Call for Papers

MID-ATLANTIC CONFERENCE ON BRITISH STUDIES

ANNUAL MEETING

VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Richmond, VA

Saturday, April 25^th, 2009

The MACBS, an affiliate of the NACBS, the main organization for British Studies in Canada and the United States, seeks participation by scholars in all areas of British Studies. We solicit proposals for panels on Britain, the British Atlantic World, and the British Empire broadly defined. Our interests range from the ancient to the contemporary and we welcome participation by scholars of history, anthropology, literature, art, politics, economics and related fields. The program committee will look with particular favor on proposals that are interdisciplinary or transnational. Senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students are all encouraged to participate.

We will give strong preference to complete panel proposals (comment, chair, and three papers). We will accept individual paper proposals if they can be integrated into a viable panel, but we encourage independent submitters to first advertise for additional panelists on H-Net (e.g. H-Albion) or to email the program committee for other suggestions. No participant will be permitted to take part in more than one session, and no more than one proposal will be considered from each applicant.

Proposals should include a brief (no more than 250 words) abstract of the paper and a curriculum vita. Full panel proposals should also include a concise description of the panel’s overall aim and indicate which panel member will serve as the organizer and primary contact.

The keynote speaker for this year’s conference will be Gail Savage, the former president of the MACBS and currently a Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her talk is entitled “Major Seton, in the Drawing Room, with a Pistol: Murder, Insanity, and Divorce after the First World War.”

The conference will also include two special panels on Britain, the empire, and the Atlantic World. The first, “Global Britons, 1600-1800,” will be chaired by Alison Games, Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University and author of Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (OUP, 2007). The second special session will be a roundtable discussion of Specters of Mother India: the Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke, 2006), by Mrinalini Sinha, Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State University. Potential conference attendees who wish to contribute to these sessions should provide the program committee with a brief statement of interest and a curriculum vita.

All submissions and requests to participate in the special panels must be received by January 21, 2009.

Please submit proposals or special panel requests via email to:

Julie Taddeo
History Department

University of Maryland
taddeo@mail.umd.edu

and

Travis Glasson
Department of History
Temple University

tglasson@temple.edu