Call for Papers

 

Conference on Technology and Memory

 

“Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.”—Lewis Mumford

Technology leads us toward the future while connecting us with the past. Material artifacts and their conceptual foundations both solve and create problems, and they offer means to think about other people across time and space. By examining the relationships between technology and memory, we may better understand how the past is imagined, experienced, and remembered.

We seek papers about technology and memory in the American experience from the colonial period to the recent past. How do the creation, evolution, use, misuse, and social construction of technology affect how people understand the past? In what ways do these mutually shaping relationships influence print culture, visual and audio communication, built environments, preservation, and theories of history?

The Hagley Graduate Program at the University of Delaware invites scholars across disciplines to submit proposals for its biennial conference, which will be held at the Hagley Museum & Library in Wilmington, Delaware, on 18 April 2015. The Hagley Museum & Library has a long history of fostering scholarly conversations and is home to an extraordinary collection of American business records.

The Hagley Fellows have held biennial conferences since 1989. We welcome proposals from established and emerging scholars. Please send a 200-300-word abstract and a one-page CV to the Hagley Fellows at hagley.fellows@gmail.com no later than 15 December 2014.