The Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago are hosting the graduate student and faculty joint conference: “Haiti: Beyond Commemorations and Boundaries,” May 12-14, 2016. The conference is taking place at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, located at 1100 East 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]

Description: The conference explores the field of Haitian Studies through multiple approaches that go beyond geographical and linguistic boundaries as well as the chronological limitations of a century. The aim is to transcend the curiosity towards the Haitian Revolution, and the extended series of sociopolitical crises made more acute in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. Vast fields of potential inquiry in Haitian Studies (notably literature, history, anthropology, culture, and language) are too often under-examined, whereas the most popular of these fields seem bound by deeply entrenched traditional academic discourses. This event is an attempt to generate a pertinent, innovative, and theoretically informed approach to understanding Haiti. It proposes a brainstorming on current work in a number of disciplines, thereby attempting to move scholarly work and theoretical reflection on Haiti “beyond commemorations,” as the conference’s title so aptly puts it. The contributors represent a diverse group of scholars (both established and young researchers) in terms of discipline, methodological and theoretical perspectives. The conference will discuss the issues introduced above, with a special emphasis on all sorts of new ground-breaking projects related to the context of a New World intellectual history of Haiti and the Black American Diaspora since the French Revolution.

Full program available at: https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/120943/graduate-student-faculty-joint-conference-haiti-beyond,http://www.fabula.org/actualites/upcoming-conference-may-12-14-haiti-beyond-commemorations-and-boundaries_73868.php, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/haitibeyond/files/2015/07/Conference-UChicago-2016-Haiti-Beyound-Commemorations-and-Boundaries-2.pdf

For information, contact Daniel Desormeaux at fac.conf.rll.uchicago@gmail.com or visit http://franke.uchicago.edu.