The Charles Warren Center at Harvard University is inviting applications for 2008-09. The Center's focus will be Race-Making and Law-Making in The Long Civil Rights Movement. The program next year will be lead by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Kenneth W. Mack. The Charles Warren Center, Harvard's American history research center, invites applications from historians and scholars in related disciplines to participate in a workshop on Race-Making and Law-Making in “the Long Civil Rights Movement” – a term originally put into academic discourse by the noted historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. As its title indicates, the workshop invites scholars to question and rethink the conventional time period during which the movement for racial equality in America is believed to have taken place, including the extension of that period beyond the bounds of the twentieth century. It also invites a rethinking of the movement's geographic scope, both within and outside the United States . Finally, participants are invited to consider the long civil rights movement in relation to organizational strategies and leadership, personnel and successes in claims-making within state apparatuses such as courts, war and wartime contexts, and the processes of racial and cultural formation that were associated with the push for equality. The workshop will focus less on the origins, successes and failures of the modern movement than on discontinuities, disruptions and ironies that attended the creation of equal citizenship in America .
Fellows will participate in a seminar led by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (History and African American Studies) and Kenneth W. Mack (Law), presenting their work and discussing that of invited speakers. Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D., J.D. or equivalent. Fellows are Harvard University members with library access, and receive a private office which they must use for at least the nine-month academic year. Stipends are individually determined in accordance with each fellow's needs and the Center's resources. The Center encourages applications, otherwise consistent with the Workshop theme, relating to the nation's life during and as a consequence of wars, and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of Harvard's academic community. Application deadline: January 15, 2008 . Decisions announced: early March. Obtain an application from the Center (Emerson Hall 400, Harvard University , Cambridge , MA 02138 ) or our web site.
Update: On the idea of "the long civil rights movement," Sally Greene has a nice post on Jacqueline Dowd Hall at Greenspace.
