Upcoming Conferences

February 18 - 20, 2010
Women in the Iberian-American Atlantic (1500-1800)

Our conferences draw together a national and international group of both established and beginning scholars to explore the histories, cultures and dynamics that reveal the Lowcountry and the Atlantic World to be regions of constant interaction and complex connection.

At the heart of these highly successful events is a shared commitment across disciplinary boundaries to depict, on the one hand, the distinctive textures of lives lived within specific places, and, on the other, to build conceptual bridges that link several such locales together as connected parts of a world characterized by a pervasive Atlantic dimension.

These conferences have been funded by grants from the National Endowment for Humanities, Humanities Council SC, and other corporate donors.

March 3 - 5, 2011
CLAW Presents United States Civil War as International Conflict

In 2011, the United States will observe the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston will host an international conference to mark this important anniversary.  In keeping with the ethos of CLAW we will examine this event by looking at it in an international context. The conference will focus on the effects and implications of the Civil War on the Atlantic and wider world. Some of the questions to be addressed include: How did the Union and Confederacy operate foreign diplomacy?  How did nations in the rest of the world view this conflict?  What did Americans, particularly South Carolinians, think of international attitudes toward the United and Confederate States?  What did Americans living abroad think of the conflict?  What impact did Confederate exiles/colonies have on their host countries?  What impact did American Emancipation have on slavery in Latin America, Africa etc.?  How did the Civil War influence World views of the U.S., particularly the South, and how did Unionists/Confederates see themselves in the world?

Co-sponsored Conferences:

February 18 - 20, 2010
Women in the Iberian-American Atlantic (1500-1800)

Registration Now Open!

The Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston calls for papers on Women in the Iberian and Latin American Atlantic World.  The conference will take place in Charleston, South Carolina, from Feb. 18 to 20, 2010.  This interdisciplinary conference welcomes papers on Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American history, literature, cultural production, etc.  We hope to examine questions such as: Who were the women that traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World or vice-versa? What ideas did they bring with them? What influence did women who did not physically travel have on the Atlantic world? What role did women play in creating an Atlantic network? What can women’s experience in the Atlantic World tell us about the Atlantic cultural production, literary exchanges, economy, race relations, religion, etc., between 1500 and 1800?

For more information, click here or contact the conference coordinator, Dr. Sarah E. Owens (College of Charleston).

 

 

March 11 - 13, 2010
Race, Labor & Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South

Call for Papers
Deadline: November 20, 2009

Organized by the After Slavery Project
Co-sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
(CLAW); the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (College of Charleston); the (SC) African American Historical Alliance; School of Humanities and Social Sciences (The Citadel) and the Southern Labor Studies Association other supporting organizations: Center for the Study of the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Institute for Southern Studies (University of South Carolina at Columbia); Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA); Charleston International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422; The Citadel Oral History Program; W. E. B. Du Bois Institute (Harvard University)

Keynote by Steven Hahn
author of the prize-winning
A Nation Under Our Feet:
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

One hundred years ago the outstanding African American scholar-activist, W. E. B. Du Bois, presented to the American Historical Association a paper entitled "Reconstruction and Its Benefits.” In the paper and in his seminal Black Reconstruction, published a quarter century later, Du Bois not only exposed the racial assumptions underpinning the dominant view of the period following slave emancipation: he insisted that the struggles over slavery and the shape of the freedom that followed were central to the history of America’s working people, calling it “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” Over the past generation, historians have built upon Du Bois’s powerful insight about the connections between race, labor and citizenship in the postemancipation South, producing some of the most compelling scholarship in the field of U. S. history.

The After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration based at Queen’s University Belfast, welcomes proposals from scholars at all levels for individual papers and panels that showcase new and developing research on these and related themes across the former slave South, between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the twentieth century. As part of our commitment to making this scholarship widely available to teachers and students outside of higher education, labor and community activists, and interested citizens, we invite proposals for teachers’ workshops and panels that attempt to link new scholarship and public/popular history and/or online learning.

Suggested topics include:

• Labor and the Politics of Reconstruction
• Freedwomen, Citizenship and the Public Sphere
• Freedom, Property Rights and the Land Question in the Postwar South
• Black Workers, the Union Leagues and the Republican Party
• White Supremacy and the Prospects for Interracialism
• The Franchise and Grassroots Political Activism
• Coercion, Paramilitary Violence and Resistance
• Emigration Movements and Black Mobility
• Gender and the Free Labor Vision
• Religion and Southern Laborers
• Dockworkers, Port Cities and Black Mobilization
• Race Leadership after ‘Redemption’
• Populism and the Color Line
• Agricultural and Urban Labor
• Race, Labor and New South Industrialization
• Independent Politics after 1880

Details are available online at www.afterslavery.com. Proposals (limit 200
words/paper) should be submitted by November 20, 2009 either electronically to charlestonconference@afterslavery.com or by completing the online form at the After Slavery website.

Conference Organizers: Brian Kelly (Queen’s University Belfast), Susan E. O’Donovan (University of Memphis), Bruce E. Baker (Royal Holloway–University of London), Bernard E. Powers Jr. (College of Charleston), Simon K. Lewis (College of Charleston - CLAW); and Kerry Taylor (The Citadel

March 2010
Religion and the Sea: North American Faiths in the Maritime World

This conference seeks to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines and geographic areas to explore, through paper presentations and discussions, the relationship of the sea to American religious cultures and history. The sea is, and has been, a source of food, transportation, play, destruction, refuge, myth, and legend. It has fired the imagination as a place of both possibility and limit.

Experientially, the sea has also been the site of innovation and potential as well as constraint and death. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the sea was an active and important part of Americans’ orientation to the world. Travel to Europe or elsewhere meant a long voyage across the ocean. Whaling was an integral part of the American economy. While some Americans were exploring and occupying the continent’s interior, others were moving outwards, bringing America to the world and the world to America. From missionaries to seamen, from immigrants to diplomats, the sea was a part of everyday life.

Today, amidst the buzz of globalization and reconfigurations of early American history through the lens of the Atlantic World, and with an increasing awareness of the importance of the Pacific World in the formation of modern religion(s) and culture(s), the sea continues to be an important, if overlooked, element of religious and cultural history and practice. This conference seeks to encourage the convergence of scholarship around this topic. By raising the flag of “religion and the sea” as an area of research, we hope to foster dialogue and scholarly exchange across disciplines and subject areas, and to spark further thought that promises to make important contributions to understanding religion and culture in North America.

For more information, please contact Dr. Elijah T. Siegler (College of Charleston) or Dr. Richard "Chip" J. Callahan, Jr. (University of Missouri).