CFP: Geographies of World History
September 30, 2017
University of Cambridge
Sponsored by the Royal Historical Society
Geographies, both real and imaginary, play central roles in world history. Attention to landscape, place, and space has long been essential in telling global stories. Within this framework, geographical features, including oceans, islands, rivers, mountains and cities are increasingly being used as productive lenses for analysing connections and disconnections across and within empires and states. These framings have also been used to successfully disrupt older nationalist and regional organisations of the world, and traditional area studies units. Recently, scholars have become especially interested in geographical intersections, such as those between sea and land, coast and interior, and lowland and highland. Here the work of historical geographers, sometimes overlooked, can help inform the way we conceive of and practice world history. This one-day conference will bring together researchers working on various parts of the globe, including the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Europe, and across different scales, to discuss the way that geographies – cultural, social, and imaginative as well as physical – provide valuable analytical tools for the writing of world histories.
We aim to facilitate discussion on a variety of topics related to geography and world history, including but not limited to:
- Geographies of resistance
- Crossing geographies; migration and mobilities
- Institutional geographies; architectures of colonialism and anticolonialism
- Urban geographies in world history
- Race, gender, and space
- Thinking geography; cartographers and geographers as colonial experts
This one-day conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on September 30, 2017. We encourage graduate students in any related discipline to apply, and welcome individual submissions or suggestions for panels. Please send an abstract (250 words or less) and a current CV to worldhistoryworkshop@gmail.com by Friday, 16 June 2017.
Organised by the convenors of the Cambridge World History Workshop: James Wilson, Stephanie Mawson, Lachlan Fleetwood, Louise Moschetta, Eva Schalbroeck, and Chris Wilson.
