Bow River Conference 2020 Call for Papers

HISTORY OF POWER

Call for Papers

2020 – University of Calgary

The University of Calgary History Graduate Student Union, in partnership with the Strategic Studies Student Consortium and the Latin American Research Centre, is pleased to invite all graduate students to present at the Bow River Conference. The Bow River Conference aims to bring together all areas, time periods and disciplines that deal with the past, and give students the opportunity to present a paper in a friendly and scholarly environment. The conference will be held at the University of Calgary, March 13-14. The theme of this year’s conference, “History of Power,” seeks to explore the impact of events, figures, relationships, and presentations of power in a historical and interdisciplinary manner.

2020 marks the 500^th anniversary of the Mexican conquest, an event of contact, conflict and exchange that set the pattern for Spanish expansion in the Americas and ushered in a new period of European imperialism worldwide. The meeting of Moctezuma with Hernan Cortés months earlier has become symbolic of the repeating interplay between exchange, merging, resistance and domination that defined imperialism in the Americas. These events highlight the paradox between the positive and negative consequences of power, and their ongoing reverberations through time—reverberations that spread beyond the Americas and throughout the history of European colonialism and speak to interconnectedness within the nature of power itself. If we follow Foucault’s description of power as being dispersed and all-pervasive, we can understand power to have been present in the experiences of all people, of all times and all places. The academic is not outside this extension, as the very nature of our work belies an inherent exercise of power. As historians it is worth asking questions about which stories are told and who should be responsible for telling those stories. These questions need to inform and shape the work we do as much as the analysis of power relations in history itself.

With this in mind, we welcome original research, dissertation chapters-in-progress, research projects, course papers, or any other relevant work, in addition to papers dealing with an interdisciplinary approach to history. We invite both MA and PhD students (and senior undergrad students) in History or any related field to submit a 300-word abstract by January 5, 2020. Abstracts must include a title and explain the context of your research, your research question(s), methodology, sources, and the historical significance of your research. In addition, please include a brief biography or CV and your contact information. While submissions that discuss our theme are encouraged, we equally welcome submissions that focus on other historical topics. 

Please direct submissions to bow.river.conference@gmail.com. Feel free to contact the committee with any questions.