Emerging Perspectives on Race and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century United
States: A Workshop for Junior Faculty, Post-Doctoral Fellows, and Advanced
Graduate Students

March 15-16, 2013: The Pennsylvania
State University (University Park Campus)

The past two decades have seen an explosion of exciting new perspectives
on the subjects of race and gender in nineteenth-century US history.
Scholars have demonstrated the integral role of these categories in many
of the century’s major developments: from the emergence of a global
capitalist economy and the origins of American empire to the making of new
regimes of health, medicine, and body care. Along the way, scholars have
reinvigorated old conversations and engendered new ones. Historians and
other scholars have enriched and enlivened a venerable literature on free
and enslaved African-Americans while bringing histories of Latino/a and
indigenous Americans into the mainstream. They’ve uncovered previously
unknown aspects of women’s lives while exploring the stories of trans- and
ambiguously-gendered persons. And they’ve subjected the ‘unmarked,’
taken-for-granted categories of manhood and whiteness to extensive
critical scrutiny. In the process, this community of thinkers has
shattered the binaries – black/white, woman/man – that have traditionally
structured work on
race and gender, and provided ample evidence of the benefits to be gained by
interdisciplinary and theoretical engagements. Many have embraced the
‘spatial turn’ or employed the human body as a site of scholarly
investigation. Others have incorporated theories of performativity or
intersectionality into their work, emphasizing the ‘constructed-ness’ of
race and gender and the way in which the meanings of these categories
inform one another. Taken together, the result of these developments has
been a simultaneous expansion and redefinition of what scholarship on race
and gender entails.

Some of the best work on these topics is being done by advanced graduate
students and scholars in the early stages of their careers. To highlight
and encourage this work, the Richards Civil War Era Center at the
Pennsylvania State University, in conjunction with the Africana Research
Center and the Department of Women’s Studies, invites proposals from early
career scholars within three years of receiving their PhD and advanced
graduate students who are writing their dissertations for the first annual
emerging scholars workshop. Taking place March 15-16, 2013 at the
University Park campus
of the Pennsylvania State University, the workshop will provide a forum for
innovative young scholars to discuss new projects involving race and gender
with faculty and graduate students from the departments of history, Women’s
Studies, and African and African-American Studies. Papers should be no more
than ten pages in length and pertain to works-in-progress rather than
dissertation projects or book manuscripts nearing completion. Submissions
will be pre-circulated to registered attendees and Penn State faculty,
including select scholars chosen to provide detailed commentary on papers.
Presenters will therefore have the benefit, not only of expert faculty
feedback, but informed audience commentary and questions – extending from
the immediate context of their papers to broader conversations around race
and gender.  Presenters can and should assume that commenters and audience
members will have a basic familiarity and comfort with feminist and
critical race theory and historical literature on race and gender. The
workshop will feature a keynote address on the state of the field from an
invited scholar.

Potential Paper Topics Include:

– Africa, empire, and the Atlantic World: imagining unconventional Atlantic
(and hemispheric) narratives for the nineteenth century.

– Black politics and white allies: the long African-American freedom struggle
and its complex links to white political and social organizations.

– Masculinity, femininity, and gender performativity: incorporating
performative perspectives on gender (and race) into nineteenth-century
historical scholarship.

– Sex, slavery, and intimate relations: enslaved women, desire, and sexual
labor beyond the ‘production/reproduction’ binary.

– Youth, children, and elders: the role of age difference and life-cycle
position in shaping the meaning and experience of race and gender.

– Labor, bodies, and objects: scholarship on race and gender and its links
to the ‘producerist turn’ and the ‘new materialism.’

– Medicine, science, and technology: the construction of ‘raced’ and
‘gendered’ bodies of knowledge and practice and their relation to
configurations of power.

Interested parties should submit a complete CV and a proposal of no more
than 500 words to Kelly Knight (<mailto:kmk404@psu.edu>) or Sean Trainor
(<mailto:sxt261@psu.edu>) by December 15, 2012. Travel funding is
available, courtesy of the Richards Civil War Era Center. Questions or
inquiries should be directed to Matthew Isham, Richards Center managing
director at <mailto:mri113@psu.edu>.