Historiciser le viol

Historicising Rape

Call for Papers

An International Conference to be held at Cardiff University, UK, 8-10 July 2015.

Keynote speaker: Professor Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA; author of What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, 1944-1946 (University of Chicago Press, 2013

Proposals are invited for participation in this three-day international conference on the history of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual violence.

The conference will bring together scholars working on a range of historical periods and places to explore what may be historically specific about rape, sexual abuse, and other forms of sexual violence in different historical and social/political/cultural/global contexts. We hope to attract participants from a range of disciplines.

The aim is to encourage a discussion that goes beyond either transhistorical or essentialist understandings of rape or those which see change primarily in terms of linear progress. Therefore, while no theme or topic related to the history of rape or other forms of sexual abuse and sexual violence is ruled out, successful proposals will explicitly address the issue of what is or is not historically specific in their own case. Papers that consider the challenges of teaching the history of these topics are also welcomed.

We invite proposals for 25-minute papers, for complete panels (containing no more than three papers) or for round-table discussions. Abstracts of no longer than 300-words for each paper, along with a 50-word autobiography for each speaker, should be sent by email to Dr Garthine Walker at HistoricisingRape@cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 27 October 2014. Informal enquiries may also be sent to that address. Applicants will be informed by mid-November of whether their proposal has been accepted.

We hope to secure a small amount of funding for postgraduate bursaries, but speakers should anticipate that their home institutions or other bodies will fund their participation at the conference. To this end, we shall seek to keep costs as low as is compatible with covering the cost of the conference, and we shall provide a general reduction for postgraduates and other unwaged participants.