Workshop Template

Announcements:

Welcome to the Empires and Colonies web page. The Empires and Colonies Workshop responds to the need for a shared academic forum for graduate students and faculty whose work is in conversation with colonial and imperial studies. Our presenters and participants come from different methodological, geographic, and temporal specializations, and we come together because we believe that by bringing into conversation different historical perspectives on imperialism and colonialism, we can further develop innovative questions and a more rigourous understanding of colonial and imperial formations.

A complete schedule for Winter 2009 is now available. Presentation dates are still available for Spring.

All events take place at 5pm in Cobb 103, unless otherwise noted.

Schedule:

January 14

Spencer Leonard, PhD Candidate, History/ South Asian Languages and Cultures

February 11

Amanda Hamilton, PhD Candidate, South Asian Languages and Cultures

"Imagining the Middle Race: John Ricketts, Eurasian Legal Status, and The East Indian Petition to Parliament of 1829"

A disscussion about how Eurasians imagined and enunciated a corporate identity. Focused on race naming and legal definitions of Eurasians and their rights, the paper engages sources from both legal and popular culture and draws on historiographic strategies from African American studies, tracing how ‘race’ gets created as lived reality in the spaces between institutions, politics and individuals.


Feburary 12
Special Day and Time: 4:30 PM John Hope Franklin Room Social Sciences 2nd Floor

*Special Event Co-sponsored with the Latin American Workshop and Human Rights Workshop

"The Reaper's Garden: Social Death and Political Life in the History of Slavery"

A presentation and discussion with Professor Vincent Brown

Vincent Brown, Dunwalke Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BROREA.html and producer of "Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness," a television documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits.

There is no pre-circulated paper for this presentation. Refeshments provided afterwards.

February 25

Tong Lam, Assistant Professor, History, University of Toronto

"Recolonizing Frontiers and Nationalizing the Empire: The Making of the Late Qing Geobody and Social Body"

Abstract: Unlike the conventional assumption that late Qing China was an immobile and crumbling empire, this paper argues that the Qing remained to be an expansionist and outward-looking empire even in its final years. Particularly, the paper analyzes how the Qing regime was able to quickly refashion its old colonial enterprises through the mastery of political technologies such as modern territorial surveys and censuses in order to defend its previous colonial acquisitions. In other words, despite being an empire without capital, the Qing was capable of thinking imperialistically. As such, the Qing’s frontier re-colonization project and civilizing mission were not all that different from those of the European and Japanese colonial powers.


We strongly encourage all students and faculty interested in strategies and technologies of nineteenth century and twentieth century empire-building to attend.

Click here to download papers

Contacts:

Stacie Hanneman

sakent@uchicago.edu