CFP: Places and Displacement: Grad Student Conference (Deadline 1/30)

Call for Papers

Places and Displacement:
A Graduate Student Conference

April 1, 2011

Graduate students are invited to submit proposals for the annual graduate student conference in international and global history, sponsored by the Columbia University Department of History and Center for International History, to take place at Columbia University in New York City on April 1, 2011.

This year’s conference will focus on the issues of place. Place indicates the intersection of communities and geography. It asks us to consider the meanings and attachments people assign a city, country, or region. A sense of place can give meaning to a location or community. It can also be conspicuous in its absence. We understand displacement broadly, not merely as the forced and voluntary movements of people.

Displacement encompasses the ways place can dissolve, the ways individuals and communities transcend places, and how culture, ideas, and technologies are reshaped as they move from place to place.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

- places in imagination and memory
- cartographical interpretations of place
- refugees, stateless peoples, indigenous communities and displaced persons
- displacement and its effect on labor and market
- fashion, architecture, style and urban planning in relation to place
- colonial and post-colonial claims to place
- contact zones and borders
- gender and places
- religion and its effect on places
- place and the construction of race, nation and ethnicity

Specialists from Columbia University will provide commentary.

We see the conference as an opportunity to problematize place and examine its role in history and historiography. We welcome papers that explore the topic from either a theoretical, empirical, or methodological perspective or a combination of these approaches. We welcome submissions from all time periods and geographic regions that offer a transnational, international, or global approach to the conference theme. We encourage interdisciplinary research and, although proposals with a historical perspective are particularly welcome, we will also consider contributions from fields including but not limited to anthropology, economics, literature, philosophy, religious studies, political science, sociology, geography, law, architecture and urban planning, and public policy.
Limited funding for travel and assistance in arranging accommodation may be available.

Graduate students interested in participating should submit a paper abstract not exceeding 300 words and a recent CV not exceeding 2 pages as email attachments (Word or PDF) by January 30, 2011 to Gil Rubin and Anna Danziger, at cih.conference@gmail.com. Participants will be notified in February. Feel free to contact the conference coordinators, Aurélie Roy (aar2150@columbia.edu) or Mark Judd (maj2143@columbia.edu) for additional information about the conference.