Call for Graduate Student Papers: "Jewish Spaces, Jewish Places," Graduate Student Conference, Carleton University, February 2012

Call for Graduate Student Papers: "Jewish Spaces, Jewish Places," Graduate Student Conference, Carleton University, February 2012

The Second Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Jewish Studies at the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa
will be held February 9, 2012, on the topic "Jewish Spaces, Jewish Places."

Michael Meng of Clemson University, with whom I participated in a session at last year's AJS conference, will be the keynote speaker.

Papers are sought from graduate students at any university working on research projects in Jewish Studies in any field or discipline. According to the organizers
"The conference aims to explore the plurality and diversity of Jewish spaces and places, past and present, and we are particularly interested in papers that focus on the socio-cultural processes of how Jews construct space and/or mark place.

Possible themes include:

-processes of making place and performing space
-space, place and identity
-gendered spaces
-diasporic spaces and spaces of migration
-negotiating Jewish and non-Jewish spaces
-spaces of remembrance and commemoration
-Holocaust sites in history and memory
-public spaces and private spaces
-secular spaces and religious spaces
-spaces of community

Dr. Michael Meng, Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University and author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, Fall 2011), will present a keynote lecture. Professor Meng's visit is co-sponsored by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

The conference will also coincide with a travelling exhibit "Names Instead of Numbers," which will be hosted by the History Department with the support of the Zelikovitz Centre at Carleton during the month of February. The exhibit highlights the biographies of twenty-two prisoners of the former Dachau concentration camp, drawn from the Dachau Remembrance Book project. The Remembrance Book project is a collaboration of several non-profit organizations to document the biographies of former camp inmates. Students, adults and relatives of former prisoners participated in the project of reconstructing and commemorating prisoners' life stories.=20

Papers should be 15-20 minutes long. Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief biography to: zelikovitz.centre@gmail.com. Please also indicate in your proposal if you will be requiring any audio-visual needs for your presentation.

Proposals are due November 10, 2011.