ISSR is pleased to co-sponsor the 19th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference of the Graduate History Association at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

(De)Constructing Power: Historical Perspectives on Authority and Resistance

Keynote Address: 
Jen Manion, Professor of History and Sexuality, Women’s & Gender Studies (Amherst College) 
Saturday, April 8, 11:00 am

This conference brings graduate students together to consider power as a tool for subjugation and liberation across intersecting political, economic, social, and historical spheres. Conference participants will think expansively about diverse sources of power, including but not limited to, individuals, institutions, nations, ideas, myths, memory, and commemoration.

Panels consider the following questions:

• Who has the power to shape historical narratives?
• What role has popular resistance played in identifying, challenging, and restructuring established hierarchies of power?
• How does history contribute to our understanding of modern day issues of justice and injustice, such as the climate crisis, global conflict, systemic racism and white supremacy, imperialism and neo-colonialism, gender-based violence, and institutional abuses of power.

Presentations reflect a variety of historical fields and disciplines in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and a broad array of subject matter.

Keynote Speaker Jen Manion is author of Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Penn, 2015) which received the Mary Kelley Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020) which was a finalist for the OAH Lawrence Levine Award for the best book in U.S. cultural history and recipient of the British Association of Victorian Studies best book prize. Jen is co-editor with Nicholas Syrett of a forthcoming two volume series, The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, Vol. I: Early America and Vol. II: Modern America (expected 2024). Manion is co-editor with Jim Downs of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (2004) and has published nearly three dozen essays and reviews in U.S. histories of gender and sexuality.