Conferences
Upcoming, 2009-2010
1763 and All That: Temptations of Empire in the British World During the Decade After the Seven Years' War
February 25-26, 2010
Call for Papers
The focus of the conference is the British Empire during its "decade of crisis" between the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the passage of the Tea Act ten years later. Over the course of this decade, Britons drastically transformed the way they viewed themselves and their empire. For the first time, British imperial policy extended to the governance of the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, the Native people of the trans-Appalachian interior of North America, Africans in the new colony of Senegambia, and the twenty million inhabitants of Bengal subject to the authority of the East India Company. In Britain itself, the governance of this vastly extended empire engendered an enormous amount of bitter debate and anxious discussion in the halls of power as well as in the popular press. Among historians of each of the different parts of the British World, this decade has long been seen as one of crucial importance. However, while invaluable work has been done to examine British and indigenous relations and exchanges in specific colonial contexts, as well as to examine connections between the metropolis and specific colonial regions, there has been as yet few attempts to interrogate the links across and between the colonial regions and to set developments in particular regions into the context of the transformation of the British Empire as a whole. We aim to address this need by bringing scholars working on various aspects of the British World into dialogue and debate over the causes and character of the imperial transformation of the 1760s and early 1770s.
We invite submissions for individual papers on these themes. Please note that the conference will be organized around the discussion of pre-circulated papers. Accepted papers must be submitted for circulation to participants no later than February 1, 2010. Each proposal should include a brief précis of the paper topic and a clear indication of how the paper will undertake to connect the specific research subject to larger events and processes taking place across the British Empire. The deadline for receiving proposals is September 1, 2009.
Paper proposals (as well a brief C.V.) should be submitted via e-mail to the conference organizers, Robert Olwell and James Vaughn, at: historyinstitute@austin.utexas.edu. Please send all queries to the same address.
Schedule not yet available.
Sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies. Additional Sponsors forthcoming.
Independence and Decolonization
April 15-17, 2010
Call for Papers
Inspired by the upcoming bicentenary of Mexican independence, the symposium aims to generate dialogue among scholars from a variety of disciplines working on processes of independence, decolonization, and the reconfiguration of territorial and social borders that such processes generate. We encourage proposals that adopt an explicitly synoptic approach to the interactions between metropolitan powers and colonial/nationalist societies. We welcome proposals from scholars working on the following broad problem areas:
- Global and local dynamics of "first wave" independence movements and decolonization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. United States, Haiti, Spanish America);
- Nineteenth century decolonization (e.g. Ottoman successor states, Brazil, Cuba);
- National liberation movements and decolonization in the twentieth century.
We are interested in bringing into dialogue a variety of approaches and themes which might include ethnic identities and anti-colonial movements, postcolonial state formation, and economic development of postcolonial states.
The application deadline for this conference closed on March 1, 2009. All applicants were notified of the selection committee's decisions in June, 2009.
Schedule not yet available.
Sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.
Past, 2008-2009
The Nation-State and the Transnational Environment
April 16-18, 2009
The conference will consist of seven panels. The first session, on the afternoon of April 16, will feature presentations by four outstanding graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin working in the general area of international environmental history. That evening, the conference will formally kick off with a keynote address by John McNeill, professor of history at Georgetown University and one of the world's leading environmental historians. His lecture, entitled "The Environmental History of the Cold War, 1945-????," will consider both the disastrous environmental legacies of the Cold War and the halting efforts by nation-states to cooperate in the environmental field during that era.
On April 17 and 18, the conference will move on to its central agenda — four panels that will explore our general theme from four different angles. The first of these sessions will lay the groundwork for what follows by examining how nation-states have established or expanded their sovereignty through control over nature and natural resources. How, in short, has the process of nation-building been connected to the process of drawing boundaries through features of the natural environment that often defy easy division? The next three panels consider how nation-states have confronted problems created by the artificiality and permeability of those very boundaries. One panel will examine the behavior of nation-states with respect to environmental toxins such as DDT and Agent Orange. Another will take up similar questions with respect to migratory wildlife, and a third will examine national policymaking regarding water resources.
Finally, the conference will culminate a "roundtable" that will shift our attention from the past to the present and future. In this session, two non-historians — that is, Sierra Club President J. Robert Cox and Forest Ethics co-founder Tzeporah Berman — will reflect on the earlier panels and attempt to draw out the larger significance of those sessions for dealing with pressing contemporary problems. In this way, we hope to tease out the unexplored lessons of history for coping with challenges that are too often viewed as fundamentally new in human experience.
Conference statement (PDF 62K)
For more information, please contact: Professor Mark Lawrence
Sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.
American Crossroads: Migration, Communities, and Race
April 15-16, 2009
This conference convenes scholars of race, activism, and migration to explore comparative trajectories of racialization and community building among Asian, African, and Latino Americans. We encourage the sharing of questions and research problems across ethnic divides to advance our understanding of the coalitions, conflicts, and intersections that distinguish and yet entwine these groups. Our three panels focus on urban communities, activism, and racial discourses.
For more information, please contact: Professor Madeline Hsu
Sponsored by the Center for Asian American Studies, Institute for Historical Studies, Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellows Program, Center for Mexican American Studies, and John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.
Black Atlantics: An Urban Perspective, 1400-1900
April 2-3, 2009
We are convening specialists on urban slavery in early modern Africa, Europe, and the Americas to study Atlantic history as a space of relentless exploitation but also incessant transnational circulations. Roughly between 1450 and 1850, Atlantic urban slavery from Mexico to São Salvador (Kongo) to Kingston to Bahia to Lisbon to Ouidah to Le Cap François generated unprecedented patterns of geographical mobility and hybrid ethnogenesis among Atlantic Africans. As slaves, sailors, conquistadors, pirates, soldiers, Protestant itinerant preachers, Catholic bishops, settlers, and merchants, Africans and their European and New World descendants crisscrossed the Atlantic. We are bringing together sixteen leading scholars on the urban Black Atlantic to explore cities as laboratories of transnational ethnogenesis in order to address, but also go beyond, current debates on the "Creole" and "African Diaspora" origins of Afro-Atlantic culture. In addition to the urban dimensions of enslavement, we are particularly interested in exploring markets, secret societies, Catholic sodalities and cabildos, reverse migration, and armies (particularly in the south Atlantic and the Caribbean) as forces of Atlantic transculturation. We are asking our distinguished guests to explore Afro-Atlantic ethnogenesis paying attention also to the role of other non-African historical actors in the Atlantic: Europeans, to be sure, but also Amerindians and Asians. The original contributions will be published in an edited volume.
For more information, please contact Professor Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
Sponsored by the Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow Program, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professorship, and the Institute for Historical Studies.
Re-thinking German Modernities
February 12-15, 2009
For more information, please contact Professor Tracie Matysik. Sponsored by Institute for Historical Studies, College of Liberal Arts, Department of Germanic Studies,and the Center for European Studies.
