Call For Papers - ASEH Meeting 2009, Tallahassee

Paradise Lost, Found, and Constructed: Conceptualizing and Transforming Landscapes through History

Tallahassee, Florida

February 25 – March 1, 2009

The deadline for proposals has passed.

The American Society for Environmental History invites panel, roundtable, paper, and poster proposals for its 2009 meeting in Tallahassee, Florida. Proposals may address any area of environmental history, but in keeping with the conference themes, we especially solicit submissions examining the interplay between different strategies for imagining, understanding, and managing landscapes throughout human history.

The conference site - Florida - is one of the nation’s most contested landscapes for the playing out of cultural fantasies about idealized nature. From St. Augustine to Miami Beach, from Cape Canaveral to Disney World, Florida has been a landscape of dreams - and when the landscape (or its mosquitoes and hurricanes) did not readily conform to the dream, of landscape design and modification. Simultaneously, like many other exotic landscapes around the world, Florida has often been conceptualized as a paradise that is increasingly under threat. This has led to repeated attempts to restore the "lost" Florida, nowhere more famously than in the massive multi-billion dollar Everglades reconstruction project. These impulses - to attempt to find or construct an idealized Florida, to bemoan the loss of an idealized Florida, and to reconstruct a degraded Florida - are staple subjects for environmental historians, especially if you replace "Florida" with “nature,” “landscape,” or "environment."

The committee encourages panel, roundtable, and poster proposals that focus on these broad themes, including (but not limited to): studies of actual physical changes to landscapes; how nature, particularly the nature found in exotic locales, has been conceptualized; reconsidering the declensionist tendencies in environmental history; analyses of restoration ecology as a mode of understanding or acting upon nature; and, travel, tourism, or spectacular nature.

The committee strongly prefers complete panel proposals rather than individual papers. Please limit panels to three papers (commentator optional) or four papers and no commentator.  Sessions last 1.5 hours; plan the length of introductions, presentations, and comments so that your session includes ½ hour for discussion. Participants may only present one formal paper, but they may also engage in roundtable, chairing, or comment duties. You may submit an individual paper proposal, but please be aware that acceptance rates are traditionally lower for these proposals, and we would encourage individual papers to consider a poster presentation.

Click here to download a pdf copy of this call for papers.

• Michael Lewis, chair, Salisbury University, mllewis@salisbury.edu
• Mark Barrow, Virginia Tech, barrow@vt.edu
• Laurel Braitman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lbrait@mit.edu
• Fritz Davis, local arrangements chair, Florida State University, fdavis@fsu.edu
• Sylvia Washington Hood, University of Illinois-Chicago, sewhood@uic.edu