A surname can become a commercial asset. A landlord can leave his authority inscribed across an urban map. Governments can erase one political order by renaming the settlements of another. Kings may accumulate several names according to who is speaking about them. Street names can preserve civic memory - or deliberately rewrite it. Even monuments, cups, and apparently ordinary objects can become arenas of naming and authority.
These questions come together at the 2026 Autumn Meeting of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland (SNSBI), which will take place on Saturday, 14 November 2026, from 10:00 to 16:30, at the University of Sheffield and online.
The theme is “Names and Power.” ICOS also lists the meeting under this title in its international calendar of onomastic conferences and workshops.
The meeting will be held in The Diamond, 32 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield. The venue is in the city centre, approximately a twenty-minute walk from Sheffield railway station, and can also be reached by tram.
The announced booking deadlines are:
6 November 2026 for in-person attendance
13 November 2026 for online attendance
Registration is available through the SNSBI meeting page. SNSBI Autumn Meeting 2026: programme and registration
Names are never completely neutral
The title of the meeting is deceptively simple.
Power is perhaps one of the most fundamental dimensions of naming. To name something is to classify it, distinguish it from other things, make it communicable—and often to claim some degree of authority over it.
This is particularly visible in political and urban toponymy. Street names do considerably more than help us find an address. Research on commemorative naming has repeatedly shown that urban namescapes may embody political ideologies, collective identities, social hierarchies, and competing versions of history. They can make a dominant historical narrative appear natural simply because it is encountered every day on signs, maps, addresses, and official documents.
What makes the Sheffield programme especially attractive is that it does not reduce “power” to government renaming. The nine papers approach the concept from very different historical periods and name classes: medieval surnames, royal names, street names, settlement names, object names, heritage toponymy and place-names associated with political hegemony.
The programme therefore suggests at least four different kinds of onomastic power.
1. Power through ownership: who has the right to put a name on the landscape?
One of the clearest thematic clusters concerns urban street naming.
Paul Tempan and Lisa Rea Currie, in “The Marquess’ footprint: comparing the impact of landlords on the naming of streets and infrastructure in Belfast and Cardiff,” examine a form of naming authority that was neither purely governmental nor spontaneous.
Large landowners did not merely possess property. Through urban development, they could leave family names, titles, estates and personal associations embedded in the infrastructure of expanding cities.
Cardiff provides an especially striking context. The Bute family profoundly influenced the nineteenth-century development of the city, and names such as Bute Street, Mount Stuart Square and Ninian Park preserve that relationship between ownership, development and commemoration in the urban landscape.
The proposed comparison with Belfast promises to move beyond individual etymologies towards a larger question: how does economic ownership become toponymic presence?
This theme continues in Robert Cotterell’s intriguingly titled paper:
“Right up my street: Street-names, legacies of power and civic identity.”
The words legacy and civic identity are important. Street names often outlive the political or social circumstances that created them. A person or institution may lose power while the name bestowed during that period remains on thousands of envelopes, maps and conversations.
In such cases, the namescape becomes a kind of historical archive—but an archive in which some groups and individuals are much more visible than others.
The programme returns to the subject at the end of the day with John Baker and Susan Kilby’s “Decoding the politics of Nottingham’s street names.”
Together, these three papers should provide one of the meeting’s strongest comparative threads: Belfast, Cardiff and Nottingham as urban texts in which social and political relationships have been written into names.
2. Power over the map: naming, renaming and political authority
The political dimension becomes even more explicit in Hasan Hasan’s paper:
“Power and settlement renaming in the Kingdom of Bulgaria, 1924–1934.”
Few acts demonstrate naming authority more visibly than an official change of settlement name.
When states rename places, they can standardize language, suppress older identities, commemorate new heroes, assert territorial sovereignty, or symbolically detach the present from an unwanted past.
A settlement name may therefore become an unusually compact expression of state policy.
The Bulgarian case of 1924–1934 is particularly interesting because systematic renaming can be approached not simply as linguistic substitution but as a historical process involving state formation, ethnicity, memory and administrative control.
This paper should provide an important geographical counterpoint to the British material and remind us that the politics of naming cannot be understood only within contemporary debates about controversial street names.
3. Power before the modern state: kings, hegemony and medieval naming
Several papers take the theme much further back in time.
Gavin Smith will speak on:
“Social systems analysis and English place-names: The example of the cultural hegemonies of Kings Æthelberht, Rædwald and Sigeberht.”
The phrase “cultural hegemonies” immediately signals an approach that goes beyond conventional place-name etymology.
Here the namescape potentially becomes evidence for the reach of political and cultural systems. Place-names may reveal not merely where a language was spoken but how political centres, elites and cultural influence helped organize landscapes and communities.
This raises a particularly productive methodological question: can distributions of names help us reconstruct forms of power that are otherwise only imperfectly documented?
Royal authority is approached from an entirely different direction in Ian Shiels’s paper:
“My name is Eorl: Ethno-eponyms, epithets, hypocorisms and multiple naming of kings in Old English and Old Norse.”
The title highlights something easily forgotten when looking at historical kings through standardized modern textbooks: powerful individuals did not necessarily possess one stable public name.
A king could be known through an epithet, abbreviated form, ethnic designation, title, nickname or alternative naming tradition.
Multiple naming is itself political.
Who is entitled to call a ruler by which name? Does an epithet glorify, distinguish, mock or retrospectively classify him? Do different linguistic communities name the same ruler differently?
This contribution promises to bring anthroponymy, textual transmission and political representation together.
4. Economic power: when a surname becomes a brand
Keith Briggs adds another unexpected dimension with:
“Surnames as brand-names in medieval Suffolk.”
“Brand name” sounds strikingly modern, but the connection between personal names, reputation and economic activity is much older.
Briggs has worked extensively on medieval Suffolk names and documentary material, including thirteenth-century Ipswich surnames, medieval personal names and Suffolk place-name evidence.
The new title suggests a fascinating reversal of the usual question.
Historical surname studies commonly ask how an occupation, place of origin or characteristic produced a hereditary surname. But what happens when the surname itself begins to identify economic activity, goods, reputation or a commercial operation?
At that point a personal name ceases merely to distinguish a person and begins to accumulate something close to economic capital.
The paper broadens the conference theme considerably: power is not only political. Names can acquire market value, reputation and recognizability.
5. Who has the authority to name heritage?
The most contemporary conceptual contribution may be Valeria Vitale’s:
“‘Deviant toponymy’ and the naming of heritage monuments.”
The phrase deviant toponymy immediately raises questions about the distinction between official and unofficial naming.
Heritage sites frequently have several names simultaneously: an archaeological designation, an official heritage label, a historical name, a local name, a tourist name, perhaps even a contested colonial or postcolonial name.
Which one is “correct”?
And more importantly: who gets to decide?
Archaeologists? Local inhabitants? Governments? International organizations? Mapmakers? Tourists? Digital platforms?
Heritage naming makes power particularly visible because official classification can transform one version of a place’s identity into the internationally recognized label while relegating other names to variants.
This paper therefore seems likely to connect onomastics with heritage studies, digital gazetteers, authority files and the politics of cultural representation.
6. Power over things: expanding the onomastic field
One of the most memorable titles in the programme belongs to Graham Williams:
“Griffins’ eggs and a cup called Crumpuldud: the onomastics of inanimates in medieval England.”
At first sight, cups and griffins’ eggs appear rather distant from the politics of renaming states or cities.
But that is exactly why the paper is interesting.
Naming an object can mark ownership, uniqueness, value, memory or prestige. Precious objects in medieval inventories and narratives may acquire individual names in ways resembling the naming of weapons, ships, animals or places.
Such examples push us towards a fundamental onomastic question:
What kinds of things does a society consider important enough to individualize through a proper name?
Naming can confer status.
An ordinary cup is one of many cups. A cup with its own individual name occupies a different cultural position.
The paper consequently expands the meeting’s definition of power from authority over people and territory to the symbolic ability of naming to elevate an object into an individual cultural entity.
Back to Sheffield
There is also a pleasant element of institutional continuity.
SNSBI records show that a meeting of the Society was already held at the University of Sheffield in 1999. The 2026 meeting therefore brings the Society back to Sheffield more than a quarter of a century later.
The Society itself was formed in 1991 to promote research on place-names, personal names and other classes of names across Britain and Ireland. Its membership extends beyond the academic community, and its meetings deliberately bring together scholars, students and other people interested in what names reveal about language, history and landscape.
That breadth is particularly well represented in this year's programme.
From medieval Suffolk surnames to Bulgarian settlement renaming, from the cultural hegemony of Anglo-Saxon kings to the urban landscapes of Belfast, Cardiff and Nottingham, the meeting demonstrates that names do not merely record power after the event.
They can be one of the means through which power becomes visible, memorable - and sometimes contestable.
For the full current programme, venue information and registration:
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