CFP: Histories of American Capitalism

Cornell University, November 6-8, 2014
Proposals due: March 1, 2014

Thematic Clusters:
Gender and Sexuality
Built and Natural Environments
Race and Ethnicity
Intellectual and Cultural History
State, Migration, and Citizenship

Keynote and Plenary Speakers:
Orlando Patterson, Harvard
Guy Standing, University of London
Nancy Fraser, New School
Peniel Joseph, Tufts
Jackson Lears, Rutgers
Julia Ott, New School
Richard White, Stanford

The Cornell Conference on the Histories of American Capitalism invites panels and individual papers that seek to make connections between the diverse historiographic subfields of the last several decades and the recent interest in the history of capitalism. In short, we seek a path forward from the “cultural turn” while honoring its complexity. Our
starting clusters are listed above, but we are open to panels in other subfields as well. Our invitation is open to scholars at any stage of their careers. Please include a 500 word description and c.v. for each paper proposal.

Contact and Submissions:
Jefferson Cowie (cowie@cornell.edu)

CFP: The Social History of Money and Credit

Richard Robinson Business History Workshop
Portland State University
May 22-24 2014 Portland, OR

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop at Portland State University
extends a call for papers concerning the social and cultural history of
money and credit. We are interested in papers that engage the meanings and uses of financial instruments in daily life as well as in the popular
imagination. Papers concerning the social history of money and credit in
non-Western contexts are particularly encouraged. Papers from all
disciplines are welcome so long as they address topics historically. Topics
proposed may include but are not limited to:

• The cultural history of currencies, including contested and alternative
currencies
• Credit and debt as social relations, and the social significance of
business contacts and credit networks
• Insolvency, bankruptcy, seizure of merchandise and imprisonment for debt
• Microcredit and informal credit instruments
• Credibility and personal reputation
• The politics of the bond market and the credibility of the state
• The development of institutionalized credit markets
• Money and credit in commercial law
• The meaning of money and credit in colonial, postcolonial, or
transnational settings

Those interested in presenting should submit a one-page paper abstract and CV to the Workshop coordinators Erika Vause (Saint Xavier University), Thomas Luckett (Portland State University) or Chia Yin Hsu (Portland State University) at historyworkshop@pdx.edu by December 6, 2013.

Accepted presenters will be notified by January 17, 2014. We plan to include 10-15 papers to be pre-circulated and discussed in plenary sessions on Friday, May 23, and Saturday, May 24. There will also be a public keynote address on the evening of Thursday, May 22.

We have funding to cover hotel expenses and partial travel reimbursements for up to about ten participants. There is no registration cost.

History of Capitalism Boot Camp

History of Capitalism Summer Camp
Cornell University
July 14 – 25, 2013

Want to write history using corporate archives?
Want to use numbers?
Don’t know where to start?

Join 25 other historians and get the skills you need to understand economic theory, interpret quantitative sources, make sense of corporate archives, and write the new history of capitalism from the bottom all the way to the top.

Topics include:
Microeconomics
Macroeconomics
Data Analysis
GIS
Financial Statements
Corporate Finance
Business Strategy
Graphing

Session includes housing, breakfast, lunch, and all materials
Instruction will be by Cornell faculty and staff
Faculty: $1800 Graduate Students: $600

To apply: https://sites.google.com/site/historyofcapitalismsummercamp/

CFP: Critical Finance Studies conference

The fifth Critical Finance Studies conference will be held at Stockholm University School of Business from August 14–16. This year we are again looking for contributions to our ongoing collaborative research project that seeks to engage finance in critically creative ways. Although critical attention is regularly devoted to finance, it generally takes the form of a call for transparency, or the systemic repair and restructuring of a paradigm in need of a shift. While finance is clearly a societal domain ridden with crisis, our sense of critique embraces the possibility of risky confrontations with the external powers that drive finance, as well as with internal, ethical combats that impact on the critic’s own situation within academic discourses on finance. We are, therefore, calling for contributions that take into account the relationship of the critic to finance and to discourses on finance, including received values, moral codes, authoritarian knowledge, political correctness, academic manners, common sense, good will, opinion and implicit presuppositions. We also invite papers that approach finance through avenues that have been underexplored such as theology, philosophy, art, music, film, new media and television, to give just a few examples.

Authors interested in publishing a paper in a special edition of the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting entitled Critical Finance Studies will have the opportunity to do so. Please submit an abstract (no more than 500 words) to Thomas Bay (bay@fek.su.se) and Joyce Goggin (J.Goggin@uva.nl) no later than 1 May 2013. Further info here.

CFP: “Capital, Inc.: Capitalists, Capitalism, and Corporations in the Cinematic Imagination”

An area of multiple panels for the 2013 Film & History Conference on
Making Movie$: The Figure of Money On and Off the Screen, November 20-24, 2013
Madison Concourse Hotel (Madison, WI)
www.filmandhistory.org/The2013FilmHistoryConference.php
DEADLINE for abstracts: July 1, 2013

AREA: Capital, Inc.: Capitalists, Capitalism, and Corporations in the Cinematic Imagination

The history of film bears the marks of economic crises, especially recently, with films addressing not only the downturn since 2008 but also broader, even esoteric, trends such as financialization, regulatory capture, outsourcing, rising inequality, and an accelerating trend towards plutocracy. Hollywood often vilifies corporate capitalism. Sometimes it exalts it. Is Hollywood liberal or conservative toward Wall Street? When are film and television trapped inside the platitudes of left-wing or right-wing definitions of the “corporation”? And when do some films move beyond them? How does the economic failure or success imagined on film characterize or redefine “capital” for its target audience? What cinematic figures of corporate capitalism affirm or subvert the national character—and why?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes proposals for individual papers or full panels that examine how filmmakers have imagined, critiqued, and/or underwritten capitalism through depictions of corporations and/or its employees, whether CEOs, middle-managers, cubicle dwellers, or blue-collar laborers. Proposals are welcome to draw upon recent titles or older films. They are also welcome to focus on films produced outside of the United States, to explain how corporate capitalism is produced and consumed cinematically for a global audience. Possible topics:

• Office Workers (9 to 5, Clockwatchers, Office Space)
• High Finance (Trading Places, Wall Street, Other People’s Money)
• Unions (The Devil and Miss Jones, Blue Collar, Norma Rae)
• Bourgeois Alienation (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Fight Club, American Beauty)
• Media (Network, Broadcast News, The Insider)
• Consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Wall-E)
• Documentaries (Roger and Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Corporation)
• Corporations in Space (Rollerball, Alien, Robocop)
• The Great Recession (Les Misérables, The Dark Knight Rises, Margin Call, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Other Guys, Tower Heist, In Time, The Hunger Games, Inside Job, The Queen of Versailles, The Company Men, Up in the Air, The Descendants, The Girlfriend Experience, Capitalism: A Love Story).

CFP: Economic Rationalities

ECORA will host a three-day conference on Economic Rationalities in January 2014.

Regimes of thought and legitimizations of action draw upon systematized authorities of religious, juridical, moral, scientific and increasingly economic reasoning. These authorities interrelate in various ways. They compete to be the prime, societal authority; they supplant each other; they borrow metaphors, concepts, practices; they subvert and change existing languages. To address these interrelations ECORA invites interested scholars to submit paper proposals on the historical study of economic rationality and the struggles for authority between economic reasoning and other claims for knowledge- and practice-authority in Western modernity.

Abstracts must be submitted to one of three parallel streams:

• The Renaissance
• The Enlightenment
• American and Western European Capitalism

We invite scholars with an interest in the history of economic thought to submit a paper proposal. We particularly encourage scholars working with the interrelations between economic, religious and/or scientific reasoning to participate as well as people understanding their work as, or related to, what could called the ‘history of economic thought’, ‘intellectual history of capitalism’, ‘history of economic ideas’, and ‘history of science and science studies’.

Click here for further information.

CFP: Financialization and its Limits: History, Context, Culture

Stream at Critical Management Studies 2013

Convenors:

Angus Cameron, Senior Lecturer in Spatial Organisation, University of Leicester School of Management.
David Harvie, Senior Lecturer in Finance and Political Economy, University of Leicester School of Management.
Geoffrey Lightfoot, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Accounting, University of Leicester School of Management
Simon Lilley, Professor of Information and Organisation, University of Leicester School of Management
Yuval Millo, Professor of Social Studies of Finance and Management Accounting, University of Leicester School of Management

Any discussion of the limits of neoliberalism would be incomplete with consideration of the roles of finance and financialization (Amato and Fantacci 2012). But, research within the social sciences of management, finance and, to a lesser extent, accounting has treated finance as standing apart from other disciplines. This has led to consideration of financialization as a unilateral process: that finance acts upon society as if it were wholly external and self-evident. This is, in part, derived from a particular conception of finance as a purely mathematical/quantitative field, although this formulation is relatively recent, emerging only in the 1960s with the so-called New Finance.

As a result, financialization, as it is understood today (Johal et al. 2006), masks, in effect, a process that is fundamentally emergent and therefore incomplete (Poovey 1998). In particular, valuation, which lies at the heart of finance, is routinely presented as an objective, unproblematic practice. Yet, we argue, valuation is always political, as it selects a single expression of value, excluding all possible alternatives (Martin 2002) and thus circumscribing the field of possibilities. This might be no problem whilst it remains within sterile models, but once the social and political acts of valuation interact with lifeworlds that have not been redacted to the same extent, the collision is always unpredictable and potentially violent.

We invite papers that explore these issues, possibly touching upon the following themes:

• Big Society
  Biocrisis
  Cultures of finance
  Finance as methodology
  Financialization as performativity
  Food crisis
  Historicizing finance and histories of financialization
  Other financial imaginaries

Deadline 31st January 2013

Teaching the History of Capitalism

Last spring, Noam Maggor and Sven Beckert organized a one-day workshop on “Teaching the History of Capitalism.” Scholars from universities across the United States spent a day at Harvard discussing their teaching strategies and exchanging ideas on pedagogy. The meeting was a great success.

They have now posted a report of the proceedings, and have also assembled a number of syllabi of courses on the History of Capitalism.

Harvard Program on the Study of Capitalism

The Program on the Study of Capitalism has an exciting program scheduled for this academic year. Please make note of the many upcoming events – from the Political Economy Seminar, to conferences, lectures, reading groups, and dissertation workshops. All the details are listed in the calendar:
http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/calendar

Political Economy Seminar: Finance Capital
The Political Economy of Modern Capitalism Seminar is exploring the theme of “Finance Capital” this year. A full list of speakers and dates is available here:
http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/workshop

On October 29th, Carl Wennerlind will offer the first talk in the series on “An Inexhaustible Treasure: Slavery as the Foundation for the English Financial Revolution.”

Conference: The Global Thirties
On Friday, October 19th, along with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History, the Program will be hosting a conference on “The Global Thirties: Responses to the Great Depression.”
http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/node/131

Full List of Political Economy of Modern Capitalism Seminar Speakers

October 29: Prof. Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College (History), “An Inexhaustible Treasure: Slavery as the Foundation for the English Financial Revolution”

Comment: Sophus Reinert, HBS

November 12: Prof. Morgan Ricks, Vanderbilt Law School, “Moneymaking: A Monetary System Design”

    Comment: Amar Bhide, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

November 26:  Prof. James Livingston, Rutgers University (History), “Finance Capital: An Extremely Brief History of the Politics, and Vice Versa, ca. 1898-2010”

    Comment: Stephen Marglin, Harvard Economics

February 11: Prof. Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv Univ. School of Law, “This Standard Which Is Not One: Gold and Multiple Liquidity Regimes”

February 25: Prof. Annelise Riles, Cornell Univ. Law School, “Against Market Totalitarianism: Thinking Through Legal Technique”  

March 11: Speaker Session: Prof. David Moss, HBS, and Roger Lowenstein, journalist/author, “The Federal Reserve and the Banking Crisis of 1931”

March 25: Prof. Mary Poovey, NYU Univ. (Literature), “The Foundations of Finance,” from A Modern Way of Knowing: The History of Financial Modeling (work in progress)

Job Search: Political Economy and American Society

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR or TENURED ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
The George Washington University Department of American Studies seeks to appoint a scholar of political economy as a tenure-track assistant professor or tenured associate professor beginning Fall 2013. Research and teaching interests may include the social or cultural dimensions of work, wealth, capitalism, labor movements, globalization, neoliberalism, market exchange, consumer society, or related topics in American political economy.

Basic Qualifications: Applicants at the associate professor rank must hold a Ph.D. in American Studies or a related discipline and exhibit a strong record of scholarly publications and teaching. Applicants at the assistant professor rank must hold a Ph.D. in American Studies or a related field by August 1, 2013, and have teaching experience and research potential/experience, as demonstrated by works in progress or scholarly publications. ABD applicants will be considered but must complete all requirements for the Ph.D. by August 1, 2013.

Application Procedure: To apply, please complete an online faculty application at https://www.gwu.jobs/postings/10976 and upload a cover letter, CV, and thirty-page writing sample. In addition, please email three letters of recommendation to amstjob@gwu.edu.
Review of applications will begin on September 17, 2012, and will continue until the position is filled. Only complete applications will be considered. The George Washington University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and particularly encourages applications from women and persons of color. Further information: go.gwu.edu/americanstudies