Bridging National Borders in North America

FAIN: FS-50340-13

Newberry Library (Chicago, IL 60610-3305)
Benjamin Heber Johnson (Project Director: March 2013 to December 2014)

A four-week summer seminar for sixteen college and university faculty, focusing on the history of borderlands in North America.

Proposes a seminar on the history of borderlands in North America, to be held at the Newberry Library from June 2 to June 27, 2014. Borderlands studies have emerged from their conceptual cradle, New Spain's northern frontier, to serve as an analytic concept for illuminating contact zones across the wider North American continent and beyond. The seminar's organizing theme is the process of border-making. We will examine three aspects of this theme: how nation-states claiming exclusive territorial sovereignty re-drew the continent's map; the intersection and sometimes collision of these efforts with other ways of organizing space and people; and the social and political consequences of the enforcement of national territoriality. The seminar's format, readings, and guest scholars have been selected with the goal of bringing together participants with diverse scholarly agendas into a common conversation about these developments.