Scripting Revolutions Conference

DATES

November 3, 2011*: Bender Room, Green Library (Map & Directions) 
November 4 and 5, 2011: Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center (Map & Directions)

* (RSVP is required for this date only)

CONFERENCE POSTER (PDF)

PROGRAM (PDF)

THE EVENT

This conference will look at modern revolution as a historical script invented in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then elaborated and improvised upon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than asking which is the first modern revolution, or what stages all revolutions may (have to) go through, we will examine revolution as a way of defining and acting upon a particular situation, a narrative frame that political actors explicitly adopted and extended as giving meaning to their goals and strategic choices. To call oneself a revolutionary after the eighteenth century, in other words (or a counter-revolutionary too, for that matter), was to embrace a genealogy and script for action that could be changed or improvised upon, but was necessarily accepted before it could be adjusted or extended in a new context. The aim of the conference will be to see the extent to which modern revolutions can be analyzed and interpreted in this way as so many variations on a common theme. From this perspective, "scripting revolution" would also be about modes of historical writing and narration.

SPONSORS AND CO-SPONSORS

The School of Humanities and Sciences
The Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages
The Department of History
The Stanford Humanities Center
The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

PANELISTS

Pierre Serna (keynote speaker) - IHRF/Sorbonne
J.P. Daughton (chair) - Stanford University
Tim Harris (panelist) - Brown University
David Como (panelist) - Stanford University
Jack Rakove (panelist) - Stanford University
David Armitage (panelist) - Harvard University
Caroline Winterer (commentator) - Stanford University
Katherine McDonough (chair) - Stanford University
Keith Baker (panelist) - Stanford Unversity
Joseph Zizek (panelist) - University of Auckland
Dan Edelstein (panelist) - Stanford University
David A. Bell (commentator) - Princeton University
Kelly Summers (chair) - Stanford University
Carla Hesse (panelist) - UC Berkeley
Guillaume Mazeau (panelist) - IHRF/Sorbonne
Mary Ashburn Miller (commentator) - Reed College
Derek Vanderpool (chair) - Stanford University
Gareth Stedman Jones (panelist) - Queen Mary, University of London
Dominica Chang (panelist) - Lawrence University
Kent Wright (commentator) - Arizona State University
Nancy Kollmann (chair) - Stanford University
Lynn Patyk (panelist) - Dartmouth College
Claudia Verhoeven (panelist) - Cornell University
Amir Weiner (panelist) - Stanford University
Jonathan Beecher (commentator) - UC Santa Cruz
Tom Mullaney (chair) - Stanford University
Alex Cook (panelist) - UC Berkeley
David Strand (panelist) - Dickinson College
Elizabeth McGuire (panelist) - Harvard University
Andrew Walder (commentator) - Stanford University
Edith Sheffer (chair) - Stanford University
Lillian Guerra (panelist) - University of Florida
Jean-Marie Apostolides (panelist) - Stanford University
Abbas Milani (panelist) - Stanford University
Silvana Toska (commentator) - Cornell University