CFP Roundup 3.26.2014

The Great War, A Hundred Years On: Origins, Lessons, and Legacies of the first World War

• When? November 6-8, 2014.
• Where? Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville GA.
• Deadline: April 28, 2014.

The sponsoring organizations at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) invite papers from scholars examining topics related to the Great War.  As the conference is commemorating the outbreak of World War I in 1914, papers exploring its origins will form one point of focus for the conference.  But the organizers also envision panels investigating other major topics that fit within the wider theme of the lessons and legacies of the Great War broadly construed, including—but not limited to—collective memory and memory politics, gender and minority experiences, trauma and “brutalization,” cultural approaches to the war and its representation, and the broader impact of the conflict on the non-Western world.  Presentations dealing with approaches to teaching the Great War in the classroom are also greatly encouraged.  The committee will consider proposals for individual papers or entire panels (3-4 papers) that will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in these questions.  The organizers plan to undertake the publication of selected papers in either a scholarly journal or in book form after the conference.

"THE SLAVE HAS SPOKEN FOR HIMSELF": The Slave Narrative as Historiographical Lens

[Editor's Note 1: As one certainly has noticed, in the previous months there has been a regrettable slowdown in the content provided by the site. Time management in and of itself is worthy of its own post, but needless to say, the busyness of our final semesters of coursework have diverted attention from posting on the website. Hopefully it has been some consolation to everyone that our Twitter account has remained relatively up-to-date.]

[Editor's Note 2: In lieu of the exciting news that 12 Years a Slave, the film adaptation of Solomon Northrup's 1853 slave narrative, won the Oscar for the Best Picture of the Year, I'd like to offer a suggestion as to how these rich resources - a number of which can be found at UNC's Documenting the South database - maybe be used for historiographical purposes.] 

William L. Sheppard, "The First Cotton Gin," 19th cent.

Peter Wood once admitted to anxiety regarding his source base when he began his research on slavery in colonial South Carolina. Bracing himself for the possibility that what was necessary for his work may “scarcely” exist, Wood instead discovered that slave voices proved “more than ample” through myriad primary sources.[1] Often, studying slavery requires a large mount of reading in the lines, such as utilizing the records of the Royal African Company to illuminate the morbid nature of the Middle Passage for saltwater slaves and examining probate records to gauge the economic optimism owners viewed the reproductive capabilities of their female human property.[2] Most valuable to historians, though, are the narratives left by escaped or emancipated former slaves who detailed their experiences whilst in the throes of the peculiar institution. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a close reading of a slave narrative – in this case, the narrative of James Williams – can act as a historiographical lens to recent scholarship on American slavery.

CFP Roundup 11.20.2013

2014 Phi Alpha Theta Alabama Regional Conference

When? April 5, 2014.

Where? Auburn, Alabama.

Deadline: February 15, 2014.

Auburn University is pleased to announce a call for papers for the annual Phi Alpha Theta (PAT) Alabama Regional Meeting, to be held April 5, 2014.The Alabama Regional Meeting provides undergraduate and graduate students of history an excellent opportunity to present their research in a supportive and professional environment.

The AU PAT Organizing Committee encourages all regional chapter advisors to disseminate the attached call for papers to both undergraduate and graduate students. Proposalsare not confined to any specific region or time period and may include – but are not confined to – topics of race, gender, culture, religion, identity, and the history of technology. Proposals may concern preliminary findings for research being conducted during Spring Term 2014 as well as research completed in earlier terms. Non-members of Phi Alpha Theta are also encouraged to submit proposals.

Individual paper proposals should include an abstract of the presentation of no more than 250 words. Students should submit their proposals to their Phi Alpha Theta chapter advisor by February 15, 2014. Faculty advisors are then requested to forward the proposals electronically (in MS Word format) to Jacob Clawson, jsc0017@tigermail.auburn.edu.

While student papers will be accepted based on the submitted abstract, the final paper and additional registration fee of $15 (checks made payable to the order to Phi Alpha Theta) should be sent to Jacob Clawson at the address listed above at least two weeks before the conference, i.e., March 22, 2014. Presentations should be no more than 15 minutes long (7-8 typed pages).

For further inquiries, please contact Alex McLure at the following email address: mam0024@tigermail.auburn.edu.

Recap: “This Terrible War: Marking the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War,” The Center for Civil War Research

As the calendar inched closer to the ides of October, I found the semester grind having its (usual) effects. I am in my last year of coursework, and while I love learning, the seminars I am currently enrolled in are more labor intensive than I imagined. The annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (this year in St. Louis), usually marks the first major break during fall semester, but seems far off.

Being a graduate student often presents a lonely existence; weekly – if not daily – reminders about your current course load, or perhaps the looming spectre of the dissertation prove hard to ignore. Even if you maintain a schedule that allows for minor breaks within the week, the responsibilities of the semester eventually catch up. In short, sometimes you need more of a jolt than simply another cup of coffee. My solution: heading to a conference! Luckily, there was conference (relatively) close at Ole Miss. So I rounded up some other grad students, hopped in a car, and road tripped to Oxford.

CFP Roundup 9.18.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers:

5th Annual LSU History Graduate Conference
 
When? March 21-22, 2014.
Where?  Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Deadline: December 1, 2013.

We invite submissions for panels or individual papers from graduate students at all levels of study. Proposals may cover all fields and approaches of historical scholarship and span all chronological and geographical boundaries…The keynote speaker is Edward L. Ayers, President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond and author of Vengeance & Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South and What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History.

 

CFP Roundup 9.4.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers:

LAGO Graduate Student Conference, "Border Encounters in the Americas"

• When? February 13-15, 2014.
• Where? New Orleans, LA.
• Deadline: Ocotber 25, 2013.

Latin America and the Caribbean are rich with cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity which has historically made and continues to make the region an object of prolific scholarly study across disciplines. Produced within this diversity are the boundaries—both physical and abstract—between nations, languages, ethnic and racial identities, ecologies, and geographies. Figurative and literal borders are confronted each day as people move across regions, navigate between cultures, and communicate with others around the world; global capital crosses national borders, redefines local economies, and produces labor migrations; geographical landscapes shift as land becomes deforested or designated as protected. These various “border encounters” highlight the ways in which borders can both restrain and liberate the objects, people, or ideas that face them, a distinction that is often bound up with power and politics…With this broad theme in mind, LAGO invites graduate scholars across disciplines to submit abstracts exploring the notion of borders—their strictures, leniencies, and significance—in Latin America and the Caribbean for LAGO’s 2014 graduate student conference. LAGO encourages participants to interpret this theme as they see fit. We invite submissions in the English and other languages of Latin America and the Caribbean regions.

Think Before You Count: Reflections on Trotti's recent article in the JAH

Being that the school year is still young and that the work is usually weighted towards the end of the semester, I actually had time to prop up my feet at the office and enjoy reading an article in the most recent edition of the Journal of American History that I got in the mail today. (I can already hear my professors lecturing me on how I'm supposed to use the free time I have now to get ahead on all the work that that will be due in December, even though they know damn well they did the exact sort thing when they were in grad school.) Of particular interest to me was Michael Ayers Trotti's article, "What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South." Trotti's piece is germane to most graduate students, regardless of their specialty, because it wrestles with the methodological pitfalls surrounding quantitative history. Trotti highlights the great difficulty inherent in quantitative historical analysis, especially when said analysis that has moral implications related to some of the darkest chapters in American history. (A quick disclaimer: this blog post is by no means intended to be an exhaustive summary of the article, but only notes some of the key points that I felt like particularly mattered to grad students.)

Trotti begins by reminding his readers that the very definition of lynching is itself contested and not always the best yardstick with which to measure the effectiveness of racial terrorism in American history. Definitions and statistical analyses of lynching emerged in the early twentieth century, usually through the work of groups like the NAACP, in order to combat the epidemic of violence. Usually, we think of lynchings as having multiple perpetrators. But Trotti points out that simply determining what counts as a "lynching" for the historian is far from simple and, furthermore, all lynchings were not created equal. Sometimes the murder of a solitary black leader by a white citizen provoked far greater terror than a brutal public lynching. Even still, it is impossible to even grasp at the total number of lynchings that occurred between 1880 and 1920 (what we usually think of as the high-point of racial terrorism in the US). Records are shoddy, testimony is often skewed, and ascertaining whether an event should count in the tally of a "lynching" is far from clear. (If three people watched one white person murder an African American, but didn't actually participate in the killing, how should the historian count it?) Trotti insists that scholars broaden their view beyond lynchings to a more expansive notion of racial terrorism because studies of "lynchings" fail to capture the totality of the situation for many black Americans living in this time period.