The Department of History Symposium
Monday, January 12, 2015
This symposium, sponsored by the Department of History, is bringing together a group of prominent scholars working in a wide range of geographical, cultural and chronological contexts to engage in a sustained discussion of the modes through which difference is conceptualized, articulated and acted upon through contact, interaction and exchange among diverse populations.
The symposium will be organized in a workshop format. Invited participants include specialists in Eurasia and the Russian Empire, Continental Europe, Africa and North and South America. We anticipate exploring the articulation of difference through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, race, religion and social class—categories which we aim not only to employ as analytical tools but also to interrogate and problematize:
Panel 1: Violence and Colonialism
- Kate Grandjean, Wellesley College, Publishing Terror in Early America
- Yuko Miki, Fordham University, Violent Terrains: Black and Indigenous Legal Regimes
Panel 2: Empires, Borders, and Ideologies of Race
- Sean P. Harvey, Seton Hall University, 'A Hybrid Origin'? Classifying Peoples in 19th-century Fiji and Oregon
- David Rainbow, Columbia University, In Us and in Our Children: Race Mixing and Political Critique in Late Imperial Siberia
Panel 3: Gender and Sexuality, Print and the State
- Christine Varga-Harris, Illinois State University, Turning 'Swamps' into 'Flowering Gardens': Soviet Woman as Contact Zone between Women in the Soviet Union and those Transitioning from Colonialism in Africa and South Asia
- Alison Lefkovitz, New Jersey Institute of Technology, 'Homosexual Households' and the Right to Live Together
Panel 4: Migration and Hierarchies
- Éric Allina, University of Ottawa, Solidarities and the Self: African Workers in East German Industry in the 1970s and 1980s
- Jeff Sahadeo, Carleton University, Black Snouts Go Home: Racism and Reaction in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow
