CALL FOR PAPERS: African Legal History Symposium

Co-conveners: Erin Braatz, Suffolk University Law School; Trina Hogg, Oregon State University; Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University; Charlotte Walker-Said, CUNY-John Jay College

Fortuitously, the 2019 annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the American Society for Legal History will both take place November 21-23 in Boston. In hopes of sparking a more sustained engagement across these two fields, and marking what we see as an inflection point in scholarship on African legal history, we invite paper proposals for an African Legal History preconference symposium, to be held in Boston on November 21, 2019. The symposium will be hosted by the American Society for Legal History in coordination with the African Studies Association, with sponsorship from the Suffolk University Law School.

We seek papers in the field of African legal history, broadly construed, and are particularly excited about papers that extend the insights of established scholarship, with its focus on customary law, in new directions. We encourage paper and panel proposals on law in Africa in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods, British, French, Islamic, Lusophone, and indigenous African traditions, and on all types of law (family, criminal, property, constitutional, business, customary, imperial, pluralist, international, etc.) Papers may focus on any region of the continent (including North Africa and the island territories).

Please email abstracts for proposed papers to bmello@suffolk.edu, with “African Legal History Symposium” in the subject line, by 5 April 2019. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words in length. Full papers to be presented at the symposium will be due by November 1, 2019, for circulation to all participants. Limited funding will be available to assist with the costs of travel. Funding priority will be given to scholars based on the African continent, graduate students, adjunct instructors, and scholars who do not have access to research funding through other sources.

We encourage symposium participants to consider submitting proposals directly to the ASA and ASLH as well, for inclusion in the main program of those conferences.

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