University of Chicago Graduate Student Conference
Refiguring the 1970s: New Narratives in U.S. and International History
April 26–27, 2013
We invite doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars to submit proposals to attend a conference, “Refiguring the 1970s: New Narratives in U.S. and International History,” to be held at the University of Chicago on 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 most 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 rise of neoliberal free-market economics and the dismantling 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 (USC Gould School of Law, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences).
The conference will pair each presenter with a faculty commentator drawn from our guest scholars and history department faculty at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
Interested graduate students and postdoctoral scholars should send a one-page proposal and one-page CV (both in PDF format) to gradschoolconference@uchicago.edu by November 1, 2012. Applicants will be notified about the status of their application in December. All questions should be addressed to Katy Schumaker and Patrick Kelly at gradschoolconference@uchicago.edu.
