THIRD ANNUAL EMERGING SCHOLARS WORKSHOP: NEW PERSPECTlVES ON MIGRATION AND MOBILITY IN THE LONG NINETEENTH-CENTURY
A workshop for junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center
April 24-25, 2015: The Pennsylvania State University (University Park Campus)
With the Civil War, the decline of Atlantic slavery, and the rise of cities, the nineteenth century was an age of intense mobility, both voluntary and coerced. People, goods, capital, and ideas traveled through new modes of transport and means of exchange. Enslavement, marronage, and emancipation set off internal migrations and dislocations of the once- enslaved, their former masters, and colonial officers. Historians have noted that these and other physical movements necessitated legal, social, and political realignments. For our nineteenth-century forebears, these disruptions provided opportunities to forge new communities, some based on distinctly reconstructed visions of society and others resolutely committed to a politics of retrenchment.
The Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, in conjunction with the Africana Research Center, invites proposals about social mobility writ large in the long nineteenth century, ranging from the Revolutionary period to the Great Migration from early career scholars within three years of having received their PhD and advanced graduate students who are writing their dissertations for the third annual emerging scholars workshop.
Workshop papers should be no more than ten pages in length and pertain to works-in-progress. Submissions will be pre-circulated to attendees and Penn State faculty, including select scholars chosen to provide detailed commentary on papers.
Potential paper topics can focus ideas of migration and mobility writ large, with special emphasis on people of the African diaspora:
-
Domestic and international networks of the slave trade
-
Postemancipation efforts to curtail the flight and social mobility of
black laborers
-
Reconfigurations of post-slavery societies through immigration and
migration schemes
-
Cultural and racial politics of imperialism
- Circulation of disease and populations in motion
- The Great Migration in the United States
Interested parties should submit a complete CV and a proposal of no more than 500 words to graduate organizers Emily Seitz ([email protected]) or Evan Rothera ([email protected]) by December 1, 2014. Travel funding is available, courtesy of the Richards Civil War Era Center. Questions or inquiries should be directed to Matthew Isham, Richards Center managing director, at [email protected].
| 
