Hagley Fellows' Conference, March 28-29, 2003
Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware
Call for Papers
The Hagley Fellows at the University of Delaware invite paper proposals for "Reinventing the Factory," the 2003 Hagley Fellows' Conference. Amy Slaton, Professor of History at Drexel University and author of Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), will give the keynote address.
Since the early industrial revolution, the factory has been recognized as a visible symbol and an important site for industrial production, technological innovation, labor relations, and political and economic change. This conference seeks to broaden our traditional understanding of what a factory is and how it has operated as a place of work, an architectural structure, and a social and cultural environment, which has evolved historically from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. By making the factory the focus of analysis, we want to expand our understanding of how structures both real and imagined are built and how they have influenced the lives of laborers, managers, and consumers. We envision papers that expand the definition of the factory as a workspace to include agricultural fields, laboratories, hospitals, universities, and even web-based virtual factories. We are also interested in the role of scale in factory production and its relation to labor and production in addition to studies involving regional and geographic analysis. The design and representation of factories as physical spaces is another area papers might focus on especially in relation to racial dynamics and gender construction.
We encourage submissions from a broad array of fields including but not limited to the history of technology, industrialization, architecture and design, public health, the environment, agriculture, business, labor, and gender.
Proposals, including a 500-word abstract and one-page CV, should be sent, by December 1st to Gabriella Petrick at gpetrick@udel.edu. If electronic submission is not possible, please mail materials to Gabriella M. Petrick, 236 Munroe Hall, Department of History, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716.