The American Racial State: A Graduate Student Conference

Here, via H-Law, is a call for papers for “The American Racial State in the Long Twentieth Century,” a graduate student conference to be held at the University of Michigan on May 10-11, 2013

Scholars in a broad range of subfields have recently "brought the state back in" to the study of the twentieth-century United States, from political and legal history to ethnic studies and the history of social movements. This conference will consider these developments while focusing attention on the racial state and its role in American politics over the course of the long twentieth century. We seek to explore the state's use of racial categories to grant and limit the rights and privileges of citizenship, as well as the contestation of those categories. We welcome individual paper proposals from graduate students investigating any aspect of race and the state, including but not limited to the role of the state in producing racial knowledge and social classifications, the relationship between the racial state and social movement politics, and the influence of racial categories on processes of migration, immigration, and imperialism.

How has race affected the American state in its many forms, including the legal state, the administrative state, and the regulatory state? What roles have gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and related categories played in shaping the modern American racial state?

We encourage paper proposals from a wide range of subfields, including political history, American political development, African-American history, urban history, legal history, ethnic studies, and the history of U.S. empire and foreign policy. Proposals should include a 300-500 word abstract and a one-page c.v.  Proposals should be in the form of individual papers only; a graduate student steering committee will make the selections and assemble the panels. Please direct any questions, and email your application materials, to graduate student organizer Nora Krinitsky (nkrinit@umich.edu) by January 7, 2013.