Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 18-19 May 2023

The Rothermere American Institute is pleased to invite paper proposals for a Spring 2023 symposium entitled At the Junction: The Local, Regional, and National in US History, hosted by Bruce Schulman, Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History.

A century ago, nearly three decades after enunciating the frontier thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner turned his attention to a different question: ‘Sections and Nation’. Facing abundant evidence of national economic, cultural, and political integration, Turner insisted on the continued vitality and enduring influence of local, state and regional forces in American life. In the twenty-first century historians have continued to interrogate how national, subnational, and transnational forces interact—writing about ‘the politics of scale’, ‘glocalization’, the ‘global [US] heartland’, and the ‘middle tier’ of American federalism. In that spirit, we invite proposals for papers that investigate the relations between and among different scales and levels of American economy, politics, culture and society. We welcome studies that interrogate how subnational (local, state, regional) actors, institutions, and movements interacted with the nation. The symposium will open with a keynote address by Edward Ayers, the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond, and conclude with a panel discussion led by Brent Cebul (Penn), Julia Guarneri (Cambridge), Andrew Heath (Sheffield) and Sarah Phillips (BU).

Please submit a 250-word proposal and a copy of your CV to comms@rai.ox.ac.uk by 15 February 2023.