CALL FOR PAPERS: “The History of the Future: Reinterpretation, Adaptation, Corruption”

Brown University History Graduate Student Colloquium

9th Annual HGSA Conference – October 2-3, 2015

Keynote address: Felice Lifshitz (University of Alberta), “Changing the Past to Change the Future: Cinematic Medievalism and the Politics of Gender”

Historical events occur in the past, but history happens in the present, as narratives from earlier times are constantly reassessed, reinterpreted, and transformed. This process of reinterpretation is a great source of vitality for history, meaning that a subject is never closed, no matter how substantial the existing body of literature. The dynamism of history as an academic discipline is also demonstrated in its willingness to constantly adapt methods and ideas borrowed from other disciplines ranging from anthropology to economics. In recent years, the emergence of the digital humanities has illustrated how new technologies developed outside the discipline can be harnessed in scholarship and public engagement. Finally, an important relationship exists between the scholarly community and the general public in transferring and translating knowledge. Historians not only have a responsibility to present their research to the public, but also to respond to popular corruptions of scholarly ideas, leading to a dialectic of scholarly and popular conceptions of history.

How will we continue to reinterpret the historiographies of various subfields? Where do new methods of historical research fit in with older empirical work in archives and how can they complement one another? How do scholarly ideas influence the public and vice-versa? We invite graduate students in history (and those in other disciplines whose research is related) to present their research in an attempt to address these questions. This is much more than a conference—it will allow students to their papers in an environment that will provide constructive feedback, then continue this intellectual exchange through a working group, allowing for ongoing fruitful engagement with peers at Brown University and from the United States and abroad.

Potential submissions may include (but are not limited to) the following:

·Transnational and connected histories

·Interdisciplinary works that complement history with another discipline

·Longue durée histories, including those using new digital technologies

·Applications of gender, race, and postcolonial theory

·Use of unorthodox sources (e.g. television, overlooked print media, art, or architecture)

·Collective memory and popular interpretations of history

·Borderlands histories

·Colonial histories and subaltern studies, especially in previously overlooked regions

·Studies involving unconventional historical actors (environmental history, technopolitics)

·Scholarship on the production and transmission of knowledge

Submission Guidelines:

Deadline for submission of drafts is June 19th, 2015. Individual paper submissions should include a paper title, a (maximum) 250-word abstract, and (maximum) 125-word author bio. All submissions should also note whether or not they will require multimedia services (e.g. PowerPoint or video). Successful candidates will be notified in late July and will need to submit final papers by August 21st.

Please e-mail submissions and questions to: BrownHGSA2015@gmail.com

Sponsors: Dept. of Classics, The Cogut Center for the Humanities, Dept. of German Studies, Dept. of History, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Dept. of Medieval Studies, Dept. of Modern Culture and Media, The Pembroke Center, Dept. of Religious Studies