University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ~ March 5-7, 2009
Submission Deadline: November 1, 2008
The Executive Committee of the Tenth Annual Graduate Symposium on
Women’s and Gender History at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The
Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department’s
Women’s History month celebration, is scheduled for March 5-7, 2009.
To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women’s and
gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any
institution and discipline. The Symposium organizers welcome
individual papers on any topic in the field of women’s and gender
history; papers submitted as a panel will be judged individually.
Preference will be given to scholars who did not present at last
year’s Symposium.
This year’s theme, “Transforming Power,” seeks to interrogate a
variety of trends shaping the field of women’s and gender history. The
Symposium Executive Committee is interested in assembling a
geographically and temporally diverse body of papers; exciting
proposals could focus on, but would not be limited to, analysis of
whether and to what extent power—as both a force in the world and an
analytical scaffold—has been transformed over the past decades of
feminist scholarship and activism. Of related interest, as well, would
be proposals that engage the issue of difference in women’s and gender
studies and history, especially the benefits and difficulties of using
difference as a scholarly and political frame of reference. These
questions are purposefully broad, inviting perspectives and reflections
from a variety of temporal, geographical, and inter/disciplinary
perspectives. Additionally, in order to celebrate the Symposium's
tenth anniversary and in keeping with our theme's focus on gender, power and the politics of
location, we hope to assemble a specifically historiographic panel
addressing the state of the field.We are, then, particularly interested
in paper proposals that problematize the history of feminist history or
suggest new historiographic avenues of inquiry for our futures.
For the Tenth Annual Symposium, we are delighted to announce a keynote speaker who engages many of these themes in his work:
• Roderick A. Ferguson, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota
The journal Gender & History will again sponsor a prize for the
best graduate student paper presented at the Symposium. Conference
presenters will also have the opportunity to publish their work in the
on-line proceedings volume. We possess limited resources to subsidize
travel expenses for presenters. Giving priority to presenters with
limited conference experience, we will allocate these funds based on
the quality of presenters’ proposals and the availability of funds.
To submit a paper or panel by email (preferred method); please send
only one attachment in Word or PDF format containing a 250-word
abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae for each paper presenter,
commentator, or panel chair to gendersymp@gmail.com .
To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format, please send five
(5) copies of all abstracts and curriculum vitae to: Programming
Committee, Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History 309 Gregory
Hall, MC 466, 810 S. Wright Street Urbana, Illinois 61801.
For more information, please contact Programming Committee Chairs, David Greenstein or Laura Duros at gendersymp@gmail.com .
