CFP: History of Human Rights

[We've recently spotted a call for chapters in a history of human rights.  H/t: AHA Members Forum)

A new volume in the successful Routledge UK series is underway: The Routledge History of
Human Rights (for other volumes, see [here]). Coeditors Jean Quataert and Lora Wildenthal have eleven authors committed and are now seeking additional historians and other scholars for this edited volume of thirty-five or more historical essays. Our collection has an unusually flexible and large format—see below.

The Routledge History of Human Rights takes advantage of – and pushes in new directions–historians’ ongoing critical examinations of the many dimensions of human rights. Its essays will, taken together, offer an assessment of complex and contingent historical developments associated with human rights norms and visions, institutions, advocacy networks, activists, and critics. The  volume will show the ways these groups and forces intersected and interacted in the international arena, as well as in transnational, regional, national and local settings from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the post-1945 period.

While the volume stresses the uniqueness of the post-1945 rupture, it also recognizes continuities
with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century precursors in international law,
humanitarianism, and international institutions. We will include histories “from above” and “from below,” emphasizing the importance of the perspectives of the historical actors. We intend our volume to be the most geographically and thematically comprehensive collection of essays to date on the history of human rights.

We are bringing together a wide range of authors to compile a volume that will advance research and teaching in this field and offer new questions to help train the next generation of human rights scholars and teachers.

On the volume’s format: This volume offers its authors distinct advantages for the widespread dissemination of their contributions, via the book’s entire framework as well as independently.  Each volume in this Routledge series appears in three versions:

1.  a hardback copy of around 35 chapters (expensive and designed for purchase by libraries and repositories);
2. a paperback version (reasonably priced); [and]
3. an e-book version, where the e-chapters can be assigned to students singly or in any combination adapted to a particular course. No longer will students have to buy the whole collection. Likewise, any reader can order an e-chapter or any combination of e-chapters.

Routledge is developing the portal through which teachers and readers will be able to select their own combinations of e-chapters from a volume or even from multiple volumes in the series. It is very exciting to be involved in this publishing innovation.

We see this as a collaborative project, and we are planning to hold authors’ workshops at our home universities for in-depth, face-to-face discussion that will add coherence to the volume and promote new scholarly contacts and insights.

Please let us know if you are interested in contributing a chapter. We would also like to hear your recommendations of junior or other scholars we might contact, or your suggestions for themes and approaches. We also are glad to discuss our current table of contents with you.  Deadline for chapter proposals (title and 200 words): 15 March 2016.

Jean Quataert, Professor of History, Binghamton University, profquat@binghamton.edu

Lora Wildenthal, Professor of History, Rice University, wildenth@rice.edu