Bodies at Work, Bodies at Play: The 14th Annual History Graduate Student Association Conference

Event information

Friday, March 29, 2019

H.J. Patterson Hall

Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies hosted a two day conference. For more information: millercenter@umd.edu. 

Bodies have served as the fundamental matrix through which societies have inscribed their ideas about race, class, gender, politics, culture, and nature. Yet they did not only serve as the passive vessels of power; bodies (be it human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, material or immaterial, real or imagined)also disrupted power, contested narratives, and provided a place of refuge. ​Bodies destabilize categories,transgress borders, challenge authority, and force us to consider the political stakes behind such classifications. Moreover, bodies are not only singular entities or subjectivities; they are also assemblages,unwieldy confederations, and vibrant groupings of matter. Bodies are the sites and the means of encounter, presence, intimacy, and union, as well as of conflict, violence, dismemberment, and dissolution. Lastly, bodies are transhuman: animals, the environment, the mystical, the cosmos itself. How and why have people draw the line between the human and nonhuman? How did actors in different historical periods and places define bodies?

Sponsored by the History Department, Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies, History Graduate Student Association, Office of International Affairs

Conference Visitor Information

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