From London to Philadelphia, Charleston to Kingston, Quebec to Lima, popular culture in early America embraced a host of activities and purposes, communities, practices, and sites. It expressed the vitality of the diverse worlds that met and collided in early America and enacted their tensions and conflicts as well. Plebeian and respectable, folk and commercial, popular and elite: "popular culture" goes by many names in early American scholarship and takes in a broad and perhaps incompatible set of activities. The Draper Graduate Student Conference in Early American Studies seeks to explore this wide arena and assay the subjects, issues, contributions, and theoretical debates in recent work on popular culture in early America and the broader Atlantic world from the sixteenth century down to the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

We invite graduate students to explore these themes in a conference to be held in Storrs, Connecticut, and Worcester, Massachusetts from March 24 to 26, 2011 under the joint sponsorship of the University of Connecticut and the American Antiquarian Society. Paper proposals should consist of a 500-word abstract and a C.V. of no more than 2 pages. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2010. We welcome submissions from graduate students within and outside the discipline of history.

Submission email: draperconference@uconn.edu
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/draperconference2011

Please download the printable electronic flier from http://history.uconn.edu/draperconference2011/drapercfp.pdf.