ALL FOR PAPERS
The Maritime and Oceanic History Workshop and The Centre of African Studies Graduate Conference 2012
Africa and the Atlantic World, 1450-1850
22-23 June 2012 - The Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge
This conference aims to bring together interdisciplinary and international researchers whose work relates to Africa and its relationship with the Atlantic across the whole of the early modern period. We welcome proposals from graduate students and early-career researchers from all disciplines within the humanities, belonging to institutions within the UK as well as abroad. The conference will present a variety of different approaches and perspectives concerning the study of Africa in the Atlantic world, and connect the most innovative and exciting new research in the field.
Subjects for papers may include historical events, processes and discourses, philosophical developments, and political issues. Topics that could be addressed are:
The place of Africa in the Atlantic World, overlap within Africa between the Atlantic and other spaces (e.g. the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean);
Deconstructing ‘Africa’: variety, diversity, and change;
African perceptions of Europeans, the transmission of African goods/ideas/art to Europe and America;
Empire and colonialism, European conflict in Africa, the fragility of the European presence;
Slavery and the slave trade, Africa’s internal slave economies, alternatives to slavery and African agriculture, perceptions of race, agency and resistance;
The creation and conceptualisation of contested spaces (e.g. the Gold Coast/Ivory Coast), hybridity and cosmopolitanism in ports and littoral spaces;
Science and nature, tropical medicine, exploration.
Harvard’s Professor Vincent Brown and Georgetown’s Professor Alison Games will deliver the keynote lectures, and will be joined by Richard Drayton (KCL), David Abulafia (Cambridge), Francisco Bethencourt (KCL), William O’Reilly (Cambridge), Anastasia Stouraiti (Goldsmiths), Manuel Barcia (Leeds) and John McAleer (NMM) in chairing the speaking sessions.
A selection of papers presented at the conference will be submitted for publication in a special addition of a peer-reviewed journal.
Please send your proposal (max. 250 words) for a 20-minute paper and an academic CV to africaatlanticconference@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 1 January 2012 – you will be notified if your paper has been selected before 1 February 2012.
The organising committee:
Edmond Smith (Magdalene)
Richard Blakemore (Selwyn)
Joshua Newton (King’s)
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