An empire of islands: concepts, contexts and collections
Dr John McAleer (History, Southampton) and Dr Douglas Hamilton of the University of Winchester, have been awarded an AHRC network grant worth £45,000 for a series of three workshops on the theme of islands and empire. The meetings will bring together a range of international scholars with the aim of exploring the catalytic roles played by islands in the shaping of modern European empires. It is hoped that the project as a whole will help to illuminate key issues relating to islands as historical spaces, with active roles in shaping and representing wider imperial contexts. The first workshop will be held in Southampton on 12 and 13 April 2016 and the second workshop in Winchester on 9 and 10 September 2016. The third and final workshop will take place at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich in Spring 2017. For more information follow this link.
Towards a Global History of American Evangelicalism
As a result of a $16,000 grant awarded to the Centre by the Henry Luce Foundation in New York, a two-day workshop on the subject of the global history of American evangelicalism was held from July 13-14, 2015, at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, Netherlands. The purpose of the workshop, organized by Kendrick Oliver of CIPCS and Hans Krabbendam of RSC, was to engage in a detailed collective review of draft essays produced for a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The workshop involved three contributors from the UK, three from Europe and four from the US, plus Professor John Corrigan, editor of the journal Church History. The special issue was submitted to the Journal of American Studies in 2016. Publication will be attended by public outreach activities. The special issue arose out of an international conference hosted at Southampton by CIPCS in April 2014.
On Edge: New Frontiers in Atlantic History
In the early modern world, no less than is true today, borders caused anxiety. A range of actors, from authorities to ordinary men and women, policed and contested boundaries; held them firm and flouted them entirely; fought over them and forged networks that transcended them. Boundaries were meant to establish sovereignty and political control, assert claims to natural resources and inhabitants’ loyalty, establish (closed) zones of economic activity, and in myriad ways determine who was in and who was out. The problem was that, however they were drawn, the lines were continually appearing, blurring and disappearing, particularly in places beyond the direct military and administrative oversight of European imperial authorities. Two distinct and usually separate lines of scholarship examine spaces of border contest: inland ‘frontier’ studies and maritime history.
In June/July 2016, the University of Southampton will be hosting a two-day conference, co-organized with Dr Jessica Roney, Temple University), at which participants will be invited to bridge the landed and aquatic frontiers of borderlands and maritime history to investigate in a broadly comparative framework how early modern actors defined, defied, and took advantage of borders, be they on land or on water. Through broadly comparative papers and revealing case studies this conference provides a forum to explore topics including, but not limited to, port cities, divided, middle, and Native grounds, saltwater frontiers, riverine trade, migration, diaspora, epistemology, and settler colonialism. This conference has been funded by an Adventures in Research Award from the University of Southampton. Visit the Conference website for further information.