Constructing Virtue, Making Place: Regional Creation in a National Context

Second Annual James A. Rawley
Graduate Conference in the Humanities

Saturday, April 7, 2007
University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Keynote Speaker:
Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

Sponsored by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln History Graduate Student Association.

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 Students’ Association invites proposals from graduate and undergraduate scholars in the humanities whose work engages regionalism.

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 Feburary 16, 2007.