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The Harvard Graduate Conference on International History (Con-IH 17) presents the conference
Migration, Immigration, Diaspora
Organized by GSAS graduate students: Tommy Jamison, Rafi Stern, Chloe Bordewitch, Kelly Brignac, Ruodi Duan, Aden Knaap, and Georgia Whitaker
Human migration, immigration and diasporas have played a fundamental role in world development and continue to do so. The forced and free movements of people throughout history intersect with some of the most important subjects of urbanization, imperialism, slavery, capitalism and globalization. This conference seeks to discuss cutting-edge studies that take up the subject of migration in international, regional, and global historical context, for any era from Antiquity to the present, and proceeding outward from any world region.
The 2017 keynote speaker is Paul Kramer, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University. Professor Kramer’s primary research interests are in modern U.S. History, with an emphasis on transnational, imperial and global histories, American social thought, and the politics of inequality. His first book, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006), explores the imperial politics of race-making between U.S. and Philippine societies in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award in the Social Science category. Prof. Kramer writes for the New Yorker and Slate on themes relating to the history of the United States in the world. His forthcoming book is on intersections between immigration policy and US foreign relations.
Migration, Immigration, Diaspora will feature twelve papers by graduate students studying in seven countries. Their research on migration, immigration, and diaspora spans the 13th to the 21st centuries and touches nearly every continent:
From Smugglers to Middlemen: The Early Modern Japanese Diaspora in Southeast Asia
Pierre-Emmanuel Bachelet, ENS-Lyon
Idle and Dangerous: Vagrancy Policing in a Southern Port City, 1852-1868
John Bardes, Tulane University
A Dispersed Diaspora: Haitians in Chicago, 1935-2010
Courtney Cain, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Once Migrant Always Displaced? Exploring Diasporic Consciousness and Shifting Narratives of Belonging across Three Generations of Urdu Speakers in Bangladesh
Isha Dubey, University of Aarhus
The Conveyor Belt to Nowhere: Memory and Resistance at a Western Saharan Phosphate Mine, 1973-1976
Sarah Gilkerson, University of California, Davis
Aichmalosia: Captivity, Ransom, and Letter-Writing in Byzantium and Its Neighbors, c. 1204-1453
Alasdair Grant, University of Edinburgh
A Community on the March: The Mormon Battalion and the Militancy of Migration
David Krueger, Harvard University
From China to Nigeria: Migration of Chinese Industrialists and Nigerian Industrialization in the 1960s
Shaonan Liu, Michigan State University
The Royal Navy, Legal Pluralism, and Authority in Early Colonial Sierra Leone, 1670-1815
Tim Soriano, University of Illinois-Chicago
Corruption, State Agents under Surveillance, and the Business of Human Smuggling in 1920s Mexican Borderlands
Abraham Trejo Terreros, El Colegio de Mexico
Sojourners and Transnationalism: Emigrant Communities in Chaozhou, 1949-1958
Hui Wang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Lives and Letters in a Time of Transition: The Legal Papers of Baghdadi-Jewish Migrants in Surabaya, Rangoon, and Singapore, 1948-1950
Genie Yoo, Princeton University
Click here to read the selected abstracts. The full conference schedule will be published soon.
Sponsors: Asia Center, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for African Studies, Center for European Studies, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Fairbank Center, Department of History, South Asia Institute, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, and Center for Jewish Studies
Link: http://con-ih.com/
Contact: ConIH@fas.harvard.edu