Poitiers 2021
Colonisations, revolutions and reinventions in early America and the Atlantic World, 1492-1848
Maison des Sciences Humaines et Sociales
Bâtiment A5, 1st floor
5 Rue Théodore Lefebvre 89000 Poitiers
Sessions can be viewed at https://uptv.univ-poitiers.fr/program/eeasa-2021/index.html
Register here: http://eeasa.hypotheses.org/files/2021/10/EEASA-2021-Bulletin-Registration-Form.docx and you will receive the links for payment of the 20€ conference fees and online Webex connection
Find guidelines for Webex use here: WEBEX Videoconference guide for speakers – English
Find your way in and around Poitiers here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KkKMWHGTAl08TFh1IWaFAd1orvh2Jqcv/view?usp=sharing
9H-9H30 WELCOME
9h30 – 11h : Morning sessions 1-3
Workshop 1, salle des conferences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Deceptive Appearances and Reinventions in Euro-Indigenous Relations
Chair: Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber (Université de Poitiers)
Sarah Smeed (University of Kent): “Paint, Feathers and Countenance: Facial Representations of Indigenous Figures in the Eighteenth Century”
Lawrence B. A. Hatter (Washington State University): “The Past Isn’t Dead: The Indigenous Present of a Two-Hundred-Year-Old Treaty”
Ben Marsh (University of Kent): “Gifting Patterns: Towards an Economic History of ‘Indian Presents’ in the Eighteenth Century”
Workshop 2, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Adaptation and Exploitation in the Urban Atlantic Diaspora
Chair: Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8)
Céline Ugolini (University of New Orleans): “Forced Immigration in the Construction and Reconstruction of the Crescent City”
Andrew N. Wegmann (Delta State University): “The Monrovian Palimpsest: Voluntary Migration and Forced Identities in Colonial Liberia”
Workshop 3, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
The Enlightenment
Chair: Agnes Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick): “The Archive as an Engine of Social Transformation: The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Self-Image as an Instrument of Racial Liberation”
Luis Ramos (New York University): “Revolutionary Republicanism as Regeneration: Abolitionist Debates and Catholic Enlightenment Thought in Europe and the Americas”
Angel-Luke O’Donnell (King’s College London): “How Print Technology Revolutionised Governance in the 1776 Pennsylvania State Constitution”
11-11H15 BREAK
11h15- 12h45 Morning sessions 4-6
Workshop 4, salle des conferences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Revolutions from without: adapting, transforming and reinventing Jacksonian democracy from the margins (1815-1848)
Chair : Laurel Shire (Western University, Ontario)
Auréliane Narvaez (Université Paris Nanterre): “Rethinking secular republicanism and reinventing womanhood: Women’s rights, proto-feminist discourse and the vindication of freethought in the early American Republic”
Patrice Dallaire (Université Laval): “Native citizenship and civil rights across the borderlands between the Canadas and the United States: 1820-1840: a tale of two imperial approaches”
Augustin Habran (Université d’Orléans): “Reinventing Indianness in the Deep South (1815-1848) Southeastern Indians as participants in the development of the ‘vast Southern Empire’”?
Workshop 5, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Atlantic Print Cultures and the Revolutions (1776-1848)
Chairs: Anne-Claire Faucquez (Université Paris 8)
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Université Paris 8): “Debating Colonisation in an Era of Revolutions. French Académies Contests and Publications (1770s-1790s)”
Carine Lounissi (Université de Rouen): “Reconsidering French “Americanists” of the 1770s and 1780s from an Atlantic perspective: anticolonialist and antislavery views”
Yohanna Alimi-Levy (Reichman University – IDC Herzliya): “Americans in Paris and Eyewitness Accounts of the French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848”
Workshop 6, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
Conflict and resistance in Spanish America
Chair: Ludivine Thouverez (Université de Poitiers)
Miguel Betti (Université de Genève): “’Indios mentirosos’, la fiction comme stratégie indigène de résistance”
Florian Wieser (University of Munich): “Caudillos y cabezas. Political and Organisational Forms of Spanish American Maroons, 1550–1700”
Andrey Issérov (HSE University, Moscow): “Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) and the Early Spanish American Independence movements”
LUNCH 12H45-14H45, RESTAURANT RABELAIS
14h45-16h15 Afternoon sessions 7-9
Workshop 7, salle de conferences (MSHS, 1st floor)
People, citizenship, and nationhood in the US Declaration of Independence
Chair: Florence Petroff (Université de La Rochelle)
Holly Brewer (University of Maryland): “Sacred rights of life and liberty: The Declaration of Independence & British slavery”
Steven Sarson (Université Jean Moulin): “‘The circumstances of our emigration and settlement here’: Thomas Jefferson’s ‘civil History’ and the invention of peoples in the Declaration of Independence”
Donald Johnson (North Dakota State University): “Independence before the Declaration: Insurgent Regimes at the Local Level in Revolutionary North America, 1775-1776”
Workshop 8, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Reconsidering the mid-Atlantic colonies and states : colonization and resistance
Chairs : Anne-Claire Faucquez (Université Paris 8), Linda Garbaye (Université Caen Normandie)
Agnès Trouillet (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3): “From impermanent lines to grid design, re-inventing territory and sovereignty in 17th-century Delaware Valley”
Michael Goode (Utah Valley University): “Warring for Peace: Native Revivalism and the Mid-Atlantic Crisis of 1763”
Andrea Mosterman (University of New Orleans): “Geographies of Resistance: Slavery in Early New York”
Workshop 9, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
Adapting to the geopolitics of Atlantic competition
Chair: Andrea Kökény (University of Szeged)
Hannah Francis (Rice University): “From La Concorde to Queen Anne’s Revenge: The Repurposing of a French Slave-Trading Vessel into an English Pirate Ship in the 18th century Atlantic World”
Thomas Mareite (Universität Duisburg-Essen): “’An unlawful and contemptible adventure’: the Ducoudray-Holstein expedition against Puerto Rico and US foreign policy in the early 1820s Caribbean”
Sean Harvey (Seton Hall University): “Friends Landing: Albert Gallatin, Jean Savary de Valcoulon, and Francophone Speculation before the Société Gallo-Américaine”
16H15- 16H30 BREAK
16h30-18h30 salle des conférences, open to the public
Roundtable: Freedom in Degrees: Black Women Claiming Freedom in the Americas
Chair: Terri L. Snyder (California State University)
Moderator: Erica L. Ball (Occidental University)
Michelle McKinley (University of Oregon): “Juana Godinez”
Honor Sachs (University of Colorado): “Judith and Hannah”
Sophie White (University of Notre Dame): “Marion”
Tamara J. Walker (University of Toronto): “The Cimmarona’s Cause: Claiming Freedoms in Eighteenth-Century Lima”
Alice Lucille Baumgartner (University of Southern California): “Minerva”
Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado (University of São Paulo): “Maria Firmina dos Reis: A pioneering Afro-Brazilian Writer Fighting Against Slavery”
9H-9H30 WELCOME
9h30- 11h Morning sessions 10-13
Workshop 10, salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
The Future of the Humanities in Europe
Chair: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université de Paris)
Rachel Herrmann (University of Cardiff)
Hannah Spahn (University of Potsdam)
Maureen Attali (Université de Friebourg)
Research in the humanities in Europe is, and has been, undergoing major changes. Newly-hired academics are urged to develop the employability of their students, which seems to be going against the idea of a liberal education. Research is narrowly connected to European funding and scholars must spend as much time preparing projects and following
European guidelines as they do working on their own research. Some wonder whether research fields which do not fall within European research objectives have a future. More generally, what is the future of the humanities at the moment in Europe? Three scholars, from Wales, Germany and Switzerland will testify to their own experience, and build from it to sketch their hopes for the future of the humanities.
Workshop 11, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
CANCELLED
Workshop 12, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
Writing slave revolt and revolution in the Atlantic
Chair: Allan Potofsky (Université de Paris)
Michael Boyden (Radboud University Nijmegen): “Constantin Volney and the Origins of Atmospheric Politics in the Atlantic World”
Anja Bandau (University of Hanover) : “Racial Politics on state: French Popular Theater on slave revolution”
11h30- 12H30 Roundtable, salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Roundtable: Voices of the enslaved: slave testimonies reconsidered
Chair: Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8)
Trevor Burnard (University of Hull)
Jean Hébrard (EHESS)
Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13)
Michaël Roy (Université Paris Nanterre)
12H30-14H30 : LUNCH, RESTAURANT RABELAIS
14h30- 16h Afternoon sessions 13-15
Workshop 13, salle des conferences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Publishing research in English in Europe and the United States
Chair: Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Nadine Zimmerli, editor of History and Social Sciences at the University of Virginia Press (USA)
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, co-editor of the Early American History Series at Brill (the Netherlands)
Iris de Rode (Science-Po, Paris 8): “Publishing French (PhD) research in the United States”
Workshop 14, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Inventing and Re-inventing empire: The Caribbean frontiers of the Atlantic economy and European imperial rule in the early modern globalization
Chair: Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8)
Andy Cabot (University de Paris): “Testing the Limits of Empire: Debating the Political Economy of Slavery and the Plantation Economy during the triumphant phase of British Abolition (1802-1815)”
Flavio Eichmann (University of Bern): “The Revolutionary Wars in the Lesser Antilles, 1795–1797: Local Resistance, Abolitionism and French War Aims”
Derek O’Leary (University of South Carolina): “Rewriting Atlantic History: Carl Christian Rafn, Antiquitates Americanae, and the theory of Norse discovery in Antebellum U.S”
Workshop 15, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
Images and representations of colonization
Chair: Steve Sarson (Université Jean Moulin)
Susan Libby (Rollins College): “Reinvention and (Re)visualization of French Caribbean Plantation Labor, c. 1670-1770”
Tobias Locker (Université Grenoble Alpes): “A darker side of the Rococo: Decorative arts, materiality and colonial exploitation”
Jason Varner (Anderson University): “The Transformation of Trauma: on Liminality and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New England”
16H-16H15 PAUSE / BREAK
16h15-17h45 Afternoon sessions 16-18
Workshop 16, salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Negotiating autonomy in colonial settings
Chair: Thomas Mareite (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
Justin Roberts (Dalhousie University) : “‘[L]et the slaves have their pay’: Wages, Contracts, and Consent in the Seventeenth-Century British Atlantic”
Sarah Penry (Fordham University): “From Resettlement to Revolution”
Andrea Kökény (University of Szeged): “Immigration, citizenship and the Texas Revolution”
Workshop 17, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Negotiating power and opportunity in the 18th-century Atlantic
Chair: Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Mark Meuwese (University of Winnipeg): “”My Good friends the Caribs”: A colonial administrator and his indigenous allies in the plantation colonies of eighteenth-century Dutch Guyana”
Jay Miller (University of Notre-Dame): “Quaker Literary Agrarianism and the Reinvention of the Moral Economy”
Sheryllyne Haggerty (Wilberforce Institute): “Private Revolutions and Reinventions. Becoming ‘Free’ and the Perils of Freedom in Jamaica, 1756”
Workshop 18, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
Illicit Actors and Animal Histories: Colonization and Re-Invention in the Atlantic World
Chair: Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber (Université de Poitiers)
Charlotte Carrington-Farmer (Roger Williams University): “Mules are ‘the most lucrative animals they can generate’: Mule Breeding for Export in Eighteenth-Century New England”
Lin Fisher (Brown University): “Turtle Shells and Indian Slaves: Animals, Empire, and Slave Trading on the Mosquito Shore, 1680-1780”
John Donoghue (Loyola University Chicago): “‘To Force Open a Free Trade in Slaves’: Early Political Economy and the Labor History of Buccaneering”
18h00-19h00: conférence plénière-Salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Pr. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université de Paris) : “Revisiting ‘An Enquiry concerning the Literature of Negroe’ by the Abbé Grégoire : Anthologies, Black Intellectuals and Late Enlightenments in the Age of Revolutions”
19h00: allocutions
Virginie Laval, présidente de l’Université de Poitiers
Hélène Yèche, doyenne de l’UFR Lettres & Langues
Elvire Diaz, directrice du laboratoire MIMMOC
20H30 Conference dinner: Restaurant Bis, 4 rue Saint Nicolas, 86000 Poitiers
9H-9H30 ACCUEIL – WELCOME
9H30-11h Morning sessions 19-20
Workshop 19, salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Roundtable: Reinventing the market, inventing capitalism in an age of Revolutions
Chair: Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Pierre Gervais (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3): “Merchant Capitalism or merchant society? Market structures and the early industrial revolution”
Evelyne Payen-Variéras (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3): “Manufacturers, internal improvements and the business culture of the Jacksonian era”
Laurine Manac’h (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne): “Invoking equity before commercial courts: a justification for new forms of business partnerships? (Catalonia, province of Buenos Aires, 1778-1840)”
Allan Potofsky (Université de Paris): “Paris as an eighteenth-century “Global City?” The rise of the engineered city as a contested site”
Workshop 20, salle Gargantua (MSHS, 1st floor)
Reconfigurations of the revolutionary body politic
Chair: Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Université Paris 8)
Csaba Levai (University of Debrecen): “The Role of Violence in the Texts of the US and Hungarian Declarations of independence”
Fanny Malègue (EHESS/INED): “Censuses, societies and revolutions in the French Caribbean (1763-1804)”
Niccolo Valmori (King’s College, London): “Political experience and business ventures: revolutionary culture and economic opportunities across the Atlantic, 1783-1794”
11h-12h : conférence plénière/plenary session, salle des conférences, MSHS, 1stfloor
Pr. Adam Rothman (Georgetown University): “Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation at Georgetown”
12h-14h lunch and EEASA General Meeting, restaurant Rabelais
14h-15h30 Afternoon sessions 21-22
Workshop 21, salle des conférences (MSHS, 1st floor)
Contraband, resistance and negotiations in New Spain slave societies, XVI-XVII centuries
Chair: Hélène Roy (Université de Poitiers)
Danielle Terrazas Williams (University of Leeds): “Conditions of freedom: Marronage and Negotiating Colonial Power”
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva (University of Rochester): “Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo: Marriage, Flight, and Asylum, 1680-1689”
Citlalli Dominguez (Sorbonne Université): “La contrebande d’esclaves entre les ports de Santo Domingo et Veracruz: Race et conflits interethniques sur les routes de commerce illégal d’esclaves, 1610-1630”
Workshop 22, salle Mélusine (MSHS, 1st floor)
CANCELLED
15H30-16H PAUSE / BREAK
16h-17h30 Afternoon sessions 23-24
Workshop 23, salle des conferences, (MSHS, 1st floor)
Revolutionary archives in transatlantic perspectives
Chair: Carine Lounissi (Université de Rouen)
Pierre-François Peirano (Université de Toulon): “References to European regimes in The Federalist Papers, Nos. VI-IX. A reinvention or a call for a political ‘revolution’?”
Jennifer Steenshorne (independent scholar): “The World of Money and the Negotiation of the Jay Treaty, 1794-1795”
Florence Petroff (Université La Rochelle): “Wodrow and Kenrick’s American
Revolution: friendship and the debate that divided the Atlantic World”
Workshop 24, salle Gargantua
Reacting to the Past: Anne Hutchinson’s Trial
Game master: Charlotte Carrington-Farmer
Whoever wants to play!
17h30 Conclusions
CFP Poitiers 2021
Colonisations, revolutions, and reinventions in early America and the Atlantic World 1492-1848
Poitiers, December 8-10, 2021
The 8th Biannual conference of the European Early American Studies Association, originally scheduled for December 2020 will be held at the University of Poitiers, France, December 8-10, 2021. The conference will focus on the related themes of “Colonisations, revolutions, and reinventions in early America and the Atlantic World 1492-1848.”
For the past twenty years, the study of Early America and the Atlantic has reinvigorated the fields of imperial and colonial topics by focusing on the circulations of goods and people. Much current research on early America and the Atlantic world examines concepts such as « empires », « commerce », « exchange », « trade. » At the same time, the political history of the revolutionary Atlantic is often overlooked as the approach of an older historiography. A number of historians criticize the very concept of Atlantic history by focusing instead on « global » and « connected histories ». Following this trend, specialists of North America have embraced new concepts and notions to study the continent, such as « settler colonialism » and « vast early America ».
This call for papers invites established scholars, post-doctoral students and graduate students to re-examine the fundamental concept of Atlantic history in light of current research on the themes of colonisations, revolutions, and reinventions, from 1492 to 1848. It is also an opportunity to examine the history of transformations in early America and, broadly, the early modern world, by taking fuller account of scholarship on the politics of primitive globalisation. We will focus on the empires that organised European settlements in disrupting and dislocating native peoples, prompting indigenous cultures to re-invent themselves; but we will also be attentive to the processes that led to the formation of new Euro-American societies in the Americas, often shaped by the enslavement of Africans and other forms of unfree labor. In the North-American colonies, the West Indies, India, Latin America, and Africa, entire peoples and their lands were reinvented by trading companies, individual administrators, theoreticians and executors of empires, as well as by those rare voices, many of who were abolitionists, who developed a critical approach to European expansion abroad.
The social and political revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Americas and the Atlantic world led to the emergence of republican nations and, eventually, to modern (often exclusionary) democracies. These offer a second major moment of reinvention through national, tribal, racial, and gender-based conflicts, as well as new forms of identities, forged through war and peace. In recent years, beyond a major historiographical focus on the Haitian Revolution, the term revolution has also come to refer to the second revolution of slavery and the revolution of antislavery in the Americas and the Atlantic world. Its meaning can also be extended to other insurrections and rebellions, as well as to the revolution of rights as embodied in the women’s rights movement in the United States, and to the upheavals culminating with the European revolutions of 1848 and their impact in the Atlantic world, most notably, leading to the French abolition of slavery in the colonies. Drawing on the theme of the 7th Biannual EEASA Conference in London in December 2018, on the making and unmaking of identities in the Atlantic world, the notions of colonisation, revolutions, and reinventions also invite participants to examine the individual stories of those who transformed their lives through imperial service, social mobility, flight, immigration, as well as by their commercial interactions and newly-crafted opportunities to serve as cultural intermediaries.
The Congress may include panels on the changes in Atlantic World societies that resulted from cultural contact and conflict; the various manifestations of clashing visions of European empires and Native societies; resistance to empire and its many forms of oppression as well as and the rise of representative government and the universal validity of fundamental principles. In sum, we welcome all papers that speak to the themes of colonisations, revolutions, and reinventions.
We encourage proposals from emerging and established scholars in all disciplines for traditional conference panels (three 20-minute papers with chair and Q&A), round tables, and other formats. Sessions are 90 minutes. We ask that panel proposals not be composed of participants from a single country or institution. The programme committee reserves the right to re-organize the composition of panels to meet this requirement. We also welcome individual proposals. Papers are posted on our website prior to the conference.
We wish to focus on the research of doctoral students by devoting a half-day to discussion of their papers. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies has generously agreed to offer support for the travel expenses of a limited number of graduate student presenters from North America.
Please note that all program participants will be required to register for the conference. To facilitate participation by younger scholars we offer a reduced conference fee to graduate students and can provide free accommodation to presenters who are graduate students or who are within two years of the award of their PhD and not in full-time academic employment.