Graduate Student Conference: Capitalist Souths

Project Directors: Terrell Orr (PhD candidate, History), Bryant Barnes (PhD candidate, History)

This Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded project is part of the Global Studies of the American South research category in the Willson Center’s expanded Global Georgia Initiative.

“Capitalist Souths” is a graduate student conference planned for Spring 2020 that will bring together the latest research on the history and culture of capitalism in the US South, Atlantic World, and Global South. The premise of the conference is that it is increasingly impossible to understand the developments of capitalism in the US South, antebellum or postbellum, without understanding its embeddedness in the flows of capital, labor, ideas, and people in the Global South, particularly Latin America and the Caribbean. Panel and paper proposals are invited to include, among other topics, transnational histories of the US and Latin America, labor and capital migration, coerced and uncoerced immigration, the “Nuevo South,” contested citizenship, and hybrid Global South identities.

The conference will be organized and hosted by the University of Georgia History Department but will be interdisciplinary in scope and open to submissions from graduate-level scholars at other institutions.