Smithsonian Libraries Opportunities for Research 2013

Situated at the center of the world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Libraries is a vital part of the research, exhibition, and educational enterprise of the Institution. Each Smithsonian scholar engages in an individual voyage of discovery using the artifacts and specimens of the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with the Libraries’ written and illustrated record of the past. The Libraries is uniquely positioned to help scholars understand the continuing vitality of this relationship, via exceptional research resources ranging from 15th-century manuscripts to electronic journals.

· The Spencer Baird Society Resident Scholar Program: Stipends of $3,500 per month for up to six months are available to support scholarly research in the Special Collections of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington, DC and New York, NY, in an extensive range of subject areas. Historians, librarians, doctoral students, and postdoctoral fellows are welcome to apply. For more information, click here.
·The Dibner Library Resident Scholar Program: Stipends of $3,500 per month for up to six months are available to support scholarly research using the history of science and technology rare books and manuscripts at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Historians, librarians, doctoral students, and postdoctoral fellows are welcome to apply. For more information, click here.
· The Margaret Henry Dabney Penick Resident Scholar Program: The stipend for this long-term fellowship is $45,000 for nine consecutive months. Senior scholars are particularly encouraged to apply, however, applicants in their post-doctoral phase or, with outstanding achievements in their pre-doctoral phase may be also considered for the fellowship. This fellowship supports scholarly research into the legacy of Patrick Henry and his political circle, the early political history of Virginia, the history of the American Revolution, founding era ideas and policy-making, as well as science, technology, and culture in colonial America and the Early National Period. For more information, click here.

Debt: The Long View

The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University Presents:

The Money Series: Debt: The Long View

David Graeber, Goldsmiths College
Louis Hyman, Cornell University
Greta Krippner, University of Michigan
Moderator: Peter Goodman, Huffington Post

Thursday, 8 March, 6:15pm
Davis Auditorium, the Schapiro Center

This discussion of debt and finance will explore how debt has changed over time and its significance in our culture and society. Central to the conversation will be the role of the state and banks in shaping our debt regime and the significance of Occupy Wall Street and other social movements that seek to resist or constrain the control of debtors by their creditors.

For more information, please visit www.heymancenter.org

“The Fictions of Finance,” a Call for Proposals for Radical History Review

Across the humanities and social sciences, a new conversation has begun about the enigmas of capital, and of finance capital, in particular. This special issue of the Radical History Review on “The Fictions of Finance” aims to intervene in that conversation and to help to shape it. From geography, history, and literary studies to anthropology, sociology, and labor studies, there has been an efflorescence of work on finance and commercial capital, flourishing amid the current capital crisis and chronic “recession.” As a historical primer on the planetary intersections of the rhetorical and the operational dimensions of “The Fictions of Finance,” this issue is designed to knit together the disparate strands of these renewed conversations. In naming that theme, we mean to recover the old notion that finance capital is itself a kind of fabrication, an illusion—the realm of Marx’s “fictitious capital.” History provides a long record of cultural figurations of this fictionality, of the fraudulent productivity and magical profit of credit and speculation—from the “wind wheat” of Illinois to the “devil” of Colombia. But new modes of thought have continually helped to marginalize those responses and to naturalize the mechanisms of finance capital. In other words, to paraphrase cultural historian Ann Fabian, economic innovation and epistemological innovation have gone hand in hand.

With “The Fictions of Finance,” then, we mean to decipher a vast array of moral panics, conceptual revolutions, legal constructions, and discursive forms implicated and imbricated within the world histories of capital. This theme may point in many directions: genealogies of economic thought; the performativity of economic theory; finance capital’s institutional architectures, such as corporations and state bureaucracies; territorial sovereignties, geographical imaginaries or spatial materialities secured by finance capital; techniques of racial capitalism; and modes of imperialism and accumulation. We want this theme to mark out the space for an interdisciplinary conversation, rather than a strictly historical one, about the political economy of finance capitalism. We seek a cultural history, writ large, writ global, of the forms, concepts, subjects, and networks that finance capital elaborates. In other words, we’d like to emphasize critiques of capitalism and to foreground its logic, and, practically speaking, to emphasize provocative juxtapositions of topics.

Some possible topics this issue might explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Slave insurance, slave mortgages, and the corporealization of finance capital
• Speculation and risk as imperatives of capitalist citizenship
• “Time is money,” and other tropes of the transactionalism of everyday life
• Microfinance, credit-baiting, and primitive accumulation in the Global South
• Pin money and the domestication of finance
• FIRE economies and the rise of global cities
• “Ball pork”: the circulation of finance capital through built and natural environments
• Territorial and national sovereignties imagined by finance capital
• Shysters, Welfare Queens and other discourses of parasitism
• Radical critiques of finance capital, among theorists and activists around the world
• The grammar of finance, e.g., the categories of credit and debt (whether personal or national)
• The instruments of finance, e.g., double-entry bookkeeping and collateralized debt obligations
• Money as a narrative strategy, from the realist novel to conceptual art
• The personification of the market that speaks, sleeps, and stumbles
• Global cycles of finance capital and the temporality of history
• Finance capital and the scapes of modernity: HSBC as “The World’s Local Bank”
• The boundary between clean and dirty money
• The emergence of the concept of finance capital
• Homo Economicus: the productions of affect, desire, and subjectivity
• The legal “personhood” of business corporations

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section.

Visit the website at http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/rhr.htm

Call for Papers: Immoral Business? Perspectives on Speculation, Speculators, and Scandalous Profits

International Conference at Leibniz University
Hanover
25 – 27 January 2013

Conveners:
Karl Christian Führer
Kim Christian Priemel and
Cornelia Rauh

Scholars are invited to submit proposals for original papers to be presented at an interdisciplinary conference in Hanover, Germany, in January 2013. The conference will explore how economic actions come to be labelled as “speculation” in different societies and in diverse historical periods. It will specifically address questions such as how speculative trading was and is operated, how states and societies react to the phenomenon of “speculation”, and how the incurred profits or losses are publically assessed.

The basic definition of economic speculation appears to be innocent enough: speculators anticipate changes in prices for certain goods and try to take advantage of these up- or downswings. While such deals may well be regarded as one of the most common traits of any market economy, speculation has often – and most prominently in the recent financial crisis – become a widely applied and easily understood pejorative term in political discussions. More often than not it is used in a moralistic discourse and as a synonym for “greed,” “irresponsibility,” or “recklessness”.

Defence of speculation is rare and hardly part of topical debates. However, economists, including free-market sceptics such as Paul Krugman, have frequently argued that even high risk speculations intended to disrupt the exchange rates of currencies can have positive, if unintended economic effects. More generally, speculation is often seen as a mechanism by which technical innovations are financed and the allocation of goods and resources is optimised. In some, albeit few cases, moral counter-arguments have been advanced: from a radical free-market perspective speculation can and historically has been presented as a form of “superior individual freedom” and accordingly as an essential element of any free society. Papers presented in the conference should not aim to decide these political and ideological feuds (although they might wish to side with one or the other). Instead they should make these perceptions of and perspectives on economic speculation and speculators the very object of their analysis. As markets do not evolve according to eternal, quasi-mechanical rules but are culturally coded and socially negotiated, economic actions take place in a social context which is shaped and influenced by human perceptions, emotions, knowledge, and beliefs – and thus liable to changes, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Profit-seeking individuals therefore do not act as (more or less well but certainly not perfectly informed) agents of static economic laws, but as members of social formations which vary significantly in time and space.

Speculation thus offers an excellent example to study economy as a historically contingent, socially constructed field of action. Its highly contested character clearly derives from a wide range of social interactions encompassing not only business protagonists (traders, brokers, shareholders, bankers, et al), but also politicians and state officials engaged in regulatory efforts as well as other stakeholders such as labour representatives, scholars, the lay public, and the media. As such, speculation offers a rich field for interdisciplinary and comparative studies. The conference, we hope, will be joined not only by historians and economists, but also by participants from Sociology, Anthropology, Theology, Criminology, and Media and Cultural Studies. Both papers on historical cases of speculation and on recent developments are welcome; internationally comparative presentations are especially encouraged. Participants should be prepared to give a 20 minute presentation at the conference followed by discussion.

Questions to be addressed in the papers may include: Which forms of “speculation” can be distinguished? Under what circumstances is speculation regarded as functional or as disruptive both in economic and in social terms? What are the differences between “speculators” and “ordinary” economic agents? Do the notions of “greed” and of “undeserved profits” necessarily form part of debates about speculation and speculators? Or is speculation only scandalized once it has failed? Can greed, as Gordon Gecko has it, be good?
In what way are speculation and its protagonists perceived by the general public of his or her time? Is there a public image of “the speculator” and – if so –who shapes that image at different times, in different places, and by what means? Is speculation a topic in high-brow art, the popular arts, and/or the media? Do economic actors conceive of themselves as speculators? Which efforts have public authorities historically made to prevent or check “speculation” and with what results? Are such policies tied to notions of a “moral economy” meant to control profits and self-interest for the sake of the “common good”?

Please send an abstract of 150 – 200 words of your paper along with a brief CV (one page at the most) to Cornelia.Rauh@hist.uni-hannover.de by February 15, 2012. All submissions should be sent as e-mail attachments (MS Word, Rtf, Pdf). At the moment, reimbursement of travel expanses cannot be guaranteed. However, we are optimistic that funding will be provided. There will be no conference fees.

Psychoanalysis, Money and the Global Financial Crisis

This special issue of new formations brings together an international cast of psychoanalysts, cultural theorists, philosophers and critics to explore numerous aspects of the nexus between psychoanalysis, money and economics in the light – or shadow – of the latest global financial crisis. Asking not only what psychoanalysis can tell us about financial crashes, but also what crashes may reveal about psychoanalysis, it stages a confrontation between two disciplines that have been mutually indifferent and mutually opaque for much of the past 100 years.

Contributors: David Bennett, Geoff Boucher, Steven D. Brown, Paul Crosthwaite, Karl Figlio, Bruce Fink, Stephen Frosh, Jean-Joseph Goux, Campbell Jones, Viktor Mazin, Laura Mulvey, Benjamin Noys, Ian Parker, Daniel Ross, Matthew Sharpe, Bernard Stiegler, Tan Waelchli

CONTENTS

David Bennett
‘Money Is Laughing Gas To Me’ (Freud): A Critique Of Pure Reason In Economics And Psychoanalysis

Bruce Fink
Analysand And Analyst In The Global Economy, Or Why Anyone In Their Right Mind Would Pay For An Analysis

Karl Figlio
The Financial Crisis: A Psychoanalytic View Of Illusion, Greed And Reparation In Masculine Phantasy

Viktor Mazin
The Meaning of Money: Russia, the Ruble, the Dollar and Psychoanalysis

Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe
Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies And ‘Generalised Perversion’: Questioning Žižek’s Diagnosis Of The Times

Paul Crosthwaite
What A Waste Of Money: Expenditure, The Death Drive, And The Contemporary Art Market

Stephen Frosh
Psychoanalysis, Antisemitism And The Miser

Tan Waelchli
Psychoanalytic Reflections On The Nature Of Money: Authority, Regulation Of Standards, And The Law Of The Father

Jean-Joseph Goux
Pleasure And Pain: At The Crossroads Of Psychoanalysis And The Political Economy

Campbell Jones
What Kind Of Subject Is The Market?

Daniel Ross
Translator’s Introduction To Bernard Stiegler’s ‘Pharmacology Of Desire’ Drive-based Capitalism And Libidinal Dis-economy’

Bernard Stiegler
Pharmacology Of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism And Libidinal Dis- Economy

Theme: Booms, Busts, and the Gilded Age

Special section of Journal of Gilded Age & Progressive Era on Booms, Busts, and the Gilded Age:

Introduction: Reflecting on History when Markets Tumble, Scott Reynolds Nelson

The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics, Nicolas Barreyre

A Financial Crisis in Prints and Cartoons, Scott Reynolds Nelson

The Freaks of Fortune: Moral Responsibility for Booms and Busts in Nineteenth-Century America, Jonathan Levy

A Storm of Cheap Goods: New American Commodities and the Panic of 1873 , Scott Reynolds Nelson

Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa , Andrew Zimmerman

Boom and Bust: A Comment , Sarah Abrevaya Stein

CFP: Capitalism by Gaslight

Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America

Date: June 7-8, 2012

Location: Library Company of Philadelphia

“Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century
America,” an exhibition currently installed at the Library Company of
Philadelphia, showcases the many ways in which Americans earned a living
through economic transactions made beyond the spheres of “legitimate”
commerce. Entrepreneurs of this sort included everyone from prostitutes
and card sharps to confidence men, mock auctioneers, pickpockets, fences
of stolen goods, and many others.

Although these shadow economies may have unfolded “off the books,” they
were anything but marginal. Instead, they were crucially important parts
of the mainstream economy, bound up in the development of commercial and
industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. The shadow economy’s
successful entrepreneurs-women, people of color, and children among
them-had to be even more creative, flexible, and adaptive than
“respectable” counterparts. During this critical period, the rules of
“legitimate” economic engagement were still being established. What
separated legal from illegal, moral from immoral, acceptable from
disdained activities were far from settled issues. The practices,
networks, and goods that constituted shadow economies often paralleled and
in some instances overlapped with those found in wholesale and retail
businesses, calling into question the morality and legitimacy of legal
economic transactions.

To highlight not only the innovative research being done by historians of
capitalism and its culture but also the rich collections of the Library
Company that support study of these topics, the conveners seek paper
proposals for a conference on Thursday, June 7 – Friday, June 8, 2012,
that explore how shadow economies operated in the nineteenth-century
United States and examine the meanings Americans gave to them.

Please send a 2-3 page abstract and c.v. both to Wendy Woloson at
wewo99@gmail.com and Brian Luskey at brian.luskey@mail.wvu.edu no later
than January 15, 2012, to ensure consideration.