Announcements

Journal of Women's History Special Issue
Call for Papers: Critical Feminist Biography as Translocal History
Co-edited by Marilyn Booth and Antoinette Burton
Comparative Literature, History, and Gender and Women's Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
USA

The return of the embodied subject as a site generative of analytical force and explanatory power in fields of inquiry throughout the humanities and social sciences, including postcolonial theory and even global studies, calls for reassessing the work of feminist biography as a form of historical knowledge. We seek papers that engage the dynamics of feminist biography as a critical mode of historical thinking and especially as an articulation of translocal history. We use the term translocal in dynamic tension with the transnational, in part to re-appropriate the geographical specificities entailed by critical biography as a feminist practice, and in part to insist on the capacity of feminist biography to illuminate geopolitics beyond the boundaries of the nation. We are interested in essays that focus on the construction of biographical subjects while theorizing problems that arise from the conjuncture of individual figures moving across space and time; the presumptions of history as a discipline; and/or the limits and blind spots of feminist inquiry as it has been practiced in the academy. We are especially keen to receive submissions from scholars residing outside Euro-America and/or interrogating the limits of the western historical canon.

The deadline for submissions is 1 August 2007. Please be sure to consult the JWH website for submission guidelines: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/guidelines.html. Submissions should be addressed to:

Marilyn Booth and Antoinette Burton
Co-editors, Critical Feminist Biography Special Issue
Journal of Women's History
c/o Department of History
University of Illinois
810 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801

Aspasia: International Yearbook for Women's and Gender History of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe

Aspasia is a new, international peer-reviewed yearbook that seeks to bring out the best scholarship in the field of interdisciplinary women's and gender history focusing on and produced in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe. Each volume of Aspasia consist of articles, a Forum and book reviews.

Volume 1 (to be released in early 2007) focuses on Women's Movements and Feminisms; its Forum asks: "Is Communist Feminism a Contradictio in Terminis?" Volume 2 (2008) is dedicated to Women Writers and Intellectuals.

The Aspasia editors are Francisca de Haan (Central European University, Budapest), Maria Bucur (Indiana University) and Krassimira Daskalova (St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia). For more information see www.berghahnbooks.com/journals/asp or write to Dehaanf@ceu.hu or Mbucur@indiana.edu.

The Journal of Women's History now features a special section devoted to the practice of women's history. We are interested in short individual pieces (1,000–2,000 words), as well as full roundtable forums of four to five contributors (5,000–10,000 words total) that explore cutting edge questions in history practice<m>from the archive to personal narrative work, from grant-writing and publishing to teaching, from activism and community service to campus and department politics. We would like to assemble a range of perspectives from across the globe. If you have ideas about future history practice sections (either individual or roundtable), please contact the editors at womenshistory@uiuc.edu or write to Editors, Journal of Women's History, The University of Illinois, 810 South Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

The Journal of Women's History regularly features "The Book Forum," a special section of short essays (1,000–1,500 words) that engage a major scholarly monograph or collection in the field of women's and/or gender history. We will invite reviewers who work outside the temporal or spatial frames of the book in question to assess its importance<m>in terms of methodological innovation, theoretical significance and empirical discovery<m>to their own fields of research and teaching. We plan to spotlight books that have had a significant impact on women's history within the past decade, as well as new titles whose thematic concerns, method, and theoretical groundwork speak to a broad and...