This summer an excellent series on Borderlands scholarship is planned and the organizers are looking for participants! Titled, “Bridging Borders in North America,” Benjamin Johnson at the University of Loyola Chicago is coordinating this National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Faculty. It will be held at Chicago’s Newberry Library and the team of scholars leading this series include Patricia Marroquin Norby, Julianna Barr, Kornel Chang, and Geraldo Cadava.
The seminar is scheduled to occur from July 10th to August 4th, while the deadline for applications is March 1st with notifications made at the end of that month. Also important to note: at least three spaces are reserved for non-tenure-track or adjunct faculty members!
From the seminar description:
The Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies will be hosting a four-week summer 2017 NEH seminar for college and university faculty that explores the history of North America’s border and borderlands. In keeping with the recent work in the field and the collection strengths of the Newberry Library, this seminar will take a broad geographic approach, framing borderlands as distinct places at particular moments in time where no single people or sovereignty imposed its will.
The organizing theme is the process of border-making. We will examine three aspects of this theme: how nation-states claiming exclusive territorial sovereignty re-drew the continent’s map; the intersection and sometimes collision of these efforts with other ways of organizing space and people; and the social and political consequences of the enforcement of national territoriality.
Two questions guide our examinations of these developments: how did diverse peoples challenge national borders, or use or alter them for their own purposes? And, how does consideration of these topics recast our understanding of the intertwined histories of indigenous peoples, Mexico, the United States, and Canada?
For more information, or to apply, follow the link
Borderlands History 