The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Mississippi's Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Critical Race Studies Group invite applications for a symposium on the semiotics of race in public spaces and efforts to memorialize histories of racialized atrocities. The symposium will be held October 23-24, 2014 at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Dr. Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, and Dr. James Young, Distinguished University Professor in English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will deliver keynote lectures at the symposium.
This symposium will bring together scholars in Holocaust Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, History, African American and Africana Studies, Religion, English, Political Science, Law, Southern Studies, and other relevant disciplines to foster scholarly dialogue and collaboration, highlight similarities and interconnections, and promote new research in and among these fields.
The symposium will feature research by students as well as established faculty members. Proposals are welcome from scholars and students, including undergraduates, in all relevant academic disciplines and at all career levels from colleges and universities in Arkansas, Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and western Tennessee. Proposals may address the public debates engendered by monuments and memorials, the museology of atrocity, cultural heritage and tourism, the preservation of landscapes, and the built environments of racialized prejudice, segregation, and exclusion. Successful applicants will be required to submit a copy of their presentation in advance of the conference for circulation among commentators, other panelists, and conference participants.
The deadline for receipt of proposals is June 13, 2014. To propose a paper, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words of your proposed paper, and a curriculum vitae that indicates your current academic affiliation, to Krista Hegburg, Ph.D., Program Officer, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, at [email protected].
Submissions must include the speaker's name, institutional affiliation, current position, contact address, and email.
The symposium organizers will provide lodging for the duration of the conference and a stipend to help defray transportation costs, as well as some meals and local transportation.
This looks mighty interesting -- there's been a lot going on regarding memorials in public spaces of late. And I never tire of talk of the law and morality of building renaming (or monument removal). Perhaps time to talk about the Confederate flags in the Lee Chapel ... or Confederate monuments in front of courthouses? I'm sure Stephen Clowney will have something to say about this.
The illustration of this post is the Confederate monument in front of the Pittsylvania County Courthouse in Chatham, Virginia.
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