History and Legacy of the Gulag

CFP: conference at Harvard University, October 2006

Call for Paper Proposals

Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University,October 19-22, 2006

On October 19-22, 2006, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University with the generous support of the Bradley Foundation will host a major international conference on the history and legacy of the Gulag. Topic areas are broad, and all proposals will be considered: history of the Gulag (including camps, prisons and exile), economy of the Gulag, literature of the Gulag, release and rehabilitation, the legacy of the Gulag in the post-Stalin and post-Soviet periods, the dissident and human rights movement in the Soviet Union, nationalities in the Gulag, the Gulag in comparative perspective, etc. Recent years have seen a burgeoning of scholarship on the Gulag, and this conference will be an opportunity for many scholars from a variety of disciplines to gather and share the results of that work.

The conference will be held in conjunction with the Boston run of a traveling Gulag museum exhibit sponsored and created by the U.S. National Park Service and the Gulag Museum, Perm, Russia. The exhibit is scheduled to open at Ellis Island in Spring 2006 and will subsequently travel to National Historic Sites in Boston, MA; Topeka, KS; Independence, CA; Atlanta, GA; Hyde Park, NY and other possible sites to be determined.

The conference will be a workshop format. All will be required to circulate previously unpublished article length papers to all workshop participants in advance, so that oral presentations may be limited in favor of questions and discussion. All submissions will be considered for publication of a conference volume.

A video feed of the conference will be streamed via internet and preserved on the virtual web exhibit Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and under construction by Steven A. Barnes and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Please send one-page paper abstracts by November 15, 2005 to:
Steven A. Barnes
Department of History and Art History
George Mason University
MS 3G1
Fairfax, VA 22030

703-993-1247