Twenty-five years after Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” the Sixth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces a call for papers in order to re-evaluate gender as a category of analysis. How has your work embraced or challenged gender? How does it intersect with other categories of identity such as race, class, and sexuality? How has activism around gendered issues shaped your work? How (and should) we as scholars integrate both activism and gendered identities into our lives?

We invite submissions from graduate students from any institution on any subject within its historical context that might grow out of a variety of disciplines and engage diverse methodologies and topics. We also welcome panel submissions of three papers united by a common theme, although each of the three papers will be judged on its own merits. Finally, we encourage panels analyzing the state of the field in women’s and gender history, engaging with a work or body of work that has been influential in the field, and/or dealing with the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

The Symposium welcomes as its Plenary Speakers for 2005: Eileen J. Suarez Findlay, author of Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1880-1920 (Duke University Press, 1999) and Brenda Child, author of Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2000.) Both Suarez and Child will participate in a roundtable on activism and multiculturalism in the academy on Saturday, March 12th.

Inspiration for papers or panels might come from (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• (Re)Defining Gender
• Race, Gender, Class, and Activism
• The Historiography of Race and Gender
• Activism in the Academy
• Women Encountering Women across Boundaries of Time, Place, and Identity

Submission Guidelines: All submissions must be received by November 15, 2004.

To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format, please send five (5) copies of a 250-word abstract AND a one-page curriculum vitae for each paper presenter, commentator, or panel chair to the Programming Committee at the address below.

To submit a paper or panel by email, please send ONLY ONE attachment in Word format containing all abstracts and curriculum vitae. The subject line of the email must read Attn: Programming Committee and should be sent to gendersymp@uiuc.edu. We cannot be responsible for submissions that do not meet these conditions.

We invite graduate students to serve as commentators and professors to serve as chairs for panels. Panel submissions are highly encouraged to find chairs and commentators best suited to comment on the work presented and should include a one-paragraph description of the panel as well as curriculum vitae for all participants including the commentator and/or chair. The Symposium also welcomes individuals to participate as commentators or chairs exclusive of the panel submissions. These individuals should submit curriculum vitae to gendersymp@uiuc.edu with the subject line: Attn: Programming Committee.

All accepted papers are eligible for the Gender & History Graduate Student Essay Prize, sponsored by the journal Gender & History, to be awarded at the conference. Conference presenters may also publish their work in the on-line Proceedings volume. Preference will be given to those who did not present a paper last year.

For more information:

Please contact Programming Committee Chair April Lindsey at gendersymp@uiuc.edu

Or visit our website