Conference Details

Date: April 10, 2015, 10am-5pm
Location: Wilder House, University of Chicago- 5811 S. Kenwood Ave., Chicago, 60637
Sponsors: The Nicholson Center for British Studies & the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture


Conference Program

BREAKFAST & OPENING REMARKS, 10-10:20

Panel 1 - Ideologies of Classification
10:20-12


Chair: Felipe Gaitan-Amman (ACLS/Mellon New Faculty Fellow, Dept. of Anthropology)
  • 10:20: Maura Capps (History, University of Chicago) "Clover Colonialism: The Fate of Sown Grasses and Enlightenment Husbandry in Britain’s Settler Empire, 1780-1850."
  • 10:40: Aakash Solanki (Social Sciences, University of Chicago) "The Criminal Tribes Act: Classifying People in British India (1871-1927)."
  • 11:00: Heather V. Vermeulen (American Studies/African American Studies, Yale) "Plantation Ecologies: Thomas Thistlewood’s Libidinal Linnaean Project and the Ritual Cultivation of Death."
  • 11:20-12: Panel chair comment & audience discussion

LUNCH BREAK 12-1 

Panel 2 - Legislating, Administering, Experimenting
1-2:40

Chair: Daragh Grant (Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences)
  • 1:00: Lydia Craig (English, Loyola University) "Conciliation and Containment: Sir Charles Wager and American Colonial Politics."
  • 1:20: José Juan Pérez Meléndez (History, University of Chicago) " 'Informal Empire' Takes Three to Tango: Great Britain, Brazil and the Zollverein during the Aberdeen Bill Crisis, 1844-1846."
  • 1:40: Tim Soriano (History, University of Illinois at Chicago) "The Royal Navy, Legal Pluralism, and Authority in Early Colonial Sierra Leone: 1670-1810."
  • 2:00-2:40: Panel chair comment & audience discussion
TEA FOR PARTICIPANTS & ATTENDEES, 2:40-3:20

Panel 3 - Ideas and Realities of Production
3:20-5:00

Chair: Christopher Taylor (Assistant Professor, Dept. of English)
  • 3:20: JiHae Koo (English, Indiana University) "A Portrait of the Artist as a Paterian Aesthete: When Pater Confronts Irish Colonial History."
  • 3:40: Sam Rowe (English, University of Chicago) "Oriental despotism and consumerist insatiability: the case of William Beckford's Vathek."
  • 4:00: Christopher Todd (History, University of Chicago) "Pricing People.
  • 4:20-5:00: Panel chair comment & audience discussion