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CFP: “Confronting the Violence(s) of History: Critical Methods, Epistemologies, and Engagements” Rutger’s History Department’s Graduate Student Conference

Call for Papers
Confronting the Violence(s) of History: Critical Methods, Epistemologies, and Engagements
The History Department’s 38th Annual Susman Graduate Student Conference
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ
Thursday and Friday, April 7 and 8, 2016

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Laura Ann Twagira, Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Women,
and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University*
Opening Address: Dr. Marisa Fuentes, Assistant Professor of History and Women and Gender
Studies at Rutgers University*

 

The Department of History at Rutgers University and its Graduate Students are pleased to invite
their peers in the humanities and social sciences to submit papers to the annual Susman
Conference, “Confronting the Violence(s) of History: Critical Methods, Epistemologies, and
Engagements.” This conference asks scholars to jointly consider violence/resistance and critique/
repair as possible sites that can provide alternative theorizations and approaches to the past.
While this conference is interested in exploring the variety of quotidian forms that violence and
resistance have taken in the past, it is equally concerned with, and challenges scholars to
consider how, engagement with this history can lead to new epistemologies, methods, and ethics
of scholarly practice. Further, this conference locates the everyday as a significant site for
investigating the multiplicities of violence, as well as producing the necessary critical tools and
theories, in which to counteract those violences. “Confronting the Violence(s) of History” leads
to questions such as:
How does thinking about the points of intersection between violence and resistance question our
normative understandings of these categories?
Can violence ever be a generative space, as well as a space of trauma?
What ethical obligations do scholars have to their historical subjects and objects, if any?
What kind of ethical/moral historical practices can possibly emerge in the present when we think
about violence/resistance in the past?

We welcome graduate students to submit proposals that explore any time period or geographical
location related, but by no means limited, to the following themes and subthemes:
Everyday Forms of Violence, Politics, and Repair: Material violence/bodily violence; violence,
ecologies, and the non-human; the violence of capitalism and commodification; rhetorical
violence and resistance in the past; state-sanctioned violence

Alternative Genealogies of Violence and Resistance: Temporalities of violence and resistance;
critiques of modernity and progress narratives; politics of (de)colonization; violence and the
postcolonial studies; universalims and localisms in theory and practice
The Violence of Resistance: Politics of (non)violence; sovereignty and borderlands; the public/
private as sites of violence/resistance; the carceral state; sovereignty, biopolitics and bare life;
loss, grievable lives and (un)recognizability
Epistemologies of Violence in the Archive and Academe: Resistance in knowledge production;
the archive as fiction, fiction as the archive; the roles of oral history and memory studies;
quantification and qualitative forms of historical method and narrative
Proposals are due by 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, January 31, 2016. Please submit all proposals to the
Susman planning committee at susmanconf@history.rutgers.edu. Participants will be notified of
acceptance by February 26th. Individual paper proposals should include a 150-300 word abstract
with paper title and CV with author contact information. The organizers of complete sessions
should send in a single submission that includes abstracts, a 200 word description of the session,
and CVs with contact information for all participants. Please list any audio-visual requirements.

*Each year, the Susman planning committee invites a graduate of the Rutgers doctorate program
in History to present a keynote address. Laura Ann Twagira received her Ph.D. in African
History from Rutgers University in 2013. Her article “Robot Farmers and Cosmopolitan
Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali)”
was published as a part of a special issue of Gender & History on gender, imperialism, and
global exchanges in 2014. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Taste of
Development: Women Re-Engineering the Foodscape in 20th Century Rural French Soudan.
Marisa Fuentes received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her
forthcoming book is entitled Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive,
and will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in the spring of 2016. She has written
extensively about gender, violence, and the use and limits of archives in Caribbean slavery