CFP: Graduate Student Conference, UConn

Imagining Environments: Navigating Space and Place in the Early Atlantic World

The Second James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies at the University of Connecticut and Mystic Seaport, September 28-30, 2006

The early Atlantic world evokes images of Basque fishermen hand lining off the shores of Nova Scotia, Africans harvesting sugar cane in Barbados, hogs rooting through mussel beds on Cape Cod, a peddler selling Bibles on a Philadelphia street corner, Navajo women hustling sheep across the Rio Grande. Such images are at the heart of exciting new scholarship.

Encouraging innovative research on both real and imagined environments, both this conference and our Pulitzer prize-winning keynote speaker, Alan Taylor, seek to explore reconstructions and representations of space and place across the Atlantic world. Taylor's William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic and his recent work, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, offer models for such inquiry, tracing the contests over territory, power, and culture in the borderlands of the Northeast.

The University of Connecticut History Department and Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea invite graduate students to submit paper proposals for the Second James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies, to be held in Storrs and Mystic, Connecticut from September 28-30, 2006. This conference welcomes interdisciplinary approaches to the Americas and the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth-centuries. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

-Public and private spaces from New England Town Squares to Portuguese slave ships
-Experiencing religious, spiritual, and other transformative environments
-Mapping the oceans, cities, and farmlands of the Americas
-Development of community identity within racial, gendered, and class-conscious paces
-Native, European, and African conceptions of the environment
-The relationship between technology, science, and space
-Staple crop agriculture, early industrialization, and environmental consequences

Submission Guidelines:
All submissions must be received by May 5, 2006. Notifications of acceptance will be made by June 15, 2006. Interested graduate students should submit a 200-300 word abstract and brief C.V. Please submit materials electronically in Word format and include, "Draper Conference" in the subject line.

Please send proposals or comments to:

Chad Reid
chad.reid@uconn.edu