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I am happy to announce two important pieces of information. First, the Historical Geography Specialty Group has a new website! https://www.historicalgeography.org/ Please check back as we continue to add additional archival information and resources.
Second, we are now accepting applications for the 2024 HGSG Student Awards. Please read below for information:
HGSG Student Research Award
Student members of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) are invited to submit research proposals for the Historical Geography Specialty Group (HGSG) Student Research Awards. The specialty group, at its discretion, will award up to two prizes in 2024. The Carville Earle Award ($700) recognizes research at the PhD level, and the Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov Award ($300) recognizes research at the Master's or undergraduate level. To apply for either award, students must submit a two-page research proposal that gives their research question and also explains how archival work and/or fieldwork is necessary to complete their project. The proposal must also specify the archives and/or field research site that will be utilized. A budget of estimated expenses and a letter of support from their major advisor must accompany the proposal. The award may be used for travel or other related research expenses. Students must be members of the AAG and HGSG to be eligible for this competition. Students must submit their two-page research proposal, with budget and letter of support, by March 15, 2024, to the following competition judge: Dr. Declan Cullen (drcu...@email.gwu.edu).
HGSG Paper Award
The Historical Geography Specialty Group (HGSG) will NOT sponsor student paper award competitions in 2024. The Andrew Hill Clark Award for a paper written at the PhD level and the Ralph Brown Award for a paper written at the Master's or undergraduate level are typically awarded. Preference is given to papers based on primary sources of information rather than on literature reviews.
HGSG funds for research and paper awards have remained virtually unchanged for over two decades. The 2023 research awards were the same amounts as the 2003 research awards! The HGSG Board has elected to allocate paper award funds towards the research awards this year with the hope of securing additional funding for paper awards next year. As you may know, HGSG also maintains the journal Historical Geography. If you wish to make a one-time or recurring donation to expand the capacity of our student funding, please do so at the following link: https://www.aag.org/donate/#/donate/3ab1223f-246d-ee11-8df0-000d3a55fb1c
Best wishes,
Mark Rhodes
Assistant Professor of Geography, Michigan Technological University
The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its 71st Annual Meeting will be held at Toronto Metropolitan University on Friday, September 27 and Saturday, September 28.
The MWCBS seeks papers from scholars in all fields of British Studies, globally and broadly defined to include those who study the British Isles (including Ireland), the British Empire, the Commonwealth, and British engagement with the world, from Roman Britain to the modern age.
We welcome scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to English and literature, history, political science, gender studies, art, and music history. We invite proposals from scholars at all stages of their careers, including independent scholars. The MWCBS equally welcomes individual paper proposals and proposals for panels (two-four presenters, plus chair and/or commentator), roundtables, poster sessions, and panels featuring the pre-circulation of papers among participants and audience members. The MWCBS encourages presenters to use H-Albion and the discussion board at the conference blog, http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/, to find additional panelists. If needed, our organization can help to find chairs, commentators, and additional panelists.
The MWCBS welcomes proposals that:
• Present new research on the political, social, cultural, and economic history of the British Isles, the empire, and the Commonwealth
• Situate literature, the arts, and sciences in a British cultural context • Examine representations of British and imperial/Commonwealth national identities, including the construction of identities shaped by race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and dis/ability • Explore new developments in digital humanities, pedagogies, and/or research methodologies • Present professional development sessions on collaborative or innovative learning techniques in the British Studies classroom or on topics of research, publication, public outreach, or employment relevant to British Studies scholars
The MWCBS welcomes presentations by graduate students and will award the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for the best graduate student paper(s) given at the conference. A limited number of Jim Sack Travel Awards will also be available. All graduate students are encouraged to apply. Further details will be available on the MWCBS website: http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/
Individual Paper Proposal Requirements:
• Include a 200-word conference paper abstract. • Include a 1-page c.v. for the author.
Panel Proposal Requirements:
• Include a 200-word abstract for each paper and a 1-page c.v. for each participant, including chairs and commentators. • Include a 200-word abstract for the panel as a whole. • Please place the panel abstract, accompanying paper proposals, and vitas in one Word or PDF file and submit it as a single attachment. Also identify, within the e-mail, the panel’s contact person.
• All proposals should be submitted electronically by May 3, to the Program Committee Chair David Pennington at dpenni...@webster.edu.
For conference updates and to find fellow panelists, visit the MWCBS website athttp://mwcbs.edublogs.org/
We are excited to announce the competition for Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards for the 2025-26 academic year!
The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program offers over 400 unique awards for U.S. citizens to teach, research, and conduct professional projects in more than 130 countries, including projects in the areas of the intersection between history and geography. Explore awards available in the 2025-26 competition. You can join the more than 400,000 Fulbrighters who have come away with enhanced skills, new connections and greater mutual understanding.
We encourage you to visit our website for application resources:
View our webinar schedule for presentations throughout the year, sharing opportunities for specific regions, countries, and disciplines.
We look forward to receiving your application by our deadline of September 16, 2024. To receive program updates and application resources, connect with Fulbright. Know someone who could benefit from a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award? Refer a colleague!
Here’s to another year of global action, opportunity, connections — and creating a brighter future!
2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries
Where: San Antonio, Texas
When: October 24-26
Venue: Menger Hotel on historic Alamo Plaza
Frontiers and Borderlands of Exploration
Frontiers, where explorers, traders, and indigenous peoples encounter one another, expanding their geographic and socio-cultural understandings as well as political and economic relationships, is the theme of this year’s conference. The experience and the acquisition of knowledge between and by those crossing frontiers into unfamiliar territory as well as the transmission of this knowledge back to their homelands includes scholarly examinations of exploration, encounters, and resistance across colonial and exploratory frontiers globally.
SHD invites papers, 20 minutes in length, on all points of view of this theme broadly conceived, including: discovery, exploration, conquest, resistance, settlement, economy, and all aspects of cultural encounters. SHD welcomes proposals from scholars, independent researchers, and is particularly interested in submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars. While papers aligned with the conference theme are preferred, the selection committee will consider all paper proposals of high quality related to the themes of geographic explorations and discoveries as well as on the teaching of the history of exploration, broadly defined.
The audience at SHD meetings is diverse and includes academics and members of various professions who are interested in the processes and consequences of geographical exploration and discovery. Presenters are encouraged to use images (maps, paintings, photographs, etc.). For the benefit of the audience, any visuals presentations will be PowerPoint-compatible projections.
Please provide a proposal that includes the following components: • the title of the presentation • the author’s name and address, including email address and affiliation • an abstract summarizing the paper’s scope and conclusions (maximum of 500 words) • a statement about the originality of the contents of the paper: how much is new, unpublished material, based on research in primary sources, etc. • a statement indicating whether PowerPoint or other digital media will be used and whether internet access is necessary for the presentation • a brief biographic sketch of the author(s)
Paper proposals are due April 15, 2024, and should be submitted via the SHD website discoveryhistory.org
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is pleased to announce an annual writing retreat for Holocaust scholars. Scholars currently based outside of North America or who hold tenured positions will not be considered. This application-only retreat is designed to provide time and space to work on original research projects and to build and sustain a community of Holocaust scholars that transcends institutional and disciplinary boundaries. The retreat will be held July 21-26, 2024 at Airlie Hotel & Conference Center, nestled in the Virginia countryside, just 45 minutes from Washington D.C.
a short summary of the piece of writing you plan to work on at the retreat and a description of why this retreat would be beneficial at this stage of your project (no more than 3 double-spaced pages)
Contact Information
Broadening Academia Initiative
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
With apologies for this impersonal email I’m writing on behalf of my CHSTM colleagues to let you know that we will be hosting a named public lecture in honour of John Pickstone, who passed away ten years ago. Our inaugural speaker, on 15 April 2024, will be Dr Sam Alberti (National Museums Scotland & University of Stirling), and he will be speaking on Ways of Knowing in the Museum.
We very much hope that you will be able to join us. We would also ask you to spread the word to anyone or any group who you think might be interested in the event.
Disability History: New Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Approaches
November 6, 2024 – November 8, 2024 In-person symposium Münster (Germany)
In recent years, the exploration of disability has increasingly gained importance within historical research. Disability history has particularly emphasized the social and cultural dimensions of disabilities, advocating for the recognition of disability as a central historical category alongside others such as gender or class. This perspective highlights how societal norms, values, and institutions shape the experiences and identities of people with disabilities. It questions traditional narratives in which the experiences of disabled people have been marginalized or overlooked, and advocates for an inclusive and nuanced historical analysis of the non-normative mind and body.
The dynamics and development of this field of research in recent years, its interdisciplinary reach, and its potential to broaden our historical understanding of human diversity are among its most important characteristics.[1] At the same time, there are still many unexplored topics, unused sources, and promising approaches that have the potential to enrich historiography with new perspectives. The upcoming symposium intends to address these very topics of disability history.
We welcome submissions that delve into the historical aspects of social negotiation processes surrounding disability. We welcome both regional and national case studies as well as transnational perspectives. Furthermore, we are particularly interested in the interactions between various disciplinary approaches and the intersections of disability history with visual history, microhistory, the history of knowledge, medical history, and the history of education.
Among others, we are interested in the following questions:
How was disability conceptualized outside of Western societies?
What alternative perspectives can be found that challenge Euro-American concepts of normality and ablebodiedness?
How did conceptions of disability circulate among different social actors? What factors and events enabled or hampered exchanges and transfers?
What forms of cooperation and antagonisms between groups, organizations, and associations can be found on a national and international level?
What strategies of empowerment can be found in the context of institutional settings?
What role do self-testimonies of people with disabilities play in reconstructing those life-worlds?
How did visual arts and media contribute to the conception of disability, and how can they be interrogated as mirrors of societal norms and perceptions?
The conference language is both German and English, with abstracts provided in both languages.
We welcome scholars from all levels of academia and encourage contributions spanning the full spectrum of academic disciplines. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers, and catering and a conference dinner will be provided. However, expenses must be advanced and will be reimbursed. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions. Also, please indicate any necessary support requirements (e.g., sign language interpreter) in your application so we can arrange for early booking. Please send us an abstract of the planned contribution of approximately 250 words along with a short biography to the following email addresses by April 30, 2024:
CFP: Zoonotic Collecting: Perspectives from the Humanities, Social Sciences and Life Sciences.
Call for papers for 4th annual conference of The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis project, deadline March 11, 2024. The conference is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Collections have played an important role in scientific understandings of diseases and their control in past and present, from anatomical collections assembled to study the natural history and taxonomies of human diseases, to zoological collections of disease reservoirs, to collections of microorganisms for pandemic preparedness, to teaching collections for the education of doctors, veterinarians, and lay publics. Extracting specimens, taxidermizing these, creating models and displaying them have been particularly important to the medical sciences. Natural history museums, for example, have been instrumental in the science of disease ecology and the control of zoonotic diseases. In the past, they have served as key sites for the identification and cataloguing of animals deemed to be vectors and reservoirs of diseases, and for charting their ecological relations with the environment. In the present, microbes are often collected and preserved in laboratories for the study of infectious diseases and the improvement of human, animal, and plant health, or, more sinisterly, the development of bioweapons.
Simultaneously, outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics have played a critical, if underappreciated, role in the history of collecting. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases provided zoologists with unprecedented funding and resources to collect rodents, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and microorganisms. Widespread campaigns against disease vectors likewise mobilized civilians to kill and send in thousands of verminous animals for inspection at medical institutions and museums, in many cases furnishing institutions with large collections. In other cases, doctors and epidemiologists used the resources provided by public health campaigns to make vast ethnographic collections of human culture in the course of their duties. Finally, specimen collecting itself has, at times, provoked fears that the act of capturing and transporting specimens might result in outbreaks of zoonotic disease, sparking new biosecurity and biopolitical measures.
Bringing together perspectives from the history and anthropology of medicine, museum studies, animal studies, ecology, and other disciplines, this conference seeks to understand the relationships between collecting (broadly construed) and zoonosis. In so doing, it aims to chart how collecting has been linked with medical and health questions; the material, epistemological, and political lives of medical collections; and how collecting in times of outbreaks, epidemics, and even pandemics has shaped the lives of humans, plants, microbes, animals, and insects. We welcome submissions on zoonotic collections and collecting from any discipline. Submissions may include but are not limited to:
• Histories of animal and insect collections gathered during outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics of zoonotic diseases. • Rethinking the museum or zoo as a site for zoonotic research. • The linkages between museums or zoos and the identification of reservoirs of disease. • Indigenous collecting. • Local knowledge and zoonotic collecting expeditions. • Environmental histories of zoonotic collecting: how collecting affected animals, plants, and landscapes. • Economic histories of zoonotic collections: costs of expeditions, public health campaigns and sales of specimens. • Global histories of specimen collecting and biosecurity measures. • Relationships between zoonotic collections, discrimination, and racism. • The ethics of zoonotic collecting and collections. • Zoonotic collections and colonial legacies: decolonial or postcolonial approaches to medical collections. • Non-medical collections assembled by medical scientists and ecologists in the course of their duties. • Networks of collectors and disruptions to collection and specimen exchange in times of zoonotic diseases.
Prospective participants are invited to send a title, abstract (200 words), and a short biographical note to ww...@st-andrews.ac.uk by 11th March 2024. Please indicate “4th Conference” in the email’s subject line. The selected participants will be provided with accommodation in St Andrews.
Macrakis, Kristie. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach: America's Techno-Spy Empire. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023. 280 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781647123239.
Reviewed by
Lydia Lafavor (Independent Scholar) Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (February, 2024) Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Kristie Macrakis’s earliest work on the history of intelligence focuses on the role of human espionage in the state apparatus, including the use of human espionage to collect advanced scientific and technological knowledge for the state. The middle part of her oeuvre includes analysis of the technologies enabling human espionage. Her posthumous publication, Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach: America’s Techno-Spy Empire, examines the shift in the US intelligence community from human espionage to processes where technology itself conducts intelligence collection.[1] Her principal argument here concerns the ramifications of that shift, including the new scales of data collection and consequent growth of intelligence community architecture to conduct both the collection and requisite analysis. Macrakis examined the coincidence of a growing US intelligence-sharing partnership with a declining British Empire and the placement of novel technological collection platforms in strategic commonwealth nations. By her implication, this partnership contributed to the rise of a neocolonial empire of information that qualifies the United States as an intelligence superpower. She considers the consistency of the US intelligence community’s self-stylization as an entity of global purview by examining the semiotics embedded in the logos and mottos of various US intelligence organizations.
First, in part 1, Macrakis examined the role of technocrats in converting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1950s from an organization driven by human espionage to one dedicated to securing new technological solutions for collection. This conversion period included the organizational realization of the limitations of clandestine work in the early Cold War ideological environment and the rise of scientific advisors in President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration through a series of bureaucratic milestones, such as the Doolittle Panel and the Killian Committee. The U-2 airborne reconnaissance aircraft and Corona spy satellite architecture were two major programs resulting from this shift to technological collection. New national agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), managed the growing space-based architecture, while the National Security Agency (NSA) created a central organization for signals intelligence collection. The growth of these civilian agencies occurred in terms of not just power and scope of responsibilities but also the physical size of their architecture and geographic footprint.
Macrakis argued that this growth in the CIA contributed to a technophilic hubris, whereby technological advances enabled gross abuses of power. Here she cited the 1950s CIA MKULTRA program, and its affiliates, which aimed to influence human behavior through pharmaceutical technology. She connected this program to the CIA’s employment of psychologists fifty years later in the Enhanced Interrogation Technique program instituted in 2001. Her point is well taken regarding the similarities of both programs to influence favorable human behavior to intelligence collection through medical knowledge and technologies. Her comparison of the severe public reactions and legislative oversight responses is also helpful. However, Macrakis argued that the CIA suffered from a case of “historical amnesia” in repeating the missteps of the earlier program (p. 57). There is room to critique the periodization in her argument here. If intelligence failures and major organizational oversteps are the few events that experience declassification before the legislated review date, then such events may skew analysis of larger periods of the organization’s history. To argue that the agency repeated a mistake comparable to a previous event is perhaps accurate, but her characterization of intentionality in the Enhanced Interrogation Program ignores three to five decades of unevaluated intelligence operations that may or may not demonstrate agency respect for the established oversight practices and institutional ethics. Other resources that Macrakis briefly referenced, such as the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program, provide clarity on events leading to the Enhanced Interrogation Program. But the lack of detail in Macrakis’s narrative between these temporally disparate events undermines her characterization of the institutional decision-making leading to the second anecdote.
Part 2 examines the growing aerospace photoreconnaissance architecture, expansion of novel sea-based intelligence collection technologies, and bureaucratic maneuvering of key personalities during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Cuban refugee reporting of growing Soviet missile sites and advisory presence cued the success of photoreconnaissance technologies at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, that human element is largely absent from collective memory. One of the most poignant images of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and according to Macrakis the foundation for Americans’ collective memory of those events, involved media coverage of Adlai Stevens excoriating the Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin in his briefing to the United Nations Security Council with posters of the available photographic evidence of missile sites in Cuba. Imagery intelligence became a preferred form of evidentiary support for policymakers, and the satellite architecture required to support this intelligence demand expanded from one targeting specific regions to a more comprehensive system encompassing the entire globe.
Macrakis provided three programs as evidence of the growing US technological intelligence collection architecture throughout the oceans. The US Navy and the NSA collaborated heavily to tap underwater communication cables. The CIA charted new organizational territory in Project Azorian to lift a sunken Soviet submarine for technological exploitation purposes. Finally, the passive hydrophone sonar detection Sound Surveillance System serves as evidence of the expansion of wide-area sea-based technological collection platforms throughout the Cold War. When technophile Admiral Stansfield Turner became the director of the CIA in 1977, technological collection programs flourished while the clandestine services experienced drastic and unceremonious personnel cuts. This created a general programmatic decay in human intelligence, which held grave consequences in more fluid intelligence predicaments, such as the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis in 1979, that could not have been forecast through the rising technological forms of intelligence collection.
Part 3 considers the expansion of the Anglo-American signals intelligence collaborative relationship. The NSA improved the collective communications intelligence intercept stations and manning around the world concurrently with the conversion of the British Empire into a commonwealth of nations. This created space for an enduring United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand cooperative partnership of intelligence exchanges as new technologies, such as over-the-horizon radar, allowed more fruitful collection from combined collection stations in strategic locations. The newly solidified intelligence partners worked to continue cable communications intercept access through the transition to fiberoptic communications and to develop foreign satellite transmission intercept capabilities. Macrakis cited Crypto AG as another example of a signals intelligence collection program, which highlights the advantage afforded to the growing US technological hegemon. Countries in the Global South purchased communication encryption machines from a Swiss contractor that partnered with the NSA, thus allowing the NSA insight into the majority of strategic communications by these customers. To cope with the massive influx of communications data, the NSA required solutions for telecommunications storage and processing. This was a phenomenon shared by the NRO in managing and tracking the global satellite architecture, as well as the organizational predecessors to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Macrakis provided a complex narrative weaving together multiple institutional histories of concurrent growth in a global Cold War context. Historians of technology will appreciate her recurring attention to the relationship between human and technological forms of intelligence collection, specifically where declining human espionage directly enabled or limited the rising forms of technological collection within the US intelligence community. Postcolonial scholars will find resonance with Macrakis’s editorial voice concerning the role of the intelligence community in constructing an American intelligence empire in function, if not by definition. She concluded with a lament of the combination of a global espionage empire with offensive military actions in her brief analysis of remotely piloted aircraft. Historians looking to continue Macrakis’s historiographical legacy may consider two branches of further study: technological augmentation of the analytical process to alleviate the workload generated by the volume of technologically collected data and the overlap of a global civilian intelligence architecture with lethal military capabilities.
Note
[1]. Kristie Macrakis’s early works include Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and with Dieter Hoffman, Science under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). The middle shift includes Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to al-Qaeda (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
The Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine invites applications for research fellowships in the history of science, technology and medicine, broadly construed. These fellowships are open to scholars at all stages of their academic careers, and will support research travel to Consortium member institutions.
The Consortium comprises 38 educational and cultural institutions using their exceptional resources to promote academic and public understanding of the history of science, technology and medicine. Taken together, the Consortium's collections of rare books, manuscripts and artifacts are unparalleled in historical depth and breadth. The Consortium also provides a vibrant and collegial community of scholars. Consortium fellows receive opportunities participate in public and scholarly events, as well as informal reading and writing groups.
Visit our website at www.chstm.org for further information, including an online application form and a list of current and past fellows. The website also features: information about the fellowship programs of member institutions; descriptions of the exceptional collections in the museums, archives, and libraries of the Consortium; and a Consortium-wide search hub for rare books and manuscripts.
Applications for Research Fellowships must be submitted online by April 15, 2024.
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