Deadline is 15 November, 2007.

Please send your abstract(250 words max) and CV. Please use either my e-mail posted here or the conference website for submissions.

The seminar:

Stateless Nomads, Non-Territorial Nations: The Roma, Gypsies, and Other Travelers

India’s forgotten children, as the poet J.S Pathania calls them, the Roma, Gypsy and Sinti diaspora in Europe, registered on the political radar of their host countries depending on the “civilizing efforts” or the “ethnic cleansing” of the current regimes. For more than 700 years, this largest ethnic minority in Europe has been marginalized politically, socially, economically and culturally. Whether driven by genocide, racist assaults or economic hardships, they traveled in the hope of sympathetic reception.

Since 1989, the situation of the Roma has become a key condition for the entry of Eastern European countries into the European Union. Even though they lack a tradition of political activism, over the last fifteen years the Romany people have been setting up self-administrative bodies and non-governmental organizations with strong ties to local communities, forming initiatives such as the Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2015.

This panel aims at broadening the academic discussions and stimulating debates on the nomadic and traveler groups in Europe whose long history of tribulation shows little sign of ending. We seek papers from historical, ethnographic, social, literary and visual studies that examine the social, political, and cultural representations of Roma, Gypsy and Sinti populations in Europe during monarchic, authoritarian, communist and neo-liberalist regimes, taking into account their geographic, cultural, linguistic diversity and class, generational, gender or tribal conflicts. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary papers are highly encouraged.