Theme: "Self and State: Intellectual Histories of Citizenship”
- Application Deadline: 5pm, Friday 14 March 2025
- Conference Date: Tuesday 24 June 2025
- Webpage: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/ptih-graduate-conference
There is an idea of citizenship that predominates in contemporary discourse. We can trace it to Cicero, with his ‘commonwealth’ of ‘the people’ bound together under the rule of law, where justice is administered fairly and impartially. Or to Hannah Arendt, with her conception of the citizen’s ‘right to have rights’ as a function of their participation in a constitutional architecture of civil liberties. It is the citizenship of the native, the national, and the passport holder; the citizenship of those whose civil rights can be evidenced and defended. But is this all that has contributed to the making of the citizen and his most precious of possessions, his citizenship? That is to say, what is citizenship beyond its mechanics?
There are several reasons to problematise our histories of citizenship, to challenge our conventional understanding of its formation to better examine how citizenship has been constructed within the self or in the shadow of the state. Studies of citizenship reveal a shifting, unstable entity; one that alters shape in line with the vacillations of history.
The 2025 Cambridge Graduate Students’ Conference intends to encourage the fresh consideration of this important theme in the history of political thought. We welcome papers addressing such topics as the changing relation of citizenship to sovereignty, to property ownership, or to political agency; we especially seek papers that take account of these political questions and extend their application to address the relation of citizenship to gender, to race, to the emotions, or to religion. Similarly, we welcome papers that test the boundaries of canonicity, periodisation, and Euro-centricity in the history of political thought with respect to this theme.
For scholars seeking to participate, we ask that you forward a paper abstract of 200 words, a speaker biography of 50 words, and a single-page academic CV to chptconference@gmail.com by 5pm on Friday 14 March 2025. Individual presentations should extend to no longer than 20 minutes.
Keynote:
This year's keynote lecture will be given by Professor Mia Bay, Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Professor Bay is a pathfinding scholar who has helped to shape multiple fields: African American intellectual history, Black women’s history, and the history of Black mobility, in particular. She is the author of the celebrated White Image in the Black Mind (2000), a history of African-American ideas about white people from 1830 to 1925; an acclaimed biography of Ida B. Wells, To Tell the Truth Freely (2009); and, most recently, Travelling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (2021), which won many awards including the Bancroft Prize.
Registration: Registration for attendance will open on Thursday 1st May 2025.