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This conference seeks to explore the ways that regions have been constructed, imagined, contested, and reaffirmed. Providing pride of place and promoting individual virtue within the larger national community can be cited as the best functions of regionalism. The nation-state offers the potential for uniting diverse and disparate identities into a homogenous polity, yet beneath the surface extra local associations remain in the form of regional and sectional identities. In American history, the South serves as an example of a region whose peculiar characteristics proved essential to the nation’s formation, yet simultaneously threatened the existence of the nation. The issues surrounding regionalism’s relationship to the nation state are hardly unique to the United States and are essential to the construction and interpretation of national identities worldwide. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln History Graduate Student Association invites proposals from graduate and undergraduate scholars in the humanities whose work engages regionalism.
Keynote Speaker:
Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia
The HGSA encourages papers that interpret regionalism broadly. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- The Politics of Regional Identity
- Literature and Regionalism
- Immigration
- Sectionalism and Regionalism
- Industry, Agriculture, and Transportation
- Race and Ethnicity
- International Regionalism
- Colonialism and Imperialism
- Linguistics and Regional Dialects
- Agrarian Virtue/Urban Vice
- Religion
Interested scholars should send a 250 word abstract and one page curriculum vitae to: HGSA@unlnotes.unl.edu
The submission deadline is January 15, 2007. The conference will be in Lincoln, Nebraska, Saturday, April 7, 2007.
Keynote speaker Peter S. Onuf specializes in the history of the early American republic and has explored the power and meaning of regionalism in All Over the Map: Rethinking Region and Nation in the United States (1996), coauthored with Patricia Limerick, Edward Ayers, and Stephen Nissenbaum and The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (1990), with Andrew R.L. Cayton. He has written extensively on the political thought of Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (2000) and The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007). Onuf most recently published Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006), coauthored with his brother, political theorist Nicholas G. Onuf.
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