Two International and Global History Conferences for Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Scholars

It's not always easy for graduate students and post-doctoral scholars to find the right venues to present work in progress. Sometimes, graduate students can feel hesitant about making the transition from seminar paper to conference paper – and thence to dissertation or book chapter. Even post-doctoral scholars can face similar challenges, whether it's to do with turning the doctoral thesis into a more robust book, or laying the groundwork for the second book. Hence, it's worth noting two opportunities that have come up on our radar recently. Firstly, on February 27-28, 2015, the Berkeley International and Global History (BIG-H) Committee is organizing their Third BIG-H conference. The conference (more here) invites submissions that address the following questions:

• How did commercial exchange and cross-cultural interaction change definitions of what is human, divine, natural, or machine?
• How were the boundaries of scientific truth and objectivity established across cultures?
• How did modes of representing ideas change to accommodate interactions among different linguistic groups?
• In what vehicles did ideas travel across cultures and polities, and how was the traffic of ideas governed?
• How did ideas about the purpose of states change as people came into contact across cultures and political boundaries?
• How did the spread of empires, nation-states, or markets change basic understandings of community, class, power, value, environment, religion, accountability, identity?
• When did ideas transcend cultural difference to give rise to transnational social movements?
• How did the scale of human imagination change as people interacted across cultures?

If that's not enough, the international history community at Harvard is organizing a graduate student conference on March 12-13, 2015 entitled "Transitions: States & Empires in the Longue Durée." According to the conference's organizers, for this, the 15th iteration of the conference, " the History Department will partner with the Department of the Classics to investigate these moments of transition between imperial orders and their international successors and precursors in a longue durée framework. Cross-temporal analysis will deepen and problematize established approaches that have tended to focus on the Age of Revolutions and the 'first wave' of newly independent states prefigured by the American Revolution, or on the global decolonization movement of the twentieth century. Alternative origins stories may be found, instead, in the tumultuous political re-organizations of the Hellenistic Age, the fall and break-up of the Roman, Byzantine, or Mughal empires, and the variety of successor states and other political units that replaced them.  Empires too can be crafted from states, like the emergence of the Soviet Bloc after the Second World War. Historical comparisons between the transitions from empire to state, and state to empire, could also reaffirm the distinctiveness of the modern international order and the novel ways in which people have come to conceive its appropriate political units." Both are something to consider for the coming academic year. The Harvard conference is for graduate students only; the Berkeley conference for graduate students and post-docs. For those of you contemplating a visit to California, the deadline for the BIG-H conference is October 3; for those more inclined to the East Coast, the Harvard conference organizers request that submissions be handed in by August 24. More information can be found on BIG-H's and the Harvard graduate student conference's websites.