x-post: H-France
Call for Papers
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
February 12-14, 1999
Expertise has been defined as "the ability to know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing." While some argue that this reflects the direction of the academic profession over the last 30 years, it is not necessarily so. Any graduate student who has served as a teaching assistant can testify to being besieged by complaints about the relevance of seemingly obscure intellectual topics. Similarly, some graduate students themselves wax mystified by more ethereal theoretically-based works, longing for more empirically grounded studies.
Many scholars do not see these perspectives as mutually exclusive or contradictory; rather they see them as two points on a continuum of historical perspectives and methodologies that ultimately complement one another. Any "good" work of history must combine a multitude of historical approaches while simultaneously incorporating interdisciplinary models from fields as varied as literary criticism, anthropology, and economics.
As history stands at the nexus of the humanities and the social sciences, historians must address the quintessentially human forms of expression found in the arts and philosophical sciences, and how their practitioners have approached them. At the same time, however, because historians study people in groups, they can ill-afford to ignore developments in the social sciences. And now, with the rise of environmental history, those scholars who seek to explore the changing relationships between human societies and their surrounding physical environs must be familiar with the methodological practices of the natural sciences as well.
This conference seeks to combine traditional historical approaches with more contemporary methods used by scholars from a wide array of disciplines. The conference organizers have chosen the themes of imperial and post-colonial studies because they lend themselves readily to a broad range of perspectives and approaches, and, significantly, because they are applicable to every region where a human society has developed at some point in time. They encourage discussions of state formation and diplomacy, yet do not preclude issues of race, gender, or class. Conference organizers hope that the conference will expand traditional notions of state expansion and concomitant social change in such a way that it becomes possible to discuss the commonalities between societies as widely divergent as St. Petersburg, Russia and St. Petersburg, Florida. Graduate students and young faculty are invited to submit abstracts or panel proposals of 250-500 words by October 31, 1998. Papers should explore various aspects of human interaction within political, economic, and/or cultural contexts in a comparative historical setting. Panels should consist of two or three members at most, and must have an abstract for each paper. Full texts of accepted papers will be due by January 15, 1999. Authors of papers accepted for presentation will be invited to submit their papers to peer review for possible publication in the forthcoming Journal of Imperial and Post-Colonial Historical Studies.
Topics for consideration include, but are not limited to:
Send abstract and requests for more information to:
Nicholas M. Creary
Copyright ©1996-2002, H-Soz-u-Kult · Humanities · Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte