H-HistGeog: New posted content
CFP: The Smith Center First Book Workshop in Map History [Announcement]
IL
United States
The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library invite applicants for the inaugural First Book Workshop in Map History. Any scholars who are working on their first book about the history of maps and mapping or on a topic that substantially engages the history of maps and mapping may apply. Scholars who have written a previous book or books are eligible so long as those books did not engage substantively with maps. The workshop is open to all periods, locations, and fields.
The workshop will last two days, in person at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Ahead of time, all participants and respondents will read everything the writers submit—whether that is a full manuscript or a subset of chapters and a book proposal. Each scholar will be paired with a senior scholar with expertise relevant to their manuscript. Each day will consist of a series of workshops on specific portions of each writer’s submission and presentations of Newberry material. For 2024, we will be able to accept three participants, at least one of whom is working in the Medieval or Early Modern period. The costs of travel, housing, and meals will be covered for all participants.
To apply, please submit your application online through the Newberry Library portal.
Dates:
- Applications Due: 1 November 2023
- Workshop: 22 and 23 February 2024
Location:
- Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
Eligibility:
- You have at least three chapters of a manuscript and a proposal at the time of submission
- You have not already published an academic book on the history of maps
- You are engaging substantively with the history of maps and mapping
- Your manuscript is in English
Evaluation Criteria:
- The project will make a significant contribution to our understanding of map history
- The project engages substantively with existing scholarship on the history of maps and mapping
- The project has a likelihood of successful completion and publication
Application Materials:
- Abstract (300-600 words)
- One chapter
- One letter of recommendation
- CV
David Weimer
Director, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and Robert A. Holland Curator of Maps
CfA: USHMM Faculty Seminar: Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Dispossession, Restitution, and Reconstructing the Home (Deadline Oct 20, 2023) [Announcement]
DC
United States
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies announces the call for applications for the 2024 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on "Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Dispossession, Restitution, and Reconstructing the Home." This Seminar will explore the Holocaust through the lens of Jewish experiences of dispossession and looting during World War II, as well as processes of restitution, reparations, and rebuilding of private lives in the postwar period. Drawing on the Museum’s extensive collections, the Seminar will examine the concept of “home” as represented through stolen property, sites of memory, places to return to, and conceptual spaces to be reconstructed anew by diaspora communities. Speakers will discuss the complexities of making restitution claims across different postwar European contexts, including in France, Austria, and Poland. The Seminar will also shed light on how Jewish claims to restitution fit in a global context of transitional justice and reparations claims that have emerged since World War II.
The Seminar is designed to help faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD candidates who are currently teaching or preparing to teach courses that focus on or have a curricular component relating to restitution, reparations, conceptions of home, and the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to: Archeology; Anthropology; History; Philosophy; Art; Conservation Studies; Disability Studies; Gender Studies, Women’s Studies; German Studies; History of Material Culture; Holocaust and Genocide Studies; Jewish Studies; Law and Human Rights; Museum Studies; Political Science; Psychology; Sociology; and Theology and Religious Studies.
Applications must be received electronically no later than October 20, 2023. This Seminar will take place from January 8-12, 2024 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Seminar applicants must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America. The full CfA and the application form are available on the USHMM website: https://www.ushmm.org/research/opportunities-for-academics/faculty-seminars/hess/2024. Please contact Dr. Katharine White (kwh...@ushmm.org) with any questions.
This Seminar is endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice
CFP: Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region [edited collection under advance contract] [Announcement]
Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region [edited collection]
Under advance contract with Louisiana State University Press
Editors: Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison
Proposals (500 words): November 1, 2023
Completed Chapters (7,000 words): March 15, 2024
As the double meaning of our title suggests, this collection intends “record, document, archive” as a triad of both verbs and nouns. Record, Document, Archive seeks projects investigating processes that record, document, or archive “event in place and time” as well as projects examining artifacts themselves, those records, documents, and archives that evince various souths within the region. Through examining the technologies and traces of recording, documenting, and archiving the U.S. South across disciplines and historical context, this collection asks what it means for the region to be both defined and imagined as a place of documentation.
In particular we welcome contributions that engage with processes and products that are im/material, un/documented, un/collected, or more-than-/human. We invite a wide temporal and disciplinary array of studies on, in, or about multiple iterations and scales of the South (American, Hemispheric, Global, U.S.): whether in recorded time (e.g., archival or media studies), time immemorial (e.g., Indigenous studies), and/or deep time (e.g., geology).
Guiding questions might include:
- What un/recorded, un/documented, or un/archived souths exist within or beyond hegemonic concepts?
- Within what constitutive or erasing systems have records, documents, and/or archives emerged or endured?
- How is “region” a humanist heuristic, one that scholars have perhaps reverse-engineered in our methodologies (broadly defined)?
- What alternate ways of knowing the region emerge when earth, life, and information sciences are brought in conversation with southern studies?
- What can documentary arts tell us about the dialectics of seeing as they apply to the region?
- What do archives cataloged as “southern” reveal about the limits of colonial and capitalist knowledge regimes of nation?
- What does the archive, as a collection of documents, a set of practices, and an institution, illuminate about the formation and continued domination of certain ways of understanding the South?
- How might the archive (broadly conceived) be a site for reclamation, narrative storytelling, ancestral recalling, and historical revisioning?
- How have queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies called into question southern archives or necessitated new documentary practices?
We encourage submissions that challenge Eurocentric documenting practices in disciplines with hegemonic legacies – such as studies in U.S. history, archive, anthropology, geography, literature, and media, and we prioritize scholarship from interdisciplinary approaches such as Indigenous, diasporic, transnational, queer, and environmental studies, among others. We especially welcome contributions interrogating un/documentation and immigration in context of what John-Michael Rivera calls in Undocuments (2021) “the spectral logic of undocumentality” (9). Contributions that engage with “un/documenting” in the broadest sense – conceptually, materially, organically, politically, bureaucratically, technologically, and otherwise – are highly encouraged.
Other Possible Topics Include:
- Artifacts and relics (im/material or un/collected); un/written or un/recorded correspondence; oral histories; etc.
- Archival collection development, acquisitions, and access (copyright, paywalls, open access)
- Activism in archival studies, museum studies, and information sciences; “liberatory memory work”; community archives
- Indigenous archives and counter-archives, Indigenous data sovereignty, Indigenous earthworks
- Undocumented souths and southerners
- Geological or ecological formations that complicate dominant notions of “the South” or “southern”
- Lost, erased, ephemeral, speculative or contested archives
- Ecologies of the archive, the archive as an ecosystem, documenting climate change in the South, archive as conservation, archival migration/assemblage
- Social and psychological acts of collecting, the emotional and affectual labor of documentary work, ethical and practical issues of curation
- Digital documentary practices in the South
- Diverse forms of documentary arts, including but not limited to television, feature and short documentaries, audio recordings, documentary photography and other audiovisual archives about the South
- Data recovery and digital restoration, archive hacking
- Recording corporeal testimonies and trauma, the body as archive
- Disability justice, medical recordkeeping, accessibility issues, the archive as a space of resistance (i.e. the reclamation of knowledge systems, ontologies, and identities structured by disability)
- Documentary as activism: feminist, trans*, and queer archives in the South, Civil Rights archives, labor archives, documenting the BLM movement, documenting environmental racism
- Fake archives, mockumentaries, forgery and fabrication, hoaxes, archival appropriation
- Interactive archives, documentary performances
- Legal and financial documents, documenting evidence; contracts, policy memos, public records, and balance sheets as archive
- Official government and/or historical records or recording systems
- Memorials and monuments, artifacts and material histories, museums, archival sites and spaces
- Pedagogies of archival research
- The role of literature in cataloging, archiving, remembering, and documenting, the memoir as documentary, auto-ethnography
- Unruly or accidental archives, radical or revolutionary recordkeeping, anarchives, living archives
500-word proposals should be sent to Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison at Record.Docu...@gmail.com by November 1, 2023. Please also direct any questions about possible submission topics to this email.
For those asked to contribute to the collection, completed essays of approximately 7,000 words will be due by March 15, 2024. Submissions from both established and emerging scholars are welcomed, as is work from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Anticipated publication year is 2025.
Stephanie Rountree (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor of English
University of North Georgia
CFP: Placing Capitalism in Postcolonial Latin America: World Congress of Environmental History (Oulu, Finland, August 2024) [Announcement]
Finland
Dear Colleagues,
There is still a week left to send proposals for this panel, which will be part of the World Congress of Environmental History in Oulu, Finland, on August 19-13, 2024. The deadline to submit your proposals here is 23:59 CET on 18 September 2023. We are interested in additional proposals, and especially would like to encourage women and members of underrepresented groups to submit proposals.
You only need to send a paper title, your name and email address, a short abstract of fewer than 300 characters, and a long abstract of fewer than 250 words through this form: https://wceh2024.com/programme#13407 . Registration fees will be due only once the papers are chosen, and the WCEH will make travel funds available to junior scholars based in middle- and low-income nations.
Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any inquiries.
Javier Puente, Smith College, jpu...@smith.edu
Adrián Lerner Patrón, University of Cambridge, al2...@cam.ac.uk
"Placing Capitalism: Economic Regimes, National Geographies, and the Environmental Imagination of Postcolonial Latin America"
SHORT ABSTRACT:
This panel fosters a conversation about the making of Latin America’s national geographies. Through the interplay between economic activities and nation-building, it dissects the role of capitalism in drawing, narrating, painting, crafting, and governing sovereign territories in postcolonial times.
LONG ABSTRACT:
In 1804, on the eve of South American independences, Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt introduced the feces of the guanay cormorant, known as guano to local indigenous societies, to a nitrogen-thirsty industrializing world. Humboldt drew the guanay, outlined guano-rich islands, mapped reservoirs, brought samples to Europe, and thus helped revamp the South American Pacific as a site of extraction and circulation. As guano eventually spurred an economic boom and became a major global commodity, it decisively pushed Peruvian state-building towards a model based on raw exports through Pacific ports, fostered the immigration of thousands of Chinese workers, and became the center of an international conflagration with incalculable consequences. Geographic understandings, representations, and policy were a political economy of bird excrement.
Outlining sovereign territories was pivotal for Latin America’s emerging nation-states. Through landscaping, cartography, traveling accounts, memorabilia, murals, internal policies, and environmental governance, states and elites asserted territoriality. Capitalism and its taxonomic impulse lied at the core of their efforts, and the national geographies of postcolonial Latin America are axiological expressions of that process.
Grounded on a preliminary conversation about Peru, we invite scholars of all disciplines to further explore the capitalist contours of Latin American national geographies. We are interested in the implications of placing capitalism at the center of postcolonial geographical imaginations for understanding past and present regimes of sociopolitical and environmental governance. Contributions will include discussions of categories such as deserts, rainforests, mountain ranges, mining regions, agrarian hinterlands, beaches, and ecological reserves, as well their implications and limitations.
Javier Puente is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino/a Studies; Chair of Latin American and Latino/a Studies, Smith College
Adrián Lerner Patrón is a Philomathia Fellow in “Ecologies in Place" at the Consortium for the Global South, University of Cambridge, and a Lecturer and Research Associate in Global History at the Free University of Berlin (on leave).
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