Small, but Mighty: Celebrating Big Histories of Marginalized Individuals, Spaces and Communities
Forty-Fifth Annual Warren Susman Graduate Conference
April 7th, 2023 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Academic Building (AB) West Wing, Rooms 6050 & 6051
EXTENDED Submission Deadline: January 31st, 2023 at 5:00pm
The 45th annual Warren Susman Graduate Conference invites papers from graduate students in history as well as other humanities disciplines that rethink and/or highlight the historical impact of individual people, communities, places, or species. We welcome submissions for individual papers and panels from graduate students at all levels and in all departments. Proposals may cover all fields and approaches of historical scholarship and span all chronological and geographical spaces. We seek papers and proposals that center a seemingly small subject but under further exploration reveal a larger significance.
We define microhistory as an intimate analysis of a particular subject to elucidate greater consequences. This year’s Susman Graduate Conference aims to engage the tradition of microhistory to emphasize those who “...must not be lost either within the historical processes or in an anonymous crowd” (Georg G. Iggers, 1997). Centering methodologies of microhistory, we seek to highlight scholarship that reimagines the historical actor and the significance of smallness.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Critical geographies and histories of race, gender, and sexuality
- Labor studies, urban studies, and agrarian studies
- Histories of children and childhood
- Histories of healing, disability, care, and technology
- Studies of alternative and emergent religion
- Application and pedagogies of microhistory
- Approaches to the archive
Abstracts of up to 300 words with a working title, as well as a one-page curriculum vitae, should be sent by January 31st, 2023 by 5pm, to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by mid-February.
Please join us after the conference for a keynote lecture in AB 1180 given by Dr. Nicole Burrowes, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Burrowes’s scholarship focuses on justice movements, relational histories of racialization and colonialism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity. Dr. Burrowes’s current book project is Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana. Dinner will follow the keynote.
Please send proposal submissions as well as any questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
