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The NACBS 2017 annual conference in Denver will include two special workshop sessions intended primarily for graduate students and early career scholars, with one on early modern bodies corporeal and rhetorical and one on cultures of imperialism. Please see CFP below.

Workshop: Cultures of Imperialism 

NACBS Denver, Nov. 2017

Abstracts (1 pg.) and short (1-2 pg.) CV due March 30, 2017

Participants in this workshop will explore the many and multifaceted cultures of imperialism in Britain and its empire, from the early modern period to the postcolonial period. From the “discovery” of the new world at the start of the sixteenth century to the present, colonial and imperial engagements and entanglements have structured the movement of English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and other British subjects, goods, and ideas as they traveled across the world.  These moments of colonial contact have been transformative for those who were colonized as well as those who did the colonizing. In this workshop we welcome papers on the cultures of colonialism and empire.  We seek research that addresses engagements and entanglements between those who moved between the British Isles and its trading posts and ports, settlements, mission stations and other sites of colonial contact. We encourage papers that work beyond the metropole-colony binary and examine forms of engagement that are transcolonial and transimperial, with the goal of thinking globally about the emergence of cultures of imperialism.  We think of cultures in a broad way to consider political, legal, economic, environmental, and scientific cultures of imperialism and its analogue in the modern period, colonialism. We hope to open definitions of imperialism and colonialism to scrutiny as we consider the ways that Britain and its imperial territories were transformed by the history of intercultural contact.  In choosing to organize this workshop from the early modern to the postcolonial, we aim to juxtapose the prenational formations of the early modern period against the national, international and globalized world of the early twenty-first century.  How important or central are cultures of imperialism and colonialism in different time periods? How might we historicize the idea of coloniality and postcoloniality? How are ideas about cultural, racial, and ethnic differences generated? If we assume that colonial activity produced exploitation and political asymmetries, how were these asymmetries challenged, particularly by subject populations? As scholars of imperialism and colonialism, how important is it for historians to acts as judges (following Ginzburg)?

Papers on these issues – or on related topics that fit broadly within our aims – are welcomed, particularly from graduate students and early career scholars.

The session will feature 7-10 pre-circulated papers of 15-25 pages. All participants will be required to submit their papers by the last day of September, and to have read the entire session's papers in advance of the conference. Please send a one-page abstract and one-to-two page CV to Elizabeth Elbourne ([email protected])  and Durba Ghosh ([email protected]) by March 30, 2017.

Early Modern History Workshop: Bodies Corporeal and Rhetorical

NACBS Denver, Nov. 2017

Abstracts (1 pg.) and short (1-2 pg.) CV due March 3, 2017

Participants in this workshop will explore early modern bodies, both material and imagined. In early modern Britain, the human body served as an important cultural vehicle, the site or object upon which politics, medicine, literature, economics, religion, science, philosophy, and art could (and did) work.  In this workshop we will explore early modern conceptions of the body, broadly defined: constructions of bodies politic, and bodies corporate; bodies of water and land; bodies of belief and faith; bodies of thought or knowledge. How do “bodies”, both material and rhetorical, enable us as historians to access early modern beliefs and practices, including ideas about violence, difference, colonial exploitation, ecological use, political and religious change, or racial and sexual norms? How did ideas about physical or corporeal bodies contribute to thinking about bodies of other things? As scholars of the period, are “bodies” useful to us and how can we problematize them in new ways? Papers on these issues – or on related topics that fit broadly within our aims – are welcomed, particularly from graduate students and early career scholars, and from scholars working and living in the UK.

The session will feature 7-10 pre-circulated papers of 15-25 pages. All participants will be required to submit their papers by the last day of September, and to have read the entire session's papers in advance of the conference. Please send a one-page abstract and one-to-two page CV to Amanda Herbert ([email protected]) and Olivia Weisser ([email protected]) by March 3, 2017.

 Amanda Herbert and Olivia Weisser