August 14-15, 2015

The Tanner Humanities Center is pleased to sponsor a two-day interdisciplinary conference addressing the entangled relationship between peace and violence in the colonial Americas. The conference will define “peace” broadly, framing it as a discourse on governance and as a set of disciplinary practices aimed at shaping, regulating, or limiting violence. Our contention is that scholars underappreciate the importance of peace – both historically and as a category of analysis – to understanding how colonial Americans grappled with the problem of violence and warfare.

This conference will explore more deeply the centrality of peace to the negotiation of violence, the legitimation of authority, and the racial and gendered ordering of the early American frontier. Topics may include, among other things, how American colonists or imperial officials confronted violence as a moral problem; how ideologies of peace informed popular and political debates about violence, warfare, and colonialism; and how peace was woven through the myriad interactions between and among settlers, Native Americans, and people of African descent.

The conference will convene on August 14-15, 2015, at the Tanner Humanities Center on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Dr. Wayne Lee, professor of history and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at UNC Chapel Hill, will be the keynote speaker. Some funds will be available for participants’ lodging and travel expenses.

Michael Goode, Utah Valley University (mgoode@uvu.edu)
John Smolenski, University of California, Davis (jsmolenski@ucdavis.edu)