POSTPONED - CONFERENCE: The Oxford Sudbury Transnational and Global History Seminar (TGHS) Graduate Conference 2020: Global Bodies, Global Lives
When examining narratives of global history, macro scale analyses predominate, in which supranational formations – including empires, corporations and NGOs – often take centre-stage. Yet the aspiration of global history to encompass such broad-ranging themes has the potential to marginalise and to merely abstract individual lives and the lived experiences which underpin them. Focusing on the impact of human endeavour on the world stage - at an individual and corporeal level - would force us to consider what it means, and what it has meant, to inhabit global bodies and to live global lives.
As intersectional perspectives in history have increasingly been at the forefront of historical and scholarly research, global historians are required to engage with renewed vigour with the agents and actors whose voices and experiences permeate the archive. Resonating with the rise of the ‘anthropocene’ in historical discourse, historians must find new ways of navigating the tensions inherent in conducting global histories on the macro-scale, whilst remembering that the subjects of study are always individuals with a range of emotional and bodily reactions to the worlds they inhabited. How have human bodies and histories shaped, and been shaped by, global connections and interactions? Can one establish a reciprocal reading between individual human experience and the often-abstracted notion of ‘the global’?
The 2020 TGHS Graduate Conference invites participants to discuss these and other related questions. We welcome submissions from current graduate students, from any field and any time period, who engage with aspects of transnational and global history including, but not limited to:
- Social history
- History of encounter(s)
- Histories of medicine and disease
- History of the body
- Intersectionality: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class
- History of emotions
- Diaspora/Migration histories
- Environmental history
- Oral history
- Global microhistory
Submission Details
Paper abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted to tghsgradconference@gmail.com by 15 March 2020. Your abstract should briefly detail your current research project and the scope of your written submission.
Notification of selected submissions for the conference will be made by Monday 30 March 2020.
Accepted invitees must send their final written piece to tghsgradconference@gmail.com by Friday 15 May 2020 for pre-circulation to discussants.
Accepted papers will be 20 minutes in length. Panels will consist of 3-4 papers connected by theme.
Each panel will be followed by feedback from a member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, acting as a discussant before Q&A from the audience lasting 30 minutes.
The conference will be held at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. Lunch and refreshments will be provided for participants on the day.
Please note that we will not be able to provide you with funding for your travels to Oxford or for accommodation should you need to stay overnight. We will endeavour however to point you toward affordable options in the Oxford area.
-The Committee of the Transnational & Global History Seminar (TGHS)
This conference is funded through the generous donations of the Sudbury Oxford Transnational History Foundation and the University of Oxford Beit Fund.
