Bodies, Histories, & Empire in Africa: Symposium

September 13, 2013, The Skylight Room, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center

Join Antoinette Burton (History Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois), Julie Livingston (History, Rutgers University) and Megan Vaughan (History, the Graduate Center, CUNY) for a symposium on “Bodies, Histories, & Empire in Africa.”

SCHEDULE

10am: Welcome and Introductions

10:15–11:30am: “Figuring the Tumor: Photography, Self, and Cancer in Botswana”
Professor Julie Livingston
Department of History, Rutgers State University of New Jersey

• Break

12:30–1:45pm: “Notes on the Political Unconscious of British Post/Colonial Histories”
Professor Antoinette Burton
Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Department of History, University of Illinois

1:45–2:00pm: Closing Remarks
Professor Megan Vaughan
Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Please join us in this symposium to welcome Professor Megan Vaughan—our newly arrived Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center.

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. An historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, she specializes in colonial India, Australasia, and Africa, and has been particularly concerned with issues related to women, gender, and sexuality. Her publications include Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (India: Three Essays Collective, 2012), The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), and Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (NY/Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.

Julie Livingston is Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her research interests are focused on care as a social practice and the human body as a moral condition and she has conducted ethnographic research in Botswana for the past 15 years. Her publications include Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) and Improvising Medicine in an African Oncology Ward (Durham: Duke University Press, in press), which is a study of the only cancer ward in Botswana. She received her PhD from Emory University and an MA and MPH from Boston University.

Megan Vaughan has recently been appointed a distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. A fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society, she is an historian of Africa and comparative colonialism and taught previously at the University of Cambridge, where she was the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History. She earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her publications include The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge 1987), Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Polity Press, 1991), and Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius (Duke University Press, 2004).

 Sponsored by the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean and the Ph.D. Program in History

Light refreshments will be served.