My colleague Elizabeth Nelson and I are in the opening stages of putting together a conference panel proposal for the AHA conference in Boston in 2011 (submission deadline: February 15 of next year). We're looking for a third panelist to join our proposal.

The topic of the panel will be "The Question of Rationality in History," or perhaps something with a bit more of a religion-based focus. My paper will focus on the non-rational experiences of converts of evangelist Billy Sunday in the early 20th-century United States. Liz will be excerpting part of her dissertation on the autobiographies of insanity penned by three late-19th century Western European scholars. Since the overall theme of the conference is "History, Society, and the Sacred," we think we have a good chance at making the cut.

Since we are aiming at a global and/or interdisciplinary focus (the panel chair and commenter will likely be world historians), we'd love to be joined by someone working in a non-Western historical field, a very different time period (e.g., Medieval), or another discipline. Your paper would need to be able to connect to the other two described above; we can tweak the theme of the panel to accommodate you if necessary.

If you're interested or would like more information, please e-mail me.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Labels: AHA, American Historical Association, CFP, Evangelism, Jeremy Young, rationality