CFP: "LAGlobal Symposium: The Global Past and Future of Latin American Studies" (21 MARCH, 2018, London)

For those interested in Latin American studies, here's a recent call for papers for a symposium titled "LAGlobal Symposium: The Global Past and Future of Latin American Studies." The call for papers explains more:

This one-day international symposium will address the global dimensions of Latin American Studies, past, present and future. Contrary to common and official knowledge, the field cannot be properly understood merely as a product of national security responses to the Cold War. Consequently, the notion that the end of the Cold War and the most recent wave of globalization spells the end of area studies or, in this specific case, of Latin American studies, is at best myopic.

Indeed, Latin American Studies has never been so vibrant as it is today. This vibrancy suggests a long global past and future for the field. Serious and voluminous scholarly research on the region began in earnest in the sixteenth century, and it peeked again in the eighteenth century, when thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were produced about all aspects of the region. Scholarly production continued apace in the nineteenth century, and was finally institutionalized in many locales in the Americas and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, Latin American Studies centres proper begin to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by a strong and concerted push to fund and establish centres in the 1960s.

Our symposium will feature papers examining the long and winding history of Latin American research in the Americas, Europe and beyond, including Asia and Australia. The presence of distinguished scholars and directors from beyond Europe is critical to the success of the comparative or global credibility of the event.

Please submit in a Word file title, 100-word abstract, and 2-page CV, by January 31, 2018 to LAGLOBAL Network Facilitator José Guevara at jose.guevara@postgrad.sas.ac.uk. Informal inquiries may be addressed to LAGLOBAL Director, Mark Thurner (University of London) at mark.thurner@sas.ac.uk.