Resistance in History: A Graduate Student Conference

[We have a call the call for papers for Resistance in History: From Transgression to Transformation, a graduate student conference to be convened on April 20, 2018, by the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University.  The application deadline is Tuesday, January 16, 2018.]

NYPL

Resistance occupies an enduring place in historical writing. Historians are drawn to stories of people who resisted oppressive forces, whether they flow from race, gender, legal or economic systems. Then again, historians have also revealed stories about those who worked hard to resist change and maintain entrenched power structures. Scholars continue to debate how to define and explain the role of resistance in social, cultural, political, and economic histories. Resistance has taken many forms in different times and across geographical regions. This conference will facilitate dialogue about histories of resistance, transgressions, and transformations, broadly defined.

We invite submissions from historians working in all fields and scholars of related disciplines. Submissions might address but are not limited to the following questions: How has resistance been defined and expressed, and by whom? What are the political dynamics at work in histories of resistance? Are histories of resistance stories of progress? How have certain narratives about resistance been lauded or dismissed by scholars and why? How should historians write and teach about resistance?

Paul Ortiz (University of Florida) will be the keynote speaker. Professor Ortiz is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (2005) and the forthcoming book, An
African American and Latinx History of the United States (January 2018). Professor Ortiz is also the Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

Interested graduate students should send a paper proposal of no more than one page (250 words), and an updated CV to Bonnie Ernst (BonnieErnst2011@u.northwestern.edu) by January 16, 2018. A Northwestern history faculty committee will select the papers. Conference papers will be ten to twelve pages double-spaced, and due by Wednesday, April 4, in order to allow time for circulation to the commentators. Presentations will run 10 min.