CFP: Three panels on Latin America and the Atlantic World at the Pacific Coast Branch – American Historical Association

R.A. Kashanipour Discussion

2017 Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association

California State University, Northridge


3-5 August 2017

 

The program committee of the 2017 Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association (PCB-AHA) 110th annual meeting invites proposals for several for panels related to Latin America and the broader Atlantic World, which are noted below.  The PCB-AHA is the western branch of the American Historical Association. It serves members of the AHA living in the western United States (west of the Mississippi) and western Canada, but participation in the conference is open regardless of region or nationality. The conference brings together historians from all geographical, chronological and topical specializations (http://pcb.cgu.edu/). The Annual Meeting theme reflects the breadth and variety of interests held by the PCB-AHA membership.

 

Panel: “Latin Americanists in the Archives” - Archives have long been the subject of scholarly intrigue, investigation, and idealization. They have been romanticized as spaces of scholastic seduction and defined as the sites where state and social authority is made visible. They exist as locations where scholars can uncover voices buried by institutional authority or the spaces to examine everyday colonial power relations.  More recently, numerous scholars have suggested that a growing division exists between those who collect and manage documents and those that interpret them.  Using Latin America as a critical context, this panel aims to explore changing approaches to archives and historical research to both close the supposed divisions between librarians, archivists, and scholars and to examine new methods and approaches to scholarship in the digital age. This panel is also a part of series of discussions that are moving towards a volume on Latin American archives.   

 

Panel: “Idolatry and Identity in the Atlantic World” – Early modern accounts of the Americas frequently detailed the prominence and dangers of the heterodox practices of idolatrous natives and settlers.  While no doubt the notions of pagan and diabolical practices brought about fear and terror, Catholic scholastics, Protestant reformers, and Enlightenment intellectuals alike all used tropes of idolatry and heterodoxy as social and political tools to define localized and inter-imperial difference.  This panel aims to explore early modern understandings of idolatry across the Atlantic and bring together scholars from across regional perspectives, including the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch Americas.

 

Panel: “Bodies, Medicine, and Ways of Knowing in the Early Modern Atlantic” – Sickness and disease were fundamental components of colonial encounters and experiences.  Recently, scholars from a variety of perspectives, especially historians and literary scholars of race, gender, medicine, and science, have begun to examine how individual understandings of bodies and collective ideas of diseases shaped colonial knowledge systems and political programs. This panel examines the colonial ontology of knowledge as mediated through bodies and disease from a broadly Atlantic framework, including scholars of colonial Latin America, British North America, and Dutch, English, and French Circum-Caribbean.

 

Interested in participants in these panels should submit the following files (as .doc or .pdf files):

  1. One-page, abbreviated Curriculum Vitae, including preferred email and institutional affiliation
  2. Paper Title and Abstract, 300 words or less

 

Questions and submissions should be sent to R.A. Kashanipour (ra.kashanipour@nau.edu), PCB-AHA program committee member, before 5-February-2017.