14th Annual Graduate Conference of the Department of History
Friday, March 24th, 2023
Hosted by the History Department’s Future Professoriate Program (FPP)
The Future Professoriate Program acknowledges with respect the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the Indigenous people on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands.
In the discipline of history, silences denote an absence of representation. More broadly, these silences can be representative of what the field construes as deserving of study, research, and attention. Silences can occur in a myriad of ways, such as in an exclusion of peoples, events, and subjectivities. Thinking within the framework of silences, therefore, means understanding what has been rendered significant to a context and what has been marginalized in a given area of study, including that which is regional and global. This politics of exclusion and inclusion signifies modes of representation in historical, geographical, literary, humanistic, and scientific investigations. Working with the notion of silences allows scholars to question, rethink, and reinspect the modalities present within their discipline and question why certain stories have yet to have been told.
This year’s 14th Annual Graduate Conference organized by the Future Professoriate Program has selected the theme of silences and the politics of representation to invite a discussion on what has—and, perhaps more importantly, has not—been studied and given attention in the historical discipline. The theme includes but is not limited to papers that examine marginal histories in both global and regional contexts, rethinking revolutions from alternate perspectives, narratives of subversion and resistance, and interdisciplinary investigation into normative research.
Submissions should consist of a project title, a 150-word abstract for a 20-minute conference presentation, and a 1-page CV. These must be submitted to historyfpp@syr.edu by January 20th. The 14th Annual Graduate Conference will be held on Friday, March 24th at Syracuse University. Papers from various departments, disciplines, and methodologies are welcome.
The keynote speaker for the FPP Graduate Conference is Dr. Durba Ghosh, an eminent scholar in the history of British colonialism in South Asia. Dr. Ghosh is Professor of History at Cornell University and the Faculty Director of the Humanities Scholars Program. Dr. Ghosh’s most recent monograph is Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which looks at political violence in mid-20th century India. Her next project examines the commemoration of freedom fighters in India through monuments and statues, and, for this project, she is part of the collaboration group “Unsettled Monuments, Unstable Heritage.”