Keynote Address: Ian Tyrrell, Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales

Date of Conference: Thursday, October 25, 2012
Deadline for Abstract Submissions: May 1, 2012

The Transatlantic History Student Organization (THSO) in collaboration with Phi Alpha Theta, the Barksdale Lecture Series, the History Department, and the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Texas at Arlington are sponsoring the Thirteenth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Transatlantic History.

Transatlantic history, as defined by the Transatlantic PhD program at the University of Texas at Arlington, pertains to the interactions of people, goods, and ideas between any of the four continents surrounding the Atlantic basin between the time of the European “discovery” of the Americas in the 1500s and the present day. Situated primarily in the fields of both social and cultural history, its approaches are transnational and comparative in scope. Rejecting the conceptualization of cultural transmission as a one-way imposition, transatlantic scholars examine the reciprocity of cultural exchange through intercultural transfer. By taking a transnational and problem-oriented approach, scholars are able to look beyond and below the state-nations, focusing instead on the qualities of individual communities or individuals. While transatlantic history shares the geographic focus of Atlantic history, it seeks to move beyond the temporal and analytical limitations established by the fields of colonial/imperial and national history.

In his keynote address, "The Spaces and Times of Transnational History and Historiography”, Dr. Ian Tyrrell will examine the relationship between Atlantic, Pacific, and global history; the European and North American versions of transnational history; and the mapping of time onto the conception of transnational history and how it affects national history, especially around key ‘moments’ in which spaces are constituted and reconstituted.

We invite submissions that are historical, geographical, anthropological, literary, sociological, and cartographic in nature which fall within the scope of transatlantic history. We will accept submissions for papers written in English, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.

Topics may include but are not limited to the following:

- New World encounters
- Atlantic empires
- Transatlantic networks
- Making of state-nations
- Transatlantic migration
- Diaspora studies
- Collective Memory
- Identity Construction
- Transatlantic cuisine and consumption
- Intercultural transfer and transfer studies
- Transnational families

Selected participants’ papers may be eligible for publication in Traversea, the peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal in transatlantic history which is operated by doctoral students as a joint project between THSO and the doctoral program in transatlantic history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Submission of abstracts should be approximately three-hundred words in length and should be accompanied by an abbreviated maximum one-page curriculum vita. Deadline for submission is May 1, 2012. We will notify authors of papers accepted for a twenty-minute presentation by August 1, 2012.

Please direct submissions and questions to either Nicole Léopoldie nicole.leopoldie@mavs.uta.edu or Rufki Salihi rufki.salihi@mavs.uta.edu.

We also invite you to visit our website, http://www.uta.edu/studentorgs/thso/.