Invitation for Keynote Speakers/Student Presentations for 3rd West Coast Symposium in the History of Medicine

The Third West Coast Symposium in the History of Medicine invites participants for a two-day symposium on March 30-31, 2012, sponsored jointly by the Department of Humanities in Medicine (Texas A&M Health Science Center), The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research (Texas A&M University), and the History of Medicine and Health Care Program at the University of Calgary, Alberta (Canada) where the preceding symposia were hosted.

The symposium will cover the history of health-related disciplines, to include a range of topics from ancient to the modern period. One special theme will be 'Civil War Medicine', in commemoration of its 150th Anniversary with a keynote speaker, Mr. George Wunderlich, Director, National Museum of Civil War Medicine. An accompanying exhibit from the National Institutes of Health will feature 'The Henkel Physicians: A Family's Life in Letters': a portrayal of the impact of the Civil War on daily lives in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

The program will also include a second distinguished keynote speaker, Dr. Stanley Finger, Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Finger has published much concerning the history of neuroscience and medicine, especially the relationship between brain and behavior as perceived by scientists in earlier time periods.

There will be awards for the best paper and poster, a reception/banquet, and musical concerts. The symposium will take place at the splendid new Health Professions Education Building at the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Bryan, Texas (USA).

The object of the symposium is to encourage and highlight student research/scholarship to sharpen awareness of what is continuous with the present, and what lessons and insights can be learned form the past to prepare for the future. Our mission is to (a) foster interdisciplinary and trans-chronological exchanges among new and emerging scholars; (b) to create a safe platform where they can share and discuss research with peers and faculty; (c) to stimulate student networking in related disciplines across State/National/International institutions.

For more information, please visit http://medicine.tamhsc.edu/basic-sciences/him/symposium/index.html.

Call for Applications for 2012 NEH Summer Seminar on France's Haunting Past

2012 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers
“France’s Haunting Past: Debating Twentieth Century History and French National Identity Since 1990”

The NEH Summer Scholar Seminar for College and University Teachers, “France’s Haunting Past: Debating Twentieth-Century History and French National Identity since 1990,” is a five week seminar from June 5 – July 5, 2012. The purpose of the seminar is to explore and discuss four historical controversies that erupted during the 1990s and that shaped, and continue to shape French perspectives on the nation’s troubled twentieth-century past, even today. These controversies focused on World War I and its legacies of violence and political extremism, Vichy and French complicity in the Holocaust, decolonization and the Algerian War, and Communism and its crimes in Europe and around the world. Our seminar will also explore representative recent literary and cinematic treatments of the historical events that provoked these controversies, and visit monuments and museums in and around Paris that recall these traumatic events and commemorate the victims. Our seminar will conclude with a discussion of French efforts to come to terms and reconcile the nation with its troubled past, including especially the passage from the early 1990s up to the present of the so-called “Memorial Laws.” These laws continue to spark sharp debate among historians, politicians, and legal specialists.

The Seminar will take place in Paris from June 5 to July 5, 2012. Meetings will occur twice a week, with one meeting per week occurring at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) and one meeting per week at the Centre International de Séjour de Paris, the recommended residence for participants during the period of the seminar. Summer Scholars will also take field trips at the end of the first week to Historial at Peronne, the national museum of World War I, located a few hours by bus from Paris. They will also visit the Mont Valerien on the outskirts of Paris, as well as other monuments commemorating the French experience during World War II. In the letter from the project director, you will find a detailed description of the seminar, its rationale and guest speakers and activities, as well as a discussion of logistical matters including especially lodging and meals.

For more information and to apply, please visit http://glasscock.tamu.edu/NEHSS2012/index.html

Call for Proposals on Visual Arts of the American West

Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association
February 8-11, 2012 Albuquerque, New Mexico
Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
http://www.swtxpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2011
Conference Theme: Foods and Culture(s) in Global Context

This area seeks papers that explore any aspect of the visual arts in or about the West and its borderlands, including photography, painting, drawing, graphic media, sculpture, mixed media works and installations, video, digital media, architecture, urban planning and design, indigenous art, museum studies, special collections, online collections, public arts, and more. The West is defined very broadly to include everything west of the Mississippi River in the United States.

In keeping with this year’s conference theme, papers on topics related to the visual depiction of foods, or comparative papers discussing Western art in a global context are encouraged.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• topographical landscape illustration produced during early explorations
• classic painters of the West–Catlin, Moran, Remington, Russell
• California Impressionism
• the Taos artists colonies and early painters in New Mexico
• Regionalist painting of the 1930s in the Southwest, California, and Texas
• New Deal art in the West
• painting in the Pacific Northwest; the Northwest School, Asian and Asian-American influence
• printmaking and lithography
• painting in Alaska and Western Canada
• architecture and urban design of indigenous peoples and colonial settlers in the West
• early modernist and postmodern architecture and urbanism in the West
• perceptions and attitudes toward the West / the uniqueness of the West
• Manifest Destiny and the West / politics and art of the West
• depictions of women, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, or other minorities in Western art
• issues of the "other" in Western art
• depictions of frontier life
• women artists, Native American artists, and Mexican-American artists from the West
• depictions of the West by artists from the Eastern U.S. and foreign artists
• ecology and environmentalism in Western art and architecture
• portraiture in the West / depictions of famous Westerners
• early modernists who painted the Western landscape
• modernist, abstract art, and Surrealism in the West
• depictions of the urbanized and suburbanized West
• Earth Art
• public art and memorials in and about the West

Information about our areas of study, graduate student awards, conference travel, lodging, and the organization can be found at http://www.swtxpca.org.

Please submit a 250-word abstract for individual papers or a 500-word abstract for panels at http://conference2012.swtxpac.org.

Feel free to contact Area Chair Victoria Grieve with questions: victoria.grieve@usu.edu.

Call for Nominations for the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) Graduate Fellowship Research Awards

Courtesy post:

Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) Graduate Fellowship Research Awards

Call for Nominations, 2011-2012

The new Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) will award 2 fellowships of $15,000 each for 8 months beginning December 15, 2011, renewable for 9 months during the academic year 2012-2013. The first round of competition will be held this Fall semester and awards will be announced October 15. Nominations in the all departments and colleges participating in the Digital Humanities Certificate Program will be considered by the selection committee, which consists of faculty in Communication, Computer Science, University Libraries, Performance Studies, and English.

The purpose of the awards is to give students the opportunity to participate in major projects underway at the IDHMC, giving them the opportunity to implement practically some of the theoretical, rhetorical, methodological, and philosophical ideas at play in their proposed dissertations.

The successful applicant will be conducting research in the following fields: information visualization, crowd-sourcing archives, interactive digital editions, global media studies, digital rhetorics, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, game studies, serious games, topic modeling, linked data, OCR development, performance studies, or digital art.

Candidates will be asked to participate in workshops held by the IDHMC, 3 to 4 per academic year, and to serve in the Applied Research Consortium as a team member. (An announcement about ARC is attached.) Finally, candidates will effectively run the IDHMC journal using Open Journal Software Systems, with technical support from staff.

Eligibility:
Candidates must be participating in the Digital Humanities Certificate program, and ideally they will have attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, sponsored by (IDHMC), for at least one summer session.

There is no limit on the number of students who may be nominated by each department, and the best candidates will be chosen without consideration of department or college.

Contents of Nomination Packet:
Students must submit the following:

1) Nominee Information: give the name and email address of the nominating professor.

2) A “layman’s summary” of the nature and significance of the dissertation project as currently imagined; this must not exceed three single-spaced pages (see detail below under evaluation criteria) NOTE: If you have already officially completed a proposal, do NOT attach the full proposal that was filed with OGS.

4) Student's curriculum vitae

5) Timeline of graduate study and completion

6) Support letter from the nominating faculty member (see detail below under evaluation criteria)

Submission Deadline:
Thursday, September 15, 2011.

Evaluation Criteria:
Though the dissertation need not be fully conceptualized at this point, the nominee should articulate clearly the importance the research questions currently motivating their graduate study and the likely contribution of the results to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of their home discipline and digital humanities. Additionally, what we are looking for in these summaries is more the ability to formulate sound and viable research questions than to prematurely propose answers.

Letters by nominating faculty should include the name of nominee and details about the contribution to the field(s) that the student’s work is likely to make.

Restrictions:
Successful candidates will be required NOT to work elsewhere in any capacity during tenure of the fellowship. The fellows’ colleges will be asked to waive tuition, and their departments will be asked to defer teaching duties to a later time.

Submit Nomination Packets to:

Professor Laura Mandell
Director, IDHMC
MS 4227
mandell@tamu.edu

Dr. Sarah Misemer Publishes Book on Trains and Nostalgia in the River Plate

Sarah M. Misemer, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies, has recently published her book, Moving Forward, Looking Back: Trains, Literature, and the Arts in the River Plate (Bucknell University Press, 2010). Professor Misemer was an Internal Faculty Fellow in the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research from 2005-2006. The Internal Faculty Fellowship allowed her to “begin working on this project in a serious manner.”

Misemer’s main area of research is contemporary Hispanic theater and performance, with a focus on Argentine and Uruguayan drama.

In Moving Forward, Looking Back: Trains Literature, and the Arts in the River Plate, Professor Misemer examines images of trains and nostalgia in the River Plate. She argues the train in regional literature and film is a modern anachronistic indicator of the national identity of the River Plate. Through text, film, and historical accounts, Misemer traces the importance of the train, marking key moments in Argentine and Uruguayan history from 1854 to the present. She shows that the train is not only an icon of the nineteenth-century’s Naturalist movement, but is a powerful contemporary metaphor used to communicate the cultural values of the region.

The Glasscock Center annually offers four Internal Faculty Fellowships which include a $1,000 research bursary, a one-course teaching release in the spring semester of the fellowship year, and an office in the Glasscock Center for the fellowship year. The next deadline for applications for Internal Faculty Fellowships is 3 March 2011. To learn more about the Glasscock Center Internal Faculty Fellowship or apply online, please visit the website.

Call for Papers for the 2nd Annual Symposium for History Undergraduate Research

Deadline: 1 March 2011

The History Department at Mississippi State University invites undergraduates to submit papers for the second annual SHUR (Symposium for History Undergraduate Research) meeting on 13-14 May 2011 on the Mississippi State University campus in Starkville, Mississippi. The theme of the symposium is "Visions of the Past, Dreams of the Future: Europe and America Since 1650." Papers on this theme or any other historical topic are welcome.

For more information (.pdf)

Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program

Deadline: 16 November 2010.
Stipend: ranges from $25,000 to $115,000; average size is $77,000.
Description: The Fulbright-Hays FRA Fellowship Program provides opportunities to faculty members of institutions of higher education to engage in research abroad in modern foreign language and area studies.

Absolute Priority: For FY 2011, we consider only applications that meet this priority:

A research project that focuses on one or more of the following geographic areas: Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, South Asia, the Near East, Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and the Western Hemisphere (excluding the United States and its territories).

For more information.