Washington University in St. Louis

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2015

The Graduate History Association at Washington University in St. Louis is pleased to announce the annual Graduate Conference, to be held October 16-17, 2015 on the Danforth Campus in St. Louis, Missouri. We invite graduate and post-doctoral students engaged in research across disciplines to submit proposals for this year’s conference theme: “The City.” The conference will consider urban environments across time and space, from their earliest incarnations to the present day.

The city serves as a backdrop for much historical scholarship. As events around the world have unfolded over the past year in places like Ferguson, Gezi, and Hong Kong, the city has played a central role, blurring boundaries between urban, suburban, and rural. Here historical actors have manipulated time and appropriated space in a broadly defined urban sphere.

Over the past few decades, scholars have engaged in cross-disciplinary studies of the processes of urbanization, gentrification, segregation, and touristification. Researchers have interrogated the physical and imagined divisions between the city, the suburb and the rural. This multidisciplinary conference is designed to explore the city as both iterative process and urban form through its inhabitants, informal and formal structures, temporalities, cultures, geographies, landscapes, and histories. How and why do residential patterns—including wealth and racial segregation—form, change, and persist? What is the relationship between residents, political actors, and entrepreneurs? How does infrastructure function as a political and social actor? How can we understand war, disease, and disaster, as well as religion, education, and technological innovation as particularly urban phenomena? What can we make of the fluid relationship between the urban and the rural: is this binary useful, how has it been inscribed and challenged over time, and what lies between?

Professor N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida and historian of race, capitalism, politics, and their relationship to the built environment at Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the keynote address. Please join us for an open reception immediately following. Panels will be delivered on Saturday, October 17. There will be an award for best conference paper with a cash prize.

Please submit a 250-word abstract for your proposed conference paper through the conference website: https://history.artsci.wustl.edu/submit-abstract-gha-conference. Direct any questions to Suzanna Krivulskaya (suzanna.krivulskaya@wustl.edu). We look forward to your submissions.