This seminar will explore how societies and individuals across a large span of time and space constructed boundaries and what meanings they attached to them. VHS will pursue the study of boundaries in their various realms: politics, culture, and society. The seminar will look for fresh approaches to political and legal history, as it studies the ways in which societies have set territorial borders, surveyed land, and settled disputes over property. It will also explore topics in cultural and intellectual history, with an emphasis on the ways that people sought to demarcate different realms of existence (heaven and earth, mind and body, public and private), distinguish between the human and the nonhuman, and among the various dimensions of the human mind (rational and the irrational, sane and insane, the conscious and the unconscious). The boundaries of the disciplines, especially as they have shaped the writing of history, will draw the seminar's interest. So, too, will the ways in which individuals, groups, and knowledge have crossed boundaries, and the moments at which boundaries have weakened, collapsed, and reformed.

*Because they are unpublished, VHS papers on Boundaries are distributed in hardcopy form only at Vanderbilt. Please contact the authors for more information on papers. You may link to their faculty page or individual seminar posters below.

Vanderbilt History Seminar 2010–2011 participants:

Michael Bess, Vanderbilt University
Blurring the Boundary Between Human Brains and Machines
September 20, 2010

Magda Teter, Wesleyan University
The Making of Sacred Space: Poznan as the "Polish Jerusalem"
October 4, 2010

David Abraham, University of Miami School of Law
Immigration and Social Solidarity in a Time of Crisis
October 18, 2010

Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University
Bounded and Boundless: Episodes from an Alternative History of South Asian Religion
November 15, 2010

Cynthia Radding, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Imperial Boundaries and the Creation of Desert Landscapes in Northern Mexico
December 10, 2010

Richard White, Stanford University
Spatial History and the Boundaries of Historical Practice
January 24, 2011, Sarratt 216/220, 4:10 PM

Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, University of Virginia
Religious and Cultural Landscapes of Angola during the Era of the Slave Trade
February 14, 2011

Alison Winter, University of Chicago
Mind, Memory, and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Science
February 28, 2011

Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
The Europe of Republics, 1970–2000: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization in Contemporary History
CANCELLED
March 14, 2011

Sarah Igo, Vanderbilt University
What's Personal? What's Public? The Politics of Privacy in the Modern U.S.
April 11, 2011