At the Faculty for Social Sciences in co-operation with the Faculties of Law, of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, of Cultural Studies and of Philosophical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna an interdisciplinary PhD-Program with 12 PhD-positions „Gender, Violence and Agency in the Era of Globalization“ (GiK) will be established.

The program will start on March 1st, 2010. The GiK offers a research intensive three year PhD-Program on a full time basis. Remuneration will amount to 1.199,10 Euro per month gross. Identification number of advertisement: 612

The interdisciplinary PhD-Program focuses on violent conflicts at territorial and social borders, on diverse forms of cultural and religious fundamentalism, on shifting responsibilities and power relations in nation-states as well as on new processes of the commodification of human bodies. Moreover, local and translocal strategies of alliances and national as well as transnational scales of belonging, empowerment and self-organization will be of major interest. The program will encourage research projects in four research areas: Continue reading →

The University of Florida’s (Web) 9th annual English Graduate Organization conference (November 12th and 13th) will explore nostalgia, focusing on the contradictory relations among desires for recovered pasts as well as deliberate attempts to manipulate the present through representations of the past. Of particular interest will be the extent to which both nostalgia and the desire for utopia are linked to historical trauma, as textual manifestations of an extratextual cause.

When Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia” in 1688, it referred to a literal disease plaguing French soldiers who were dying from homesickness. By the 1870s, it had lost its medical usage but had been taken up by culture to frame Romanticism’s desire for both the concept of the homeland and the past. Despite connotations of rosy naïveté, nostalgia retains pathological connotations in its implicit desire to recreate or reformulate the past. This decay of the so-called historical truth, then, is replaced by a necessity to invent conceptions of the past and/or loose conceptions of home—whether a geographical or ontological distinction. How this preoccupation with decay frames possibilities for both personal and cultural reinvention through representation, demands further investigation. Continue reading →

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) (Web) invites proposals for panels and individual papers at its annual conference to be held June 24-26, 2010 at the Pyle Conference Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In order to receive full consideration, proposals should be submitted no later than December 1, 2009.

The program committee welcomes panels and paper proposals that deal with the history of United States’ role in the world in the broadest sense. In order to complement SHAFR’s signature and continuing strengths in diplomatic, strategic, and foreign relations history, particularly for the post-1900 period, the Committee especially encourages proposals that deal with non-state actors and/or pre-1900 transborder histories, as well as proposals that involve histories of gender and race, cultural history, religious history, environmental history, economic history, labor history, immigration history, and borderlands history. The Committee also invites applications from scholars working in areas other than U. S. history, and panels that include work by such scholars. Finally, the committee welcomes panels dealing with issues such as pedagogy and professionalization. Continue reading →