Contested Ground: Claiming and Reclaiming Territory in History
The Graduate History Association of the University of Massachusetts Amherst invites proposals for its 20th annual historically grounded, interdisciplinary conference. This year’s conference is entitled “Contested Ground: Claiming and Reclaiming Territory in History” and will take place on our campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from April 5-6th, 2024. The conference is co-sponsored by the Institute for Social Science Research.
This conference seeks to bring graduate students together to consider how historical actors have claimed and fought for spaces across settings varying from hyperlocal to global. We invite conference participants to think expansively about borders – physical, political, and cultural– considering issues of imperialism, racism and prejudice, and identity formation. We encourage proposals to engage with the question of how historians might connect these topics to modern-day issues of justice and injustice, such as colonial land occupation, state and national politics, and identity across borders.
We welcome proposals from historians as well as those addressing historical topics in disciplines in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, such as American Studies, Art and Architectural History, Black Studies, Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. Additionally, we welcome a broad array of subject matter, including subaltern studies, labor and working-class history, urban history, carceral studies, social history, transnational history, history of sex and sexuality, memory studies and public history. Applications are open to graduate students at any institution.