CFP: Graduate Student Conference: "Capitalism in Action"

The Third Graduate Student Conference on the History of Capitalism will be held at Harvard University on March 4-6, 2011. "Capitalism in Action" is the theme of the meeting, which will feature Jackson Lears as the keynote speaker. The following call for papers has been issued:

Discussions of American capitalism often uncritically rely on loaded but abstract terms, from “markets” to “capital.” This conference aims to bring together emerging scholars who are interested in interrogating the nitty-gritty details of how capitalist systems have been imagined, constructed, maintained, altered, and challenged by an array of different historical actors in the United States and across the globe. What does “the economy” look like once we shift our focus from intangible market models toward the concrete workings of capitalist society and culture? In this conference, we hope to expand our understanding of American history by analyzing many different moments of “capitalism in action.”

We welcome papers by fellow graduate students from many different fields, such as cultural, social or business histories of capitalism. We encourage papers on a range of diverse topics. Possible paper subjects could include anything from mortgage-backed derivatives, land speculation, and the geography of garbage to corporate personhood, consumer branding, and the political economy of baseball. We welcome the submission of panels as well.

Interested graduate students should submit a C.V. and a 750-word abstract of their paper (description, significance, sources, current status) to histcap@fas.harvard.edu.

The submission deadline is November 1, 2010. Those selected to present will be notified by November 19 and will receive a stipend toward travel costs. 

Previous conference programs can be found at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~polecon/conference/ (2006) and http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histcap/ (2008).