Call for Papers: Women's and Gender History

Tenth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ~ March 5-7, 2009

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2008

The Executive Committee of the Tenth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department’s Women’s History month celebration, is scheduled for March 5-7, 2009. To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women’s and gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any institution and discipline. The Symposium organizers welcome individual papers on any topic in the field of women’s and gender history; papers submitted as a panel will be judged individually. Preference will be given to scholars who did not present at last year’s Symposium.

This year’s theme, “Transforming Power,” seeks to interrogate a variety of trends shaping the field of women’s and gender history. The Symposium Executive Committee is interested in assembling a geographically and temporally diverse body of papers; exciting proposals could focus on, but would not be limited to, analysis of whether and to what extent power—as both a force in the world and an analytical scaffold—has been transformed over the past decades of feminist scholarship and activism. Of related interest, as well, would be proposals that engage the issue of difference in women’s and gender studies and history, especially the benefits and difficulties of using difference as a scholarly and political frame of reference. These questions are purposefully broad, inviting perspectives and reflections from a variety of temporal, geographical, and inter/disciplinary perspectives. Additionally, in order to celebrate the Symposium's tenth anniversary and in keeping with our theme's focus on gender, power and the politics of location, we hope to assemble a specifically historiographic panel addressing the state of the field.We are, then, particularly interested in paper proposals that problematize the history of feminist history or suggest new historiographic avenues of inquiry for our futures.

For the Tenth Annual Symposium, we are delighted to announce a keynote speaker who engages many of these themes in his work:

• Roderick A. Ferguson, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota

The journal Gender & History will again sponsor a prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the Symposium. Conference presenters will also have the opportunity to publish their work in the on-line proceedings volume. We possess limited resources to subsidize travel expenses for presenters. Giving priority to presenters with limited conference experience, we will allocate these funds based on the quality of presenters’ proposals and the availability of funds.

To submit a paper or panel by email (preferred method); please send only one attachment in Word or PDF format containing a 250-word abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae for each paper presenter, commentator, or panel chair to gendersymp@gmail.com .

To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format, please send five (5) copies of all abstracts and curriculum vitae to: Programming Committee, Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History 309 Gregory Hall, MC 466, 810 S. Wright Street Urbana, Illinois 61801.

For more information, please contact Programming Committee Chairs, David Greenstein or Laura Duros at gendersymp@gmail.com .