By August 10, 2012, please send a working paper of approximately 3000 words, together with an abstract (300 word maximum) to Ruth Lahti at rlahti@english.umass.edu.

Please send abstracts and papers by attachment in MS Word, so that we can collate a file of abstracts only. We’ll convert all documents to PDFs and post them on a protected site. (Or, if you prefer, you may send your paper in PDF and send the abstract separately in MSWord.) Receipt of papers and abstracts by the August 10 deadline will allow us to organize seminar discussions around the key themes that have emerged in the papers.

Your paper should articulate your sense of the implications of recent research and analyses in world history before 1500, especially for current academic accounts of economy, culture, globalization, and empire. To this end, please read the target essays and write your papers with them in mind; but you need not organize your paper directly around any of them, unless you so choose. Please do, however, include some mention of them, in text or endnotes, at least briefly linking your discussion to those of the target essays. Especially for those of you familiar with the scholarship covered in the target materials, it may make sense to engage at more length with other, related scholarship, rather than with these target essays per se.

Please flesh out your perspective, theory, or questions with 1-2 examples from your own research and area of expertise. This focus on conceptual possibilities or problems illustrated through concrete specifics from your own research, together with at least some reference to target materials, will help to supply a coherent framework for the seminar’s interdisciplinary discussion.