The Modern and Contemporary History Centre and the Birmingham Research
Institute for History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham
invites postgraduate researchers and early-career (PhD awarded in the
last eight years) academics to submit papers for a two-day conference
sponsored by Past & Present on the theme of “everyday empires.”
“Everyday Empires: Trans-Imperial Circulations in a
Multi-Disciplinary Perspective” aims to bring together scholars working
across geographical, chronological, and methodological lines to
reinterpret the ways in which empire was lived through commonplace
things, spaces, and decisions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A key focus of the conference is to develop a greater discussion of
inter-imperial and trans-imperial dynamics. Historians of the United
States, British, French, Habsburg, Qing, and Ottoman empires are all
encouraged to submit papers to foster a dialogue that can all too often
be cantonized by the archival legacies of imperial political structures
or by the constraints of their respective research languages.
Our approach will advance understandings of trans-imperial
circulations related to race, gender, class, sexuality, commodities,
diaspora and mobility. In taking this line we do not abandon the
nation-state as an object of analysis, nor do we discount the violent
and coercive mechanisms that sustained imperial power. Nor, finally, do
we assume imperial rule to have been an all-pervasive mode of political
organisation, itself impervious to the counter-forces local and
areas-studies methodologies have made visible. Instead, we ask scholars
to interrogate empire as a process emergent through the everyday,
ontologically negotiated material practices of its citizens and
subjects: from bicycles to hotel bars; from medicine cabinets to the
daily labour of the rubber plantation; from teakettles to steamship
tickets.
Key axes of exchange will be:
How does our view of empire change when we look at the ordinary or mundane?
Does the everyday open a useful space to explore inter-imperial or trans-imperial circuits and connections?
How do mundane objects allow us to examine the intersections of the local with the global?
Fundamental to the conference is our intention to bring together
senior and junior colleagues, affording opportunities for mentoring and
intellectual cross-fertilisation. Six significant scholars in their
fields will “anchor” six long-form panels across two days. We see this
two-day conference as an important opportunity to create a conversation
that is not limited to advanced career scholars but puts equal value on
the voices of a diverse selection of junior academics. As such we
especially encourage proposals from doctoral students and early career
researchers. The conference will be capped and spurred on by a keynote
address from Daniel Bender (Toronto).
Confirmed panellists include: James McDougall (Oxford); Samiksha
Sehrawat (Newcastle); Artemy Kalinovsky (Amsterdam); Stephen Tuffnell
(Oxford); and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (Hawai’i).
Please send proposals consisting of an abstract of 300 words and a
two-page C.V. to Dr. Nathan Cardon (N.Cardon@bham.ac.uk) by 1 February
2017.
Travel and accommodation for panellists will be funded.
