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.

CFP Roundup 8.19.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers: 

Atlanta Graduate Student Conference in US History

• When? November 15-16, 2013
• Where? Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
• Deadline: September 13, 2013

 

The Workshop in U.S. History at Emory University will host the second Atlanta Graduate Student Conference in U.S. History November 15-16, 2013.  The Conference will be held on Emory’s campus in Atlanta, Georgia.  Professor Bethany Moreton of the University of Georgia will give the keynote address. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates are invited to submit proposals for individual papers or full panels on any topic pertaining to U.S. history.  We welcome submissions that focus on any region, time period, or topic.  Proposals with a comparative, transnational, or interdisciplinary approach to U.S. history, as well as papers with a public history focus, are also encouraged.

Things I wish I had known (or I was glad I knew) my first year in grad school

All across America, it's back to school time. For most students and families, it's a time to buy new backpacks, pencils, and crayons. If you're in a college town (like I am), every time you go to Walmart or Target you see eighteen year-old kids with their parents buying dry erase boards, plastic storage bins, and dorm room refrigerators. And then, there are first year grad students. Many of you, perhaps those who come to a Ph. D. program with an MA in hand (as I did), are generally well-prepared for the workload. Others are blissfully naive about the changes that are about to happen in their lives. Classes start at most universities in the next week or so; if it's your first year of grad school and you don't feel like Billy Madison waiting for the bus yet, then you will before August is over. Indeed, your first few months as a grad student will likely be one of the most stressful times in your entire life and I think most first-year students could benefit from the collective wisdom of their colleagues. With that that in mind, I solicited suggestions on Twitter and while I was disappointed that I didn't get more responses, I have plenty of tips to offer those of you starting this odyssey in the next few weeks.  So here are my tips for a first grad students in history (along with the ones I received from Twitter).

Bloggin' the Bookshelf: David Hall's "Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement:
Popular Religious Beliefs in
Early New England (1989)

In Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, David D. Hall has reexamined the spiritual community of colonial New England, arguing for the existence of a popular religion that is both rooted in and supported by culture. Hall’s approach is novel, arguing that religion acted as “a mode of literacy” (18), and this prevailing connection between faith and literacy dominates this seminal work.

For Hall, the faith that emerges in New England cannot be simply explained as a product of cultural transmission. A variety of reasons are noted for colonial distinctiveness: the utility and persistence of folk belief, the spatial relationship between minister and congregation, the separate nature of church and state, the relative lack of appeal for ‘radical’ (i.e. Quaker, Baptist) faiths, the accommodative nature of magic and religion (paying homage to Keith Thomas’ 1971 seminal work), and the prominence of literacy. Popular culture represents something unique, facilitating an environment that was at once strictly demarcated, but flexible enough to include “countervailing practices and motifs” (245).

CFP Roundup 7.31.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers:

"Emotions in History" - Ceræ: an Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early 

Modern Studies

• Deadline: October 31, 2013

Emotions drive individual actions and effect broader social change. The way they are felt, expressed and performed evolves over time, and in exploring the way these emotions were experienced in their historical context, we can both gain a better understanding of how past societies understood their experience, and how this has influenced the way we experience emotions today...We are particularly interested in submissions which engage with the growing field of the digital humanities, and are happy to work with authors to accommodate any requirements involving multimedia or alternative formatting. We also encourage submissions from authors working on emotions in performance and material culture. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by qualified experts in the field.

Embargo or EmbargNO?

Yesterday, the AHA caused quite an uproar with a press release regarding the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations. You can read the whole statement here, but I would like to highlight a number of key quotes: 

Although there is so close a relationship between the dissertation and the book that presses often consider them competitors, the book is the measure of scholarly competence used by tenure committees...History has been and remains a book-based discipline, and the requirement that dissertations be published online poses a tangible threat to the interests and careers of junior scholars in particular.  Many universities award tenure only to those junior faculty who have published a monograph within six years of receiving the PhD.  With the online publication of dissertations, historians will find it increasingly difficult to persuade publishers to make the considerable capital investments necessary to the production of scholarly monographs...

Reactions on Twitter varied (and somehow, Jon Butler made an appearance): 

Bloggin' the Bookshelf: Peter Mancall's "Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic. 

Neither Indians nor colonists could sever the alcohol trade from the workings of empire. The peculiar vice of Europeans had become a fixture in Indian country, deadly medicine that remained to poison relations between the peoples of North America (180).

So concludes Peter Mancall's nearly twenty-year old work on alcohol in early America. Mancall, now at Southern Cal, wrote this book not only with an eye towards trying to figure out the roots of the conundrum of rampant alcoholism in modern Native American communities, but also to try and highlight how contingency - and not simply a biological predisposition - played such an important role in the early alcohol trade. According to Mancall, "Indians in colonial America made choices when they drank" (8), more often than not as responses to opportunities that became available to them. 

CFP Roundup 7.16.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers:

80th Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association

• When? November 13-16, 2014
• Where? Atlanta, Georgia
• Deadline: September 15, 2013

The Program Committee for 2014, chaired by Laura Edwards, Duke University, invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today...According to SHA policy, no one who appeared on the previous two programs, those at Mobile and St. Louis, can be part of the program in Atlanta...All proposals for the 2014 program must be submitted online.

History: Science, Humanity, or Something Else?

While no one would confuse Momma Goldberg’s of Auburn as a wellspring of erudition, it was there, last night, while consuming drink and breaking bread (or, rather, cheap nachos) with the graduate cohort that I had a bit of inspiration for my first post to this blog.  The issue was one that I think dogs most historians:  is history a science, or is it one of the humanities?  This type of existential question is one that I think is important for us, as professionals, to consider.  After our conversation, it was brought to my attention that Ken Owen has written on this matter at The Junto in reaction to Eric Herschthal’s piece comparing popular history and popular science for Slate.  While I agree with the general thrust of Owen’s argument, on the question of history’s relationship to the sciences, I would like to suggest that the relationship might not be as cut and dry as Owen seems to suggest.  Specifically, history – or, academic history - is scientific, even if it is not considered one of the sciences in the sense that chemistry or biology is. 

Thoughts on Bernath's recent JSH article

It being a relatively mild, overcast, and dreary day in Durham, I woke up this morning and poured a cup of coffee and picked up the most recent edition of the Journal of Southern History. I went right for Michael Bernath's article, "The Confederacy as a Moment of Possibility," mostly because the title looked startlingly provocative. In the piece, Bernath revisits the argument that many powerful southerners, including Jefferson Davis, viewed formation of the Confederacy as a profoundly conservative revolution - the purging of the cancerous northern influences. It is well known that despite these conservative intentions, the necessities of war pushed the CSA to become more powerful and centralized. The ultimate defeat of the Confederacy led to radical changes that few southerners could have foreseen in the heady days of secession. But, as Bernath reminds us, many viewed the creation of a new southern nation and the resulting war as an opportunity to push new reforms that were, for a variety of reasons, unimaginable under the old Union. He uses the example of three reform initiatives: expansion of women's education, slavery reform, and reactionary antidemocratic activism. Bernath's article is thoughtful and convincing, and I want to take a moment to both add to his argument, but also to take issue with some of his assertions. 

Edmund Morgan, 1916-2013

Today is a sad day: at around noon I found out that Edmund Morgan, the dean of early American history, passed away. 

I have struggled to try and figure out how to describe how much Dr. Morgan has meant to me. One skill that I always admired about him was his ability to simply explain the complexities inherent in the historical actors he wrote about (John Winthrop and Ezra Stiles to name a few). With that in mind, I'm going to (attempt) to write as Ed did, clearly and passionately. 

RECAP: ARC Biennial Sourcing Emotions Conference

Winthrop Hall, University of Western Australia

Last week, the Australian Research Council held its Biennial Sourcing Emotions conference at the University of Western Australia. I was fortunate enough to have a paper selected for presentation at the conference, and jumped at this unique opportunity to connect with academics involved in the study of emotions in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions provides an institutional sanctuary – and I don’t think “sanctuary” is a dramatic term, many scholars iterated their gratitude towards the ARC in bringing them together and “out of isolation” as one plenary speaker noted – for this still-nascent field that is absent from the American university system, buoyed by a $24 million grant from the Australian government, the largest grant bestowed to the humanities in the history of Australia.

My goal here is to provide a short recap of the conference. Since the conference followed a parallel-session format, I am unable to comment on a number of the panels. As an upfront disclaimer, I admit that I was drawn to panels that included emotions in the New World, the colonization of Australia, Anglo-Aboriginal interactions in early Australia, and reading emotions in early modern English literature.

How Bibliocentric was Early America?

Earlier this month, Mark Noll provided perhaps the most provocative argument of the 3rd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture when he claimed that the America of 1740-1820 was a "creation of the Bible," bolstered by the Protestant non-establishment. He went further, arguing that public use of scripture is always political in the United States. When pressed to elucidate further, most notably by John Corrigan's question of how Noll's understanding of the period in question differed from previous arguments made by Jon Butler, Noll stood his ground (Charlie McCrary penned a fantastic summation of the conference on the Junto; for a tweet by tweet timeline, see this Storify). 

Welcome to the Graduate Historical Exchange

We conceived this blog while driving south in a white Ford pick-up on Interstate 65 somewhere between Indiana and Alabama. Having just attended the 2013 Religion and American Culture conference in Indianapolis, we had much on our minds as we traveled back home to Auburn. We talked about what we had learned in two days of thoughtful intellectual dialogue, discussed our own research interests, and, above all, reflected on the spirit that we, as historians and graduate students, wanted for our profession. 

As the miles passed and the sun hung ever lower on the western horizon, our ideas became more specific. First of all, we wanted a place where we could use technology to simply talk about our experiences as graduate students. Whether to discuss readings for seminar, our progress studying for exams, or to write about our dissertations, we felt that a blog such as this could be a creative outlet (and maybe even a productive diversion) for those of us toiling away in graduate school. Second of all, we want to engage critically with historiography, theory, and method – three topics that all graduate students wrestle with on daily basis. There are not many resources like this for grad students like us as we wade into deep intellectual waters, usually without a life preserver. So, in part, we envision this corner of cyberspace for graduate students to engage with a friendly audience on big subjects in the field. Finally, and most importantly, we want the Graduate Historical Exchange to be a collaborative endeavor with like-minded graduate students. Graduate school can be a tough time for aspiring academics – as questions abound over the future of higher education and job opportunities become increasingly limited, it’s very easy to become discouraged. Moreover, the day-to-day life of a grad student often feels like taking a monastic oath – it can be a time of loneliness and soul-searching. With our onerous burdens, it’s often hard to think outside of our own institutions or even our own cohort within a department. We envision our list of contributors to be expansive and to bring all of us out of our relative isolation – this is to be an exchange of ideas, reflections, and experiences that we can all learn from. We want to use this blog to develop professionally, establish connections with other emerging scholars, and to cultivate good feelings amongst one another. We want to help each other to become better scholars, better friends, and better professionals. We want to share, to teach, and to reflect. And, above all, we want to listen.

This is a marketplace for ideas, and we encourage contributions. Email us at gradhistoricalexchange@gmail.com if interested in suggesting blog post themes, writing a blog post as a guest, or requesting permission to reprint entire posts.