Call for Papers: Conference on Slavery and the University

In recent years, an increasing number of scholars and students have explored the profound historical entanglements and legacies of slavery and the slave trade at institutions of higher learning. Some of these critical reexaminations have been sponsored or facilitated by senior administrations; in other cases, this historical research and “memory work” has been pursued without official sanction or encouragement. This work has inspired activism and change within universities and in the communities that surround them. Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies, an international conference to be held on February 3–5, 2011 at Emory University, will explore the full range of historical intersections between slavery and higher education, past and present, as well as the acknowledged and unacknowledged legacies of slavery and the slave trade in the academy.

We encourage paper and panel proposals on a wide range of topics, including:

• The economic entanglement of universities in the slave trade and in slavery
• The roles of colleges and universities in providing theological, legal, and political legitimacy for chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade
• Universities and the construction of racial knowledge in support of slavery and Jim Crow
• The contributions of enslaved persons in the building and maintenance of colleges and universities
• The experiences of enslaved persons and their descendants at institutions of higher learning
• Universities as contributors to and inhibitors of abolitionism
• Academic freedom, slavery, and antislavery
• How ideas about slavery and emancipation in educational institutions became templates for those institutions’ international imperial projects as well as their treatment of other racial groups (such as Native Americans and Native Hawaiians) and of women
• Remembering and forgetting slavery in the context of universities, including through exhibitions, memorials, and commemorative ceremonies
• The establishment of historically black colleges and universities as institutions meant to address the aftermath of slavery and debates around the education of freedpeople.
• Memories and images of slavery at historically black colleges and universities
• Strategies for engaging students and community members in documenting the history of slavery at institutions of higher learning
• Literary and artistic engagements with slavery in university contexts
• University librarians and archivists and their experiences with research on slavery and the slave trade
• How these histories inhibited or inspired institutional change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Review of paper and panel proposals will begin April 26, 2010. For individual papers, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words. For panels, submit an overall abstract of no more than 500 words and individual paper descriptions of no more than 250 words each, in addition to a cover page with paper titles, presenters, and their affiliations. Each applicant should also include a two-page c.v. with current e-mail contact information. Please submit materials via e-mail to Dr. Melissa Sexton at msexton at emory dot edu