Europe’s Entanglements

Location: Monash University (Melbourne), 11 – 14 July 2017
Contact: arts-AAEH2017@monash.edu
Further information here
Conference flyer here

First deadline for paper and panel proposals: 30 September 2016

Monash would like to invite you to the XXVth Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, to be held at Monash University’s Caulfield Campus in Melbourne.

As Europe commemorates the centenary of the Great War, current conflicts nearby spark the largest influx of refugees since the Second World War. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom considers (once again) leaving the European Union, and economic downturn and the re-emergence of far right politics throughout the EU threatens its unravelling at the seams. What intervention can historians make to understand these developments? This conference invites a reconsideration of Europe’s entanglements – with the past, with its neighbours in the world, and within itself ­­­– and how these have been forged as well as unmade through the commemoration and forgetting of its history, the movement of people across its borders, the clash of political and economic interests, the encounters between different ideologies and worldviews.

We invite established scholars as well as postgraduates to discuss Europe’s entanglements (and disentanglements), their historical roots, contours and contemporary resonance, from the eighteenth century to the present, on the topics below. Individual papers are welcome, and we also encourage panel proposals.

The formation and dissolution of borders, blocs and empires in Europe;
The foundation, expansion and maintenance of overseas colonies and empires, their dissolution and legacies;
Efforts at national and regional unification, as well as the resistance of ethnic and religious groups against integration within nation-states and across the continent;
The movement of people as migrants, refugees, expatriates;
Social and cultural networks and movements – monarchies and aristocracies, entrepreneurs and business people, journalists, scholars, public intellectuals, artists, entertainers and writers;
Europe’s efforts, attempts and failures at integrating within a global community, through legal, economic and political institutions;
Entanglements with the past through commemorative practices and communities, representational practices, custodial institutions and museums, and through traces and monuments in the landscape (natural as well as urban);
The historical trajectory of environmental entanglements, between humans, animals and their habitats, urban and rural

Confirmed keynote speakers
Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney, Professor of International History, ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Jennifer Sessions, University of Iowa, Associate Professor of History
Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago, Professor of History, Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand