THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE

SOCIETY FOR U.S. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY ANNUAL MEETING

NASHVILLE, 2021

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History invites proposals for its 2021 annual conference. This year’s event will be held in person from October 28-30 in Nashville, Tennessee with regular events at the Scarritt Bennett Conference Center in Midtown. Stay tuned for updates.

Nashville is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. While widely known as the capital of country music, the city has a surprising amount to offer beyond its reputation as “Music City, USA.” Billed by nineteenth-century boosters as the “Athens of the South,” today Nashville boasts several institutions of higher education (Fisk, Vanderbilt, Belmont and Tennessee State universities to name a few), and serves as a regional hub for writers and artists. Being a tourist destination, there are countless entertainment options in the city, obviously a great number of live music venues, honky-tonks, and watering holes, but also an up-and-coming, nationally recognized dining scene (from fine-dining to unique, hole-in-the-wall eateries). Should we meet in person, the conference will be held in the midtown area of the city, a bustling area busy with bars and restaurants, close to Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities, and just a short distance from downtown attractions.

CONFERENCE THEME

Our 2021 theme is “The Public and the Private.” We interpret this broadly, and we welcome proposals touching on ideas however expressed: in philosophy, literature, and science, or through politics, race, religion, gender, government, society, and education—covering ALL time periods and events in U.S. history. We are glad to consider submissions that address any aspect, period, or problem from the history of American thought. Our meeting is meant to be a rich and diverse forum for those working in the realm of intellectual history. We encourage scholars from across the disciplines, as well as scholars at all stages of career development, to propose topics, panels, and papers. We strongly encourage panel organizers to create panels reflecting the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and/or institutional affiliation.

Ideas of ”public and private” have been expressed in any number of ways across time. How historical actors understood the relationship between these ideas coincides with thinking about a wide array of concepts, appearing in any number of changing contexts over the entire history of the U.S. The possibilities are nearly endless. A few potentially interconnected and overlapping themes could be:

• Ideas of private or public selfhood, the “mind,” or “consciousness,”
• Formal or institutional differences and relationships in education, business enterprises and so on, vis-à-vis the state or as statecraft,
• Legal regimes and systems demarcating or defining public and private (including slippages or attempts therein),
• Practices and methods in public history,
• Religious belief and practice, including civic religion and/or ideas of church and state,
• Human bodies in different kinds of spaces (who belongs where and why),
• Race, ethnicity and ideas of public, private and/or counterpublic spaces,
• Understandings of gender and sexuality (roles, expectations, where and when),
• Politics and political theory (especially ideas about spaces, spheres, or realms),
• Rhetoric and speech-making (who addresses whom, where and when),
• Ethical considerations about what is or ought to be public or private, not limited to considerations of manners, etiquette or deportment across time

KEYNOTE and EVENTS

On Thursday, join us for a special preconference workshop on teaching intellectual history, an opening reception, and a keynote address from Sarah Igo, Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and, most recently, the author of the widely-acclaimed, award-winning book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America.  Plenary sessions and highlights will include panels on public and private ideas of freedom, varieties of American philosophy and its practice, and contemporary voices in Southern literature and writing. Please note that we meet from Thursday to Saturday, with no Sunday panels.

We look forward to your submissions on the theme of “The Public and the Private.” While single papers will be considered, we strongly prefer submission of traditional panels, roundtables, and guided discussions. See below for details. SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE 16 April 2021 May 28, 2021. All submissions MUST be emailed as a single .PDF or Word file to: [email protected]

TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS

The committee will consider the following types of submissions:

Traditional Panels:  4-6 people

 A traditional panel will include a chairperson/commentator and 4-6 presenters. Traditional Panel submissions must include the following materials:  panel title; a designated chair; names, emails, and institutional affiliations of all participants; a 300 word abstract for each paper; a 500 word abstract for the entire panel; a one-page CV for each participant.

Roundtables:  4-5 people

A roundtable will include four or five discussants. One may serve as the chair/moderator, or the roundtable may include a separate chair/moderator. Roundtable submissions must include the following materials:  a title for the roundtable; names, emails, and institutional affiliations of all participants; a 300 word description of each discussant’s contribution; a 500 word abstract for the entire roundtable; a one-page CV for each participant.

Guided Discussions: 3-4 People

Guided Discussion sessions ask the audience to consider four interrelated scholarly or pedagogical questions.  Presenters each speak for 5-10 minutes, laying out one of the four questions.  Audience members then split into groups for dialogue.  Presenters share their table’s discussion with the room and encourage debate. Guided Discussion submissions must include: session title; names, emails, and institutional affiliations of all leaders; a proposed discussion question and a 300 word abstract from each leader; a 500 word abstract for the session; a one-page CV for each participant.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The committee is eager to ensure a diverse representation of scholars at the conference. We welcome submissions from graduate students, historians, academics working in adjacent fields, scholarly professionals working outside the academy, and independent scholars. Individuals may appear on the program no more than twice. Those appearing twice must do so in two distinct capacities. Participants may, for example, deliver a paper and be a commentator, but may not present two papers. Panels that require a projector or other audio-visual hookup must notify the committee at the time of submission.

All persons appearing on the program must register for the conference. The committee will assume that submission to the conference is an indication that participants will attend the entire conference. We will be unable to accommodate special scheduling requests. Panel organizers will be notified of the committee’s decision in June 2021. All questions may be sent to the conference email: [email protected]

2021 Conference Committee:

Chair: Peter Kuryla
Robin Averbeck
Sara Georgini
Andrew Hartman
Anthony Hutchison
Alex Jacobs
Richard H. King
Max Matherne

2021 Local Arrangements

Jefferson Cowie
Andy Davis
Alex Jacobs
Brenda Jackson-Abernathy
Will Krause