AskHistorians Digital Conference: Registration for the keynote address is LIVE!

by crrpit

Can you believe it’s only 8 MORE SLEEPS TILL THE FIRST-EVER ASKHISTORIANS CONFERENCE???

Ahem.

As many of you know, next week AskHistorians will be hosting the first scholarly conference ever held on Reddit. We are, as keen-eyed readers may have picked up on above, slightly excited about it. Preparations are already well underway – the panels are being recorded, the networking events planned and the exclusive conference swag is all ordered.

Today, we’re very pleased to announce the full schedule of events for the conference. Starting with a fantastic panel on Indigenous histories and finishing with a bang with nation building and conflict, we've got a full programme of panels and live events across the three days of the conference. Each panel video will be accompanied by a live AMA here on r/AskHistorians, so be prepared for a whole new wave of historical content hitting the sub each day!

We're also delighted to now be able to invite our readers to register for our live keynote address by Professor Alex Wellerstein – or, as AskHistorians regulars might know them, u/restricteddata. The keynote itself will take place on 15 September at 1:00 pm (ET).

Prof. Wellerstein is a leading historian of nuclear weapons and technology, and has shared this expertise across many scholarly books and articles, as well as venues like The New Yorker, Washington Post and, most recently, Netflix. We think it’s incredibly fitting that our first keynote will be delivered by a scholar who not only has such an outstanding track record as a public historian, but is also a longstanding and valued member of the community.

The keynote itself will be about what U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson called the “new relationship of man to the universe". Stimson was reflecting on what the invention of the atomic bomb meant, several months before its use at Hiroshima. But what would that relationship look like, and who would define it? Over the course of the keynote address, Prof. Wellerstein will discuss the emotions, calculations, actions, and reactions that unfolded as countries imagined what a world in an atomic age would look like, vacillating between apocalyptic fears and utopian dreams. Whatever nearly everybody agreed on was that the world would never be the same — but nobody was sure about what "the new world" they were entering would actually be like.

Want to know more? REGISTER NOW to reserve your place!

Please note that while space for the live talk is limited, the talk will be recorded and made freely available afterwards. Can’t make this time, but still want to join in for a live event? You can also register for our conference networking sessions held across each day of the conference!

As always, feel free to leave comments, questions and suggestions in the comments, and we look forward to seeing you all for the conference next week!

crrpit

Schedule of Events for AskHistorian Digital Conference 2020: 'Business as Unusual'

Tuesday, September 15

Panel 1 (10:00 am, ET): Indigenous Histories Disrupting Yours: Sovereignties, Histories and Power

  • Ali Al-Jamri: "Countering Cultural Erasure Through Community History: The Case of the Baharna"
  • Wayne Buchanan: "Rupture and Resilience: The Muckleshoot People"
  • Kyle Pittman: "Inherent Sovereignty: Disruptions to Indigenous Nationhood"
  • Miguel Rivas Fernandez: "Remembering Malinche: The Evolving Role of Language in the Events and Memory of the Early Spanish Conquest"

Keynote Address (1:00 pm, ET): The Atomic Bomb and Visions of the New Post War Order

Panel 2 (4:00 pm, ET): How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse: Imagining Mass Destruction

  • Joshua R. Porter: "Samantha Smith: Citizen Diplomacy in the Cold War"
  • Kenneth Reilly: "More Powerful Than The Atomic Bomb: Dinosaur Extinction and Nuclear Warfare"
  • Malcolm Craig: "The Nuclear 1979: Revolution, Islam, and 'The Bomb'"
  • Victoria Cooper​: "The End of the World As We Know It: Social Disruption and Catastrophe in Medieval Literature and Modern Analogues"
  • Corranne Wheeler: "'The great peril of their bodies and souls’: Failure, Response, and History in the Würzburg Annals"

Networking Day 1 (8:00 am and 8:00 pm, ET): Sessions on Academia

Wednesday, September 16

Panel 3 (10:00 am, ET): Pick Your Poison: Climate, Disease and Human Disaster from the Middle Ages to Today

  • Christopher S. Rose: "The Importance of Epidemics for Social History"
  • Daria Berman: "The Anti-Jewish Riots in the First Castilian Civil War"
  • Chris Day: "Computing Cholera: Topic Modelling Catalogue Entries for the Correspondence of the General Board of Health (1848-1871)"
  • Adam Bierstedt: "Galt margr óverðr þessa ófriðar: The Samalas Eruption, Unusual Weather, and the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth"

Panel 4 (2:00 pm, ET): Sinners, Saints and Spies: Historical Women and Cultural Propaganda

  • Cait Stevenson: "Elisabeth Achler’s Dirty Laundry, or, the Medieval Saint and Her Suffering Sisters"
  • Joshua Anthony: "Through Chimalmantzin’s Eyes: A Family History of the Conquest of Mexico"
  • Ronald James:"Sex, Murder, and the Myth of the Wild West: How a Soiled Dove Earned a Heart of Gold"
  • Lois Leveen: "When Black History Becomes Multicultural Clickbait, Manure Happens: Uncovering Civil War Spy 'Mary Bowser'"

Panel 5 (4:00 pm, ET): Power and Projections of Trauma in the 19th and 20th Centuries

  • Adam Franti: "His Gallant Soul Had Fled: Death, Remembrance, and Race in Early America"
  • Katie Truax: "Dealing with Catastrophe: Medical Men and the Diseases of Women in 19th century Britain"
  • Stephanie Montgomery: "'A Den of Monsters': Women, Crime, and the City in 1930s China"
  • Melissa Brzycki: "Young People in the Chinese Great Leap Forward and its Aftermath, 1958-1962"

Networking Day 2 (8:00 am and 8:00 pm, ET): Sessions on Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

Thursday, September 17

Panel 6 (10:00 am, ET): Being the Change that Others Don't Want: Asserting and Resisting Racial Hierarchies in Midcentury North America

  • Tyler Wentzell: "Fascists in Hogtown: Toronto’s Reaction and Resistance to the National Unity Party during the Summer of 1938"
  • Ryan Abt: "Everyone I Don’t Like is Hitler: The Appropriation of Anti-Nazi Axioms by American Fascists, 1944-1949"
  • Megan Hunt: "Bringing the Millennium to Birmingham: To Kill a Mockingbird and Racial Protest in Alabama’s Magic City"

Panel 7 (4:00 pm, ET): In Whose Trenches? Violence, Voice, and the Experience of War from Below

  • Patrick O'Brien: "'Gilded Misery': Reconsidering Emotions and Community during the American Revolution"
  • Hediye Özkan: "The Rupture Between the South and North: The Diary of Nancy Emerson and War Discourse"
  • Edwin Tran: "Crossing Sect and Race: Civilian Ingenuity during the Lebanese Civil War"

Panel 8 (6:00 pm, ET): Building the Nation, Dreaming of War: Nation-Building through Mythologies of Conflict

  • Liam Connell: "'Building a nation, dreaming its destruction': Australian Federation and Fantasies of War"
  • Andrei Oprea: "War: The Defining Catastrophe of 17th Century Moldavia"
  • Buğra Can Bayçifçi: "The Balkan Wars from an Ottoman Perspective: Rupture as Creative Destruction?"
  • Cullan Bendig: "‘Behold the Heresiarch’: Jan Hus, Mythologies, and Nationalism in Postwar Czechoslovakia"

Networking Day 3 (8:00 am, 2:00 pm and 8:00 pm, ET): History by Era and AskHistorians META session

Soviet_Ghosts

Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder
I was caught
In the middle of a conference track
I looked round
And I knew there was no room left
My mind raced
And I thought what could I do
And I knew
There was no help, no help from you
Sound of the users
Beating in my head
The thunder of clicks
Tore me apart
You've been
Registered-struck

Gankom

I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it

I'm about to register for the AskHistorians Conference and I think I like it

I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it

And I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I want you to register to.

aquatermain

Baby I would climb the Andes solely

To count the panels on this conference's agenda

Never could imagine there were only

Ten million ways to do academic networking

Can't you see?

I'm at your Zoom meeting

Whenever, wherever

We're meant to be historians together