October 10 – 11, 2025
How have U.S. gun regulations evolved since the beginning of 2025? How did governments in early modern Europe address the emergence of firearms 250 years before the founding of the United States? How can the tools of the humanities inform discussions around gun culture and gun violence in this country?
These were just a few of the topics explored during the fourth annual “Current Perspectives on the History of Guns and Society” conference held at Wesleyan University Oct. 10-11, 2025.
“I came to the conference because there’s nothing else like it,” said Carole Emberton, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. “For anyone interested in the history of guns in America, the conference is the only place I know of where scholars meet to discuss their work.”
Organized by the Center for the Study of Guns and Society (CSGS), the event attracted more than 100 attendees from across academia, law, public health, and museum professionals. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)—who was at Wesleyan for another engagement—stopped by the conference and complimented the research presented, noting its importance in informing evidence-based public policy.
The conference’s opening panel focused on recent developments in the gun control debate and featured three Wesleyan alumni—Nick Suplina ’00, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety; Rob Wilcox ’01, former deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention; and Patricia Logan-Greene ’99, an associate professor in the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work.
Moderated by Richard Galant, a former CNN opinions editor and creator of “Now It’s History,” the panel highlighted the successes of recent firearm violence reduction projects and expressed how their Wesleyan liberal arts background provided a firm foundation for their work. “Good policy doesn’t come from one field alone. It takes social insight, government expertise, and technological innovation working hand-in-hand,” said Galant.
Another panel, moderated by Peter Rutland, the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought at Wesleyan, focused on how early modern European leaders handled the emergence of firearms in their societies.
Firearms were initially considered “the devil’s work” across Europe, explained Catherine Fletcher, a historian and author of the forthcoming book, The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires. But after Europeans heard about the role guns played in Hernán Cortés’ conquest of Mexico, firearm use became more widespread across the continent.
Joining Fletcher on the panel were two faculty members from the University of Pittsburgh—Shakespeare scholar Jennifer Waldron and Renaissance art historian Christopher Nygren—who spoke about their program, “Gun Violence and Its Histories.” Created in the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, the program develops modules for colleges and schools that illustrate how humanities tools can be used to understand the role of weapons in war and civil society.
“At this conference, we found a community that helped us develop an even broader vision for our project,” Nygren said. “Several conference-goers have agreed to contribute modules for our website of teaching resources. These collaborators bring new methods and expertise that will make our work with students much richer.”
This year, CSGS offered competitive travel awards for early-career PhDs and PhD candidates for the first time. The two recipients, PhD candidates Robert Dietterick (Brown University) and Jonas Stark Johnson (Johns Hopkins University), discussed their work with conference participants during a lunchtime roundtable.
“[The conference] was one of the best experiences of my grad school career to date,” Johnson said. “The level of feedback and enthusiastic support I received at this critical inflection point in my research was phenomenal.”
In addition to the conference’s sessions, attendees took in a performance of The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets. The concert—set to music by Neely Bruce, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan—featured Wesleyan faculty and students, local singers, instrumentalists, and community partners in a unique performance that celebrates America’s collective history.
Visit our comprehensive review of the conference’s sessions for more details.
