[We have the following announcement.]
Refiguring the 1970s: New Narratives in U.S. and International History
University of Chicago Graduate Student Conference
April 26–27, 2013
This conference capitalizes on the changing historiographic moment to offer a forum for graduate students from throughout the country (and abroad) to share the more innovative work on the 1970s. Rather than view U.S. and international history as two isolated fields, this conference will explore interrelated and overlapping themes. The 1970s saw the rise of formal equality in equal rights movements for women, gays, people of color, the disabled, and even animals; the decade brought both the end of formal empire throughout the globe and the rise of human rights as a transnational politics and ideology. At the same time, market values and individualism worked to supplant more collective visions of society--what was once "public" gradually became the proper purview of the "private"--engendering the advent of neoliberal free-market economics and the partial erosion of the welfare state. How do we explain the tension at the heart of these seemingly contradictory trends? And how might a conference that explores the intersection of U.S. and international history shed light on these developments?
Four guest scholars who have done critical recent work on the 1970s will participate in the conference: Daniel Rodgers (Princeton, author of The Age of Fracture); Tim Borstelmann (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, author of The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality); Matt Lassiter (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South) and Mary Dudziak (Emory University, author of War Time).
The conference will pair each presenter with a faculty commentator drawn from our guest scholars and history department faculty at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the London School of Economics.
If you're interested in registering for the conference, please fill out this brief registration form by Friday, April 12.
