The History and Classics Graduate Student Association at McGill University is excited to announce that the 15^th annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, will be taking place in Montreal on March 1-3, 2018. The theme of this year’s conference, “Violence and the Mind”, provides a platform for graduate students to situate these problems as they continue to explore violence historically by foregrounding the interior lives of historical subjects. We welcome emerging scholars from across the disciplines to present research that questions how violence is produced, elaborated, interpreted and experienced by the mind. For more on this year’s theme, please refer to the attached PDF. To learn more about the McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, please visit https://mcgillhcgsa.wixsite.com/home/about. 

This year’s keynote speaker is Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her book, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

We encourage proposals that present historiographical, theoretical, and comparative approaches to such forms of violence across a variety of regions and time periods. Hopeful participants should propose 15-20 minute presentations that speak to the following questions and themes: How are the interior lives of human beings shaped, historically, by violence? What distinguishes violence committed against bodies from violence committed against minds? How can historians study the relationship between violence and subjective experience? What is distinct (and what is similar) about violence produced or directed towards the mental realm? To what extent can the various subfields of history, which explicitly study violence, be approached together when inner experiences are taken as the point of departure? How can the notion of structural violence contend with individual psychologies?

Potential areas of enquiry may include (but are not limited to):

• The history of ideology
• The history of psychoanalysis
• The history of medicine, including psychology and psychiatry
• Colonialism
• Slavery
• Racism and Critical Race Theory
• Military history, including trauma
• Queer theory and the history of sexuality and gender
• Philosophy of Mind
• Disability Studies
• History of emotions

Please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words as well as a brief academic biography in Word or PDF format to mcgillqueens2018@gmail.com by 8 December 2017.