Latin American History Graduate Student Conference

The doctorate students of Latin American history at Columbia University are pleased to invite graduate students from all disciplines and institutions to participate in the conference, "Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean."

The year 2010 marks the centennial of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and the bicentennial of upheavals and Independence movements in several of Spain's American colonies. With this conference, we hope to highlight the connections between violence as massive historical rupture -revolutions, wars, riots, rebellions- and violence as historical continuity- the experience of unremarked violence in everyday life: What are the ideologies behind violence and how are they put to work?  How does violence become justified, rationalized, or respected?  When does the state seek a "monopoly of violence" and when does it marginalize, coopt and redirect already-existing violence? Rather than focus exclusively on instances of mass upheaval represented by revolutions and wars of independence, we invite participants to re-think violence historically in terms of:

-Institutional torture
-Banditry and crime
-Public display of violence, torture and execution
-Disciplinary violence
-Racialized violence
-Violence based on gender
-Exclusionary violence
-Border, frontier and transnational violence
-Civil War
-Military and institutional violence
-Guerrilla warfare
-Environmental conflicts: land displacement and conflict over natural
resources.

This graduate student conference will take place March 5 and 6, 2010. Prospective participants should send an abstract of no more than 300 words to no later than October 15, 2009. Accepted participants will be notified by November 1, 2009, and are required to send a full version of their papers no later than January 15, 2010. Each participant will have 20 minutes to present. All inquiries should be directed to the above e-mail address, to Julia del Palacio at , or Ariel Lambe at

"Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean" is sponsored by the Department of History at Columbia University, the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS) and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).