Continuing Standing Sections in GNCS Invite Contributions Year Round

History from Beyond

Kyle Jackson

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

kyle.jackson1[@]kpu.ca

Historians who study the nineteenth-century world are heir to a set of conceptual tools forged by intellectuals in a small part of that world. While euromethodologies have proven illuminating, much historical evidence has been cast aside without good reason, while the lived experience, truths, and knowledges of diverse peoples have been downgraded as “belief.” What alternative ways of doing history have been relegated to the shadows by our discipline’s post-Enlightenment assumptions? Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature “History from Beyond”—interventions that seek to open up new questions or approaches beyond disciplinary norms, beyond humans, and beyond euromethodologies. We especially welcome submissions that seek to challenge the core assumptions of Western modernity, close the gap between Western constructions of the past and wider-world realities, decolonize and Indigenize historical storytelling, or more seamlessly integrate non-Western epistemologies, the unknown, or the mysterious into historical narrative.

Global Documents

Joshua Ehrlich

University of Macau

jehrlich[@]um.edu.mo

and 

Agnes Gehbald

University of Bern

agnes.gehbald[@]unibe.ch

Submissions for this section should present and analyze unpublished (or not widely available) textual or visual materials that explore the world’s connectedness in the long nineteenth century. Global documents are primary sources such as private writings, author drafts, official or technical reports or the like, that capture convergences or entanglements among or across diverse world regions. We invite contributions that draw out the significance of unpublished materials found in archives, libraries, and private collections; or that explore printed texts and images with limited circulation, or about whose reception or use little is known. This section seeks to uncover the global narratives embedded in individual texts and images. If not in English, documents should be translated, but original versions may be included when appropriate. Other formats such as roundtable discussions of one or more documents will be considered. For all proposals, the word count should be at least 2,000 words and should not exceed 9,000 words (including footnotes).​

Creative Histories

Trevor R. Getz

San Francisco State University

tgetz[@]sfsu.edu

In the nineteenth century, as today, people communicated ideas through a vast range of media. This was the era of cartoonists like Emmanuel Poiré, picture journals like Punch and Eshimbun Nihonchi, the invention of the phonograph, and a flowering of puppet and lantern theater around the world. Many of these media conveyed messages and stories from the past, from Gustave Doré’s The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Russia, arguably the world’s first graphic history, to wayang histories of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib and other Muslim figures, to ground-breaking data visualizations by W. E. B. DuBois, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Joseph Minard. Similarly, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature the unusual and alternate ways in which contemporary scholars depicted and interpreted the nineteenth century: descriptive maps, comics, data and architectural visualizations, experimental histories, and speculative biographies that mirror the richness of the nineteenth-century world. Reflective essays that engage with issues in the creative rendering of history are also welcome.