The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (http://www.ssemw.org)
seeks nominations for awards for scholarly work published/completed in
2013. Any work on women and gender in the early modern period (ca.
1450-1750) is eligible.

Awards Categories:

*   Book Award
*   Essay or Article Award
*   Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition
*   Scholarly Edition in Translation Award
*   Teaching Edition Award
*   Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award
*   Collaborative Project Award (Edited Collections of Essays, etc.)
*   Digital Scholarship, New Media, & Art Award (Web-based projects, exhibitions, concerts, productions of plays, etc.  Note: Since such projects often do not have a single date of publication, nominations are accepted for
projects operating in 2013.)

To nominate a work from 2013 for an award to be presented in 2014, please
send three (3) copies of books or a PDF of articles, essays, or papers by
MARCH 15, 2014, to

Eleanor Hubbard
129 Dickinson Hall
Department of History
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
ehubbard@princeton.edu

Extended deadline to February 28 for proposals for the Feminisms Workshop at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

The Feminisms Workshop is a full-day event that offers opportunities for all scholars at all levels to come together and discuss issues concerning feminism and the field of Composition and Rhetoric. It will take place Wednesday, March 19, 2014. The workshop features invited speakers who will cover a variety of topics with the goal of contextualizing and historicizing the way we think about gender in CompRhet. In addition, the workshop is a venue for receiving feedback on work-in-progress that uses feminist theories or methodologies during breakout sessions. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss their work with other feminist scholars; so please come prepared with any questions or concerns you may have! We encourage graduate students and scholars at all stages of their careers to join us.

If you are interested in being a work-in-progress presenter, please submit a 250-word proposal to guarantee a place at the roundtables. Plan for a 5-8 minute presentation that includes scholarship you wish to share and and get feedback on and questions for the group. Roundtable participants will be listed on the workshop program (separate from the official CCCC’s program). Participants in the Feminisms Workshop who do not submit a proposals ahead of time may have an opportunity to participate in the roundtable discussions if time permits.

The revised deadline for proposals is February 28. Submit proposals to: 4c2014feminismsworkshop@gmail.com

Since World War II, the West has positioned Turkey as a role model for the Islamic world and a gateway to the Middle East.  A secular nation with a parliamentary system, Turkey, which occupies the eastern-most corner of Europe, and the western-most corner of Asia, is the only Muslim nation with European Union candidacy status.  However, despite its EU status and membership in NATO, it is a country that is still caught between its Eastern heritage and the “modernity” of the West. Thus, it is a nation that eludes categorization: part of Europe and Asia, but somehow not comfortable with the socially-constructed label “Eurasian”; bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, but somehow not “Mediterranean”; contiguous with the Middle East, but not “Middle Eastern.”

While ninety plus percent of Turkey’s over seventy million inhabitants
identify themselves as followers of one of the branches of Islam (the
majority being Sunnis), there is a strict separation between religion and
state—or secularism— that is enforced by the Turkish military.[1] This
secular-religious divide that serves as the backbone of the Republic of
Turkey was established by its first President, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in
1923, and includes a series of political, social, and cultural reforms,
such as the institution of a public dress code, that deconstructed the
patriarchal hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire and increased women’s rights.

This anthology seeks to explore Kemalist feminism in modern Turkey.
Some papers discuss the rise of the Turkish Republic, specifically with
Atatürk’s reforms aimed at women.  These reforms instituted state dress
codes (1924), which forbade the wearing of headscarves in public buildings.
Of course, this law stood until 2012 when students at religious school
were permitted to wear them.  Yet, throughout this more modern-day
controversy concerning the headscarf, Turkish women have been continuously
engaged in feminist politics.  The myth that Turkey stands ahead of the
West in regards to gender equality will be examined here, in terms of
women’s activism and demands for expanded rights within the public sphere,
international community and organizing, and the use of fashion as a
political tool and marker of discourse.

In the late 1960s gender emerged as a category for analysis, and the
studies from this movement act as texts of women’s lives.  These juxtapose
nicely alongside the letters and accounts of YWCA workers seeking to
develop a Christian community and global connection of women in the early
twentieth century.  Of course, media forces, advertisements, and a sense of
global social pressure structured the Turkish women’s front.  Just as these
women were fighting for a place within their own nation—a land on the
metaphorical and literal border of modernity and western—their acts for
rights and social and political acceptance forced personal and political
debates to color their lives and actions.

We are seeking proposals for articles (4000-7000 words in length) that
address questions of Turkish feminism during the twentieth century.
Please send your proposal (250 words) and a cv to:
turkishfeminism@gmail.com by March 1, 2014.  For those whose proposals are
accepted, completed articles will be due by July 15, 2014.  Any questions
can be directed to: turkishfeminism@gmail.com.

Boston, Massachusetts
March 6-8, 2014

Conference Chair:
Nichole Pinkard (DePaul University)
Conference Committee:
Elizabeth C. Babcock (California Academy of Sciences)
Angela Booker (University of California, Davis)
Eric Gordon (Emerson College/ Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University)
Philipp Schmidt (Massachusetts Institute of Technology/P2PU)

Today’s networked and digital media demand that we reimagine the where, when and how of educational practice. In an era of online affinity groups, Q&A forums, Wikipedia, and MOOCs of different sizes and shapes, learners are encountering an abundance of choice, and learning is unshackled from conventional institutional bases, credentials, pathways, and players. Educators and learning institutions are facing a new landscape of challenges and opportunities. Researchers are struggling to define new objects of study and connect to an evolving set of practices and design challenges.

It is more important than ever that the DML community finds shared educational and societal values to rally around. How do we build new alliances and coalitions that will break down the walls between formal and informal learning, between diverse communities, and between research and practice? We need to reach beyond the roles we occupy as teachers, librarians, mentors, designers, researchers, and organizers to pursue a common purpose. We can’t default to given disciplinary identities, institutional roles, and well-worn forms of educational practice; we need to challenge each other to reconsider and reposition the contributions we can make to educational reform that will serve the needs of all learners. This year’s conference calls on all of us to build shared agendas and goals to reach across the boundaries that separate our disciplines, fields, institutions, and sectors.

Register by February 19th to take advantage of Early Bird Registration Rates. See the conference website (http://dml2014.dmlhub.net/) for more details, full schedule, and registration information.

2014 National Underground Railroad Conference

July 16-20

Detroit Michigan

Due to popular demand, the National Underground Railroad Conference is
back! The National Park Service, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom (NTF) Program and friends, will host its annual 2014 National
Underground Railroad Conference in Detroit, Michigan, July 16-20, 2014. The
theme for this year’s conference is “*I Resolved Never to Be Conquered”:
Women and the Underground Railroad.* This sentiment penned by freedom
seeker Harriet Jacobs, shows her determination, “though one of God’s most
powerless creatures,” to retain control over herself and her body despite
her enslaved status. The conference’s focus on women recognizes NTF
program’s new organizational link with the Harriet Tubman Underground
Railroad Monument (HATU), and will explore that while Tubman has been the
dominant image of women and the Underground Railroad, her involvement is
part of a larger story of women’s participation in the movement, as freedom
seekers and as operatives.

During the conference, we will also take advantage of Detroit’s proximity
to travel on a tour to Canada, a final destination for many freedom
seekers. So be sure to have your passports ready!

Click here<http://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/upload/2014-call-for-presentations.pdf>
for the Call for Proposals. *Deadline March 1st. *

Call for Contributions
Women, Gender and Information and Communication Technologies
(Europe, 19^th-21^st centuries)
International Symposium
Paris
15-16 May 2014 

Organized by LabEx EHNE (Écrire une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe – Writing a New History of Europe), research strands 1 and 6 (http://www.labex-ehne.fr), in partnership with the CNRS Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC)

Although pioneering studies have contributed in the last few years to highlighting numerous aspects of the gendered construction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), via analyses concerning women telephone operators, female radio listeners, or even the ENIAC Girls, the place of women and of gender in the history of information and communication technologies remains to be reflected upon and written, whether it is the role and the representation of the two sexes regarding research, conception, utilisation or consumption.

It is hoped that these two days will compare European perspectives on the historical relations that women have maintained with information and communication technologies, since the telegraph. The study days invite transnational and interdisciplinary analyses across the long term, drawing as much upon the history of computer science and ICT as upon the history of work, organisations, consumption, education, media, and gender studies.

In touching upon imaginations, values, figures, models and practices that cut across the history of the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the TV, the internet and digital devices, we hope to explore in particular the manner in which the history of information and communication technologies can enrich gender studies, and conversely the way in which the latter can shed light on studies related to ITC.  The aim is to do so via numerous angles of approach (not exclusive of other approaches):

–       Female actors of ICT: individual and collective historical figures, inventors, programmers, researchers, professional users, consumers etc.

–       The gendered representations of the public actors of ICT and their evolution (discourses, advertising, teaching and education, imagination etc).

–       The stakeholders implicated at the heart of ICT, affected by the problematic of gender (European associations, national or transnational collectives etc).

–       ITCs as producers of new spaces for the expression of gender.

–       The specificity or not of European research in the gendered approach of ITCs in relation to the work carried out in North America.

Papers should be twenty minutes in length and can be delivered in French or English.  The organising committee would be particularly interested in proposals integrating a diachronic dimension and those explicitly touching upon a European dimension. Proposals of post-graduate students or early-career researchers are welcome.

Submission

Proposals should be sent to fgtic@iscc.cnrs.fr

They should be one page long, contain a bibliography and if possible a proposed plan.  Authors can include a summary of their publications/research and a brief biography in their initial e-mail.

• Deadline for submission of proposals: March 1^st 2014
• Notification of acceptance: March 15^th 2014
• International Symposium: May 15^th and 16^th 2014

This information is available on http://genreurope.hypotheses.org/

Organizers

• Delphine Diaz (IRICE, Université Paris-Sorbonne, LabEx EHNE)
• Valérie Schafer (ISCC, CNRS)
• Régis Schlagdenhauffen (LISE, CNAM/CNRS, LabEx EHNE)
• Benjamin Thierry  (IRICE, Université Paris-Sorbonne)

Program Committee

• Gerard Alberts (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
• Alec Badenoch (Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Utrecht University)
• Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann (LISE, CNAM/CNRS)
• Niels Brügger (The Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University)
• Frédéric Clavert (Université Paris-Sorbonne, IRICE, LabEx EHNE)
• Delphine Gardey (Faculté des Sciences de la Société, Université de Genève)
• Pascal Griset (Université Paris-Sorbonne, CRHI-IRICE/ISCC, LabEx EHNE)
• Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, IUF)
• Christophe Lécuyer (Université Pierre et Marie Curie)
• Ilana Löwy (Cermes, CNRS, EHESS, Inserm, Paris 5)
• Cécile Méadel (CSI, MINES Paris Tech)
• Ruth Oldenziel (Eindhoven University of Technology, Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich)
• Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan (HT2S, CNAM)
• Fabrice Virgili (IRICE, CNRS, LabEx EHNE)

Conference Secretary
Arielle Haakenstad (Université Paris-Sorbonne, IRICE/ISCC, LabEx EHNE)

Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender

Thursday, February 13, 2014, at 5:30 p.m.
Location: Schlesinger Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Gloria Whiting, Harvard University
“How can the wife submit?” African Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery in New England
Comment: Barbara Krauthamer, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

This paper discusses various ways in which the everyday realities of slavery shaped gender relations in Afro-New England families. While the structure of slave families in the region was unusually matrifocal, these families nonetheless exhibited a number of patriarchal tendencies. Enslaved African families in New England therefore complicate the assumption of much scholarship that the structure of slave families defined their normative values.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. To respond, email seminars@masshist.org or phone 617-646-0568. As usual, there will be four programs in this series, two each at the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. The complete schedule is available at http://www.masshist.org/2012/calendar/seminars/women-and-gender.

Each seminar consists of a discussion of a pre-circulated paper provided to subscribers. (Papers will be available at the event for those who choose not to subscribe.) Afterwards the host institution will provide a light buffet supper. As in the past, the essays will be madeavailable to subscribers as .pdfs through the seminar’s webpage, http://www.masshist.org/2012/calendar/seminars/women-and-gender. Subscribe to the 2013-2014 series via this page to receive the full series of papers.

Re-posted from the H-WOMEN listserv.

Our first anthology of stories about women in STEM, A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention, has been a fantastic success and it’s time to start thinking about the next one! To that end, we would like to invite you to submit an idea for articles about individual women or, especially, groups of women in:

• Science
• Medicine
• Technology
• Engineering
• Maths
• Pioneering users of technology

In the latter category, we’re after fascinating stories of women, individually or as part of a group, who played important roles as the users of technology, such as the women who ran the Doodson-Légé Tide Predicting Machine,or the women pilots of WWII.

We would like to get a fairly even distribution across the categories outlined above, but are also open to ideas that don’t fit in quite so neatly, so if you have an oddball idea, we want to hear it! Please also note that A Passion for Science featured quite a lot of astronomers, so we’re looking for a wider variety of sciences, and more women from the tech, eng, and maths categories, for this second book.

Initially, we would like you to send us 250 words on the woman or women that you want to write about, explaining why they are notable or interesting, along with a link to a sample of your writing. To submit your idea, please complete our form by 28 February 2014 and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can after that. The deadline for final submission is 30 April.

Ultimately, we’re looking for 20 articles of between 2,000 and 6,000 words. At this point, we don’t have a budget, but we’re hoping to raise some money to pay for editing, cover design and an honorarium for writers. Profits go towards supporting Ada Lovelace Day, which remains essentially a budgetless organisation run by a very small group of dedicated volunteers.

If you need a bit of inspiration, do take a look at some of the sample chapters from last year’s book. And if you want to know exactly what you’ll be getting yourself into, please take a look at our draft author notes and style guide.

Submit your abstract or find more information at http://findingada.com/book/call-for-submissions/

Call for papers: IFRWH Conference at Jinan, China, 27-29 August 2015

The next IFRWH conference will be held at Jinan, China in August 2015 in conjunction with the CISH conference (23-29 August). A number of themes and panels on women’s histories have been included in the main conference and that is a big step in taking women’s histories forward and a measure of the acknowledgment of the work of feminist historians.  The IFRWH conference will be held over one and half days at the end of the CISH conference, and will include a meeting at which the new officers and board of the Federation will be elected.

Based on the proposals that national committees originally put forward for the main CISH conference, and on consultation with the IFRWH board, we have decided on the following overarching theme for the conference:

Women and Modernity
The drive towards modernity has been one of the ways in which large-scale transformations in society in economic, political, and social have been pursued across the world over the last three centuries. The conceptual framework of modernity has straddled  diverse global locations. The tensions and conflicts in such broad-based changes encapsulate colonial and imperialist drives not only between the “west” and the “east,” but also within the “east” and the “south’. Women’s particular gendered experiences in nations and regions which have undergone these often rapid changes have led women to emerge as active agents, redefining/refining our notions of resistant subjectivities.
In order to maximize participation in the conference by delegates from all the different national committees of the IFRWH, we would also welcome proposals relating to these two conference sub-themes:

1.  Retrieving women’s histories from small archives and recently uncovered collections (including any period of historical enquiry)

2.  Resistant subjectivities

We hope you will be keen to participate in the IFRWH conference in this very important new location in China in 2015.

To download the conference paper/panel proposal form, click below.

Click Here for Paper/Panel Proposal Form

For more details, see the conference website: http://www.ifrwh.com/