The Exchange

The 2018 Asia Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be hosted by the School of History at the University of Tasmania in Hobart on February 15-17, 2018. The conference, under the topic "History from Below: Ordinary Lives in Historical and Comparative Perspective," will "bring together researchers in business, economic, and social history and feature new and exciting research from a variety of perspectives covering historical developments in Australia and Asia, as well as in other regions of the world." The preliminary program for the meeting has now been posted on the conference website. The site also provides a link to abstracts and full texts of papers as available.     The annual Noel Butlin Lecture will be given by Sumner La Croix, with the title "Understanding the Unwritten Past: Hawaii's Economic History, 1260-1778."     For additional information, including registration and accommodation details, please consult the m

A listing of short items of interest from around the web: On OSU's "Origins" blog, Bill Childs writes about "How Public and Private Enterprise Have Built American Infrastructure" The first winner of the Kobrak Fellowship , named in honour of the late Professor Christopher Kobrak, co-founder of the CBHA/ACHA and past Wilson/Currie Chair in Canadian Business and Financial History at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, is Stefano Tijerina of the University of Maine. He will use the award to study Canadian financial institutions in Latin America. In other prize news, the 2017 Wadsworth Prize , presented by the Business Archives Council, has been awarded to Hermione Giffard for her book, Making Jet Engines in World War II: Britain, Germany, and the United States (University of Chicago Press). We are saddened to report that well-known environmental and political historian  Samuel P. Hays  (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus ) died on Nov

The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina has announced that it will award up to eight short-term summer research fellowships of $1,250 to support intensive and innovative research use of its collections. (For applicants whose permanent residence is within the Research Triangle region, the award will be adjusted to $625 to support the expenses of commuting rather than travel and housing.) According to the announcemen, a successful candidate for the 2018 Summer Visiting Research Fellowships will: Submit a research plan that draws deeply and substantively on the collections of the Wilson Special Collections Library. The Library’s collections include the North Carolina Collection, the Rare Book Collection, the Southern Folklife Collection, the Southern Historical Collection, and University Archives.  Commit to a research residency of at least ten days at the Louis Round Wilson Library that will occur between May 1 and September 1, 2018. 

The next Economic History Society (EHS) annual conference will take place at Keele University in Staffordshire, UK, on April 6-8, 2018. The preliminary program has now been posted. The program features a poster session, and Friday sessions are devoted to papers by new researchers. The conference will conclude with the Tawney Lecture, presented this year by Professor Şevket Pamuk of Bogaziçi (Bosphorus) University on "Uneven Centuries: Economic Development in Turkey since 1820." Presenters are expected to make available an electronic copy of their paper, which will be linked from the program.     Registration is open, and will continue online until March 23, 2018 . For more information, including information about off-line registration, please consult the EHS Conference website .

On February 15-16, 2018, Henley Business School at the University of Reading will host a workshop on "Fashion and the Supply Chain."  According to the website, "This two-day workshop explores themes in the business history of fashion and its broader supply chain. The aim is to share current research linked to fashion (broadly defined). The papers presented include perspectives from business, culture, retail, curators, archives, design, production and consumption."     The program includes papers by, among others, Regina Blaszczyk, Ben Wubs, Véronique Pouillard, and Vicki Barnes and Lucy Newton.     Questions should be directed to Daria Radwan by email at d.m.radwan@henley.ac.uk or by phone on +44 (0) 118 378 6597.

The Early American Republic Seminar at CUNY invites proposals for papers focusing on the years ranging between the colonial period and the end of the Civil War for its fourth annual graduate student conference. The theme for the conference, which will be held on May 11, 2018, at the CUNY Graduate Center, is "Common Ground: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early America."     Topics include but are not limited to gender, material culture, religion, the Atlantic World, slavery, Native American history, politics, law, print culture, biography, immigration, urbanism, capitalism, and environmental history. Proposals that consider these topics from alternative disciplinary perspectives, including literature, political science, legal studies, urban studies, women and gender studies, and the digital humanities, are particularly welcome. For more details, please see the full call for papers .     The extended deadline for submissions is February 1, 2018 . Please send an abstract (

Registration for the 2018 BHC Annual Meeting , to be held in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 5-7, is now open. Everyone attending the conference is required to register. This includes all presenters, chairs, and discussants, as well as audience members without a place on this year's program. The registration fee covers costs associated with holding the conference, including room rental charges, coffee breaks, receptions, and audio-visual equipment.     Those who are not BHC members are encouraged to join the BHC to take advantage of the discounted rates and to obtain an annual subscription to the BHC journal, Enterprise and Society . Attendees can join or renew by going to http://www.thebhc.org/jointhebhc . For those who are already BHC members, membership renewal notices are sent on a quarterly basis; if you have not yet received such a notice, your membership is current.     The deadline for on-line registration is March 25, 2018 . Please be aware that onsite registration will

The American History Workshop at the University of Michigan invites papers for its 2018 Graduate Student Conference on May 4-5, with the theme  "Constructing America: Identities, Infrastructure and Institutions." The call for papers states: The world has constructed America, just as America has shaped itself--as a real and imagined place, constructed and reconstructed by transnational forces and figures. America materializes through global alliance and opposition, immigration, urban development and rural economies, organization, consumption, and rebellion. In whose image is America constructed? Where are its borders? Papers might investigate the construction of America in any number of ways: as an "imagined community"--a product of historical memory intertwined with assumptions about race, class, sex, faith, ethnicity and gender; as an object of knowledge in the social and natural sciences, the arts and humanities; as a material entity made of machines, buildin

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) has introduced a blog on its website called "Technology Stories." Edited by Suzanne Moon and Gerardo Con Diaz, the site aims to engage readers with the usable past—stories that help us make sense of contemporary technological challenges and aspirations. Technology’s Stories is a place for thinkers to share new insights on the integration of technology with our environments and our social, political, and economic lives. Published several times a year, "issues" feature three to four essays each; after three years, the site now contains many "Technology Stories," ranging from John K. Brown's 2014 discussion of the Eads Bridge and the analytic use of the "constrained counterfactual " to Marie Hicks's recent post on ingrained gender discrimination in the computing industry, "A Feature, Not a Bug."     Readers can find the full index to the site's essays here .

The University of Illinois Foundation announces the 2018-2019 John E. Rovensky Fellowships . Two $9,500 fellowships will be awarded for doctoral students writing their dissertations in U.S. business or economic history. The fellowships are available largely through the generosity of the late John E. Rovensky and are administered by the University of Illinois Foundation.      Applicants must be working toward a Ph.D. degree with U.S. business or economic history as the area of major interest. Fellowship recipients must be enrolled in a doctoral program at an accredited college or university in the United States. Preference will be given to applicants who are preparing for a career in teaching and research and who will have completed all graduate course work prior to the fall of 2018. Awards are non-renewable but may be held concurrently with fellowships from other sources.       To apply: please fill out the form at http://thebhc.org/john-e-rovensky-fellowship-application . Please n

The 13th Sound Economic History Workshop will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 6-7, 2018, hosted by the Unit for Economic History, University of Gothenburg. The keynote speaker will be Deborah Oxley of the University of Oxford. The local organizer is Svante Prado; organizers for Sound are Jacob Weisdorf, Kerstin Enflo, and Svante Prado. According to the organizers: The main aim of the Sound Workshop is to gather young researchers in a friendly and non-imposing environment where they can present their research and receive constructive criticism from their peers and leading economic historians. Another aim of the workshop is to demonstrate the breadth of (especially Nordic) Economic History as an academic discipline, so there is no theme to the workshop, and submissions are encouraged from any sub-field of economic and social history. Nordic scholars and scholars based in a Nordic country will be given preference, but others are warmly welcome to apply.  The workshop organ

Proposals are invited for a two-day conference on "Entangled Histories: Making New Connections in Early America, c. 1750–1850," which will be held at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on April 5-7, 2018. The organizers are looking for scholars who challenge traditional narratives of imperial or national history by applying a wider lens to Anglo-America. The goal is to foster a wide-ranging debate on relations across borders – geographic, political, legal, social, and ethnic – in the Americas. . . . We seek papers that link Anglo-America to the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, or French empires. Alternatively, proposals might situate the British Atlantic in relation to East Asia or the Gulf Coast borderlands. We also welcome studies about historical figures on the legal, social, or geographic margins of British America – such as maroons, refugees, smugglers, missionaries, indigenous peoples, etc. The program for this conference will highlight the value of entangled h

The Institute of Historical Research (IHR), with the support of the Economic History Society, will hold a one-day conference on June 25, 2018, on "Negotiating Networks: New Research on Networks in Social and Economic History." The keynote speaker will be Sheryllynne Haggerty of the University of Nottingham. According to the call for papers: The conference will bring together scholars working on networks in social and economic history, broadly defined, with a particular focus on those using Social Network Analysis (SNA) in their research. SNA has become increasingly popular as one of the key digital tools for historical research in recent years. We would like to encourage conversation and exchange of ideas between researchers who use this methodology.     We welcome proposals for papers from postgraduate, early career and established scholars working in this area. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers dealing with the challenges and rewards of examini