First Call for Papers

THE EIGHTH TAMPERE CONFERENCE ON NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES
"BORDER CROSSINGS", APRIL 22-25, 1999

The 1999 Tampere Conference will be the eighth biennial international conference on North American Studies organized by the North American Studies Program at the University of Tampere. The theme of the conference will be 'Border Crossings' referring to the end of the millennium and to new scholarly challenges.

We are hoping to make the 1999 conference truly cross-disciplinary in the tradition of these conferences, with speakers from North America and Europe in such fields as literature, linguistics, history, sociology, media studies, politics, and anthropology among others.

The conference welcomes proposals of individual papers, panels, and workshops on all aspects of the theme of the conference. We anticipate the following three broad foci to emerge, but participants are encouraged both to seek interrelationships between them and to interpret the theme as broadly as possible:

cross-disciplinarity in scholarship (e.g. questions of cross-disciplinary area studies and cultural studies; the place of more traditional interpretive frameworks in humanities and social sciences; modernity/postmodernity debate)
boundaries of personhood and nationhood, of cultures and societies (e.g. meaning and context of identity; building the citizen: nation, gender, class, and race; ethnicity and identity; shapes of political community: liberalism, republicanism, and communitarianism in North America; 'America' as an argument in European social and political thought; transformations of industrial societies in comparison)
national borders and international relations from the cold war to globalization (e.g. the cold war reappraised; post-cold war transatlantic relations; doing away with borders?: the North American community after NAFTA; globalization and sovereignty; new media flows; immigration and emigration)

Please submit an abstract (1 page) of proposed papers to Jarmo Oikarinen, Conference Coordinator, or Benita Heiskanen, Program Coordinator for North American Studies,by September 30, 1998.

You can also register on-line at our internet web-site:

http://www.uta.fi/konferenssi/nam99/.

Welcome to Tampere!

Marjatta Hietala, Chair of the Conference, Director, North American Studies, Professor of General History

Jarmo Oikarinen, Conference Coordinator, North American Studies

Benita Heiskanen Program Coordinator North American Studies

Center for North American Studies
University of Tampere, P.O. Box 607, Tampere FIN-33101, FINLAND
Phone: +358-3-215 7154
Fax: +358-3-215 6980
Email: NorthAmericanStudies@uta.fi
Web: http://www.uta.fi/konferenssi/nam99/