Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies
Northwestern University
www.historicalstudies.northwestern.edu
Graduate Student Conference April 15, 2016
Intimate Histories:
Intersections between the Global and
the Personal
Application deadline: Wednesday, JANUARY 6, 2016
Historians have increasingly turned to the intimate to illuminate large-scale transnational and
global historical processes. Scholars of empire have been particularly attentive to the ways in
which intimate realms interact with ideas about race, nation, and imperial rule and how these
phenomena influence intimate spaces. We will take up ideas and questions about the intimate
developed by historians and theorists working from imperial and gender perspectives and invite
participants to use them to inform their own geographic and theoretical fields. The conference
will consider the intimate as a subject of inquiry and interrogate the meaning of the intimate in
various contexts. Papers and panels will explore how the intimate details of private life, the
histories of sexuality, the home, the family, and marriage, and ideas about the body, the mind, and
the self are intertwined with histories of imperial expansion, state regulation, race, gender, and
class, cultural and political movements, transnational migrations, and medical and technological
innovations.
Among the topics this conference will take up is the question of scale, definitions of ‘the
intimate’, and new directions for the topic. What do we mean by the intimate and how has the
concept been differently defined across time and place? Why has the intimate become so useful to
historians who study transnational, global, and imperial topics? What does juxtaposing these two
vastly different scales offer historians? How can different scales of inquiry—the intimate, the
local, the national, and the global—be combined and set against one another to suggest new
questions about relationships between subjects and the state? Do intimate histories have to be
entangled with global or national histories to be relevant? We welcome proposals from scholars
in a wide range of geographic and temporal fields.
Mary Lou Roberts (University of Wisconsin) will be giving our keynote address. Roberts
is the author of D-Day through French Eyes: Memoirs of Normandy 1944, (Chicago, 2014), What
Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, 1944-1946, (Chicago, 2013),
Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siècle France, (Chicago, 2002), and Civilization
without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994).
Interested graduate students should send a paper proposal of no more than one page (250
words), and an updated CV to Alex Lindgren-Gibson (alexslg@u.northwestern.edu) by January
6, 2016. A Northwestern history faculty committee will select the papers. Conference papers will
be ten to twelve pages double spaced, and due by Friday, April 1st, in order to allow time for
circulation to the commentators. Presentations will run 10 minutes.