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Conference "Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa"
University of Toronto
May 20-23, 2009

The export of men, women and children from Africa to America lasted over four hundred years and touched most communities in Africa, directly or indirectly. We now know a great deal about this trade: its gender and age composition, the ways in which individuals and communities responded to the trade, the extent to which warfare, kidnapping, legal mechanisms, economic processes and religious institutions generated a pool of people to be bought and sold. We know about resistance, the formation of slave-trading states and the increased use of slaves within Africa. We have some autobiographical accounts by those who were literate or achieved literacy after their capture, but these are few. Most of the sources used to write the history of slavery in Africa are European, but the memories of the external and internal slave trade remain and are embedded in African ritual, song, and memory.

We are inviting proposals dealing with the exploration of new research methodologies and the re-examination of old ones. Our major objective is to make available to students and scholars African sources on slavery, enslavement, the slave trade and to improve our understanding of these documents. The conference will deal with all parts of Africa and is open to any methodology that taps African voices. Our goal is to seek out and explore newer methodologies, to find more African sources, and if possible, to look for the voices of the slaves themselves. We also want to make these sources more widely available.

Interested persons should submit a title and an abstract to slavery.tales@utoronto.ca. All participants will be expected to post on the conference web-site a month before the conference a copy of their papers and at least one document on which the paper is based. Our objective is to publish both a collection of sources and a volume of essays.

Conference "Crossing Colonial Historiographies: Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective" St. Anne's College, Oxford September 16-17, 2008

Conference "Crossing Colonial Historiographies: Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective"
St. Anne's College, Oxford
September 16-17, 2008

The field of history of medicine during the age of empire has expanded considerably in the last two decades. Engagement with different kinds of colonialism and with varied indigenous socio-political cultures has led to a wide range of approaches to colonial medicine and indigenous modes of healing. The increasingly distinct historiographic traditions of colonial and indigenous medicines emerging in the various regions formerly ruled by different colonial powers have developed quite independently from each other. This has reinforced a geo-cultural divide and a regrettable lack of conceptual interaction between between those working on North/East/West/South Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, Austral-Pacific and the Americas respectively.

This conference aims to provide a platform for exchange to scholars who are working on the history of medicine in different geographical regions in Asia, Africa, Austral Pacific and the Americas and within the varied contexts of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian. German, Dutch and British colonialisms.

Please send enquiries and abstracts to Ms. Manjita Palit at manjita.palit@gmail.com.

Organising team:

Prof. Anne Digby
Prof. Waltraud Ernst
Department of History
Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP

Dr. Projit B. Mukharji
Department of History
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne

NE1 7RU