CFP: “Southern Capitalisms” Graduate Student Conference

“Southern Capitalisms” is a graduate student conference to be held on March 4-5, 2016, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. According to the call for papers,

Among the contributions made by this new generation of scholars is a re-conceptualization of the spatial trajectory of capitalism. Rather than an economic system emanating outward from the industrialized North, capitalism, as scholars like Edward Baptist and Caitlin Rosenthal have shown, arguably has its roots in the accounting practices and slave labor of the plantation in the American South and the Caribbean. If these works have helped to create space for thinking about capitalism in the South, recent literature on the Sunbelt has raised new questions about the relationship between capitalism and place. Rather than a simple product of geography, many new works have shown how the “South” itself has been constructed and reconstructed with the help of capital.

For a full discussion of the aims of the conference, please see the complete call for papers.

Graduate students interested in applying should submit a 500-word abstract and a C.V. to the conference committee at southerncapitalisms@gmail.com. The submission deadline is December 24, 2015.

The keynote speaker for the conference will be Bethany Moreton of Dartmouth College, author of To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009). Conference organizers are Paige Glotzer and Jessica Levy, both Ph.D. candidates in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.

For additional information, please consult the conference website.