Organized by the American Historical Association, the World History Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the African Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the Conference on Latin American History, the Association for Asian Studies, the Community College Humanities Association and the Library of Congress, this conference aims to go beyond traditional area studies and to cross the usual national, geographical and cultural boundary lines of scholarship by taking explicitly comparative, crosscultural, systematic, global or other appropriate approaches.  A major purpose is to explore contemporary globalization in historical context and the historical processes that drive globalization, as well as the way in which the current dialectic of globalization and fragmentation affects the definition of areas and regions.

Each of the three conference days will focus on a particular rubric.
Day One:  Movement of peoples, ideas and goods; material interactions and their sites.
Day Two:  Networks and connections beyond the nation-state.
Day Three:  Reconfigurations of "area" and "state," their implications and interactions.

More specifically, but not exclusively, papers might consider some of the following themes and their possible combinations:

• Politics:  Dominant forms, countervailing forces, the rise and fall of power centers.  Alternatives to national states as units of historical analysis, changing historical definitions of regions and sub-regions and their historically changing relationship to one another in different world orders.  Variants of imperialism and the place that different regions have had in them.
• Economics:  Regional and social division of labor, social change, formation of "world systems," uneven development.  Cross-cultural trade and its effects, sites of trade, mechanisms of trade such as brokers, trade diasporas, conventions governing exchange.  Imperialism and colonialism.  Environmental, ecological, biological exchanges.
• Social organization:  Global hierarchies of class, gender, race and their historical variations including the effects of contemporary globalization.  Migrations, diasporas and a gendered analysis of these.  Civil society and human rights, the political valence of non-governmental organizations.
• Culture:  Universalism vs. multiculturalism.  Hegemonic ideologies such as religion, nationalism, free market and the resistance to these.  Technological transfers, cultural exchanges and syncretism as expressions of dominance, of subversion and of convergence.  Ethnogenesis.  Postcolonial issues of representation and identity politics.

Paper proposals of one or two pages along with a brief curriculum vitae of no more than two pages, should be sent, preferably electronically to, Debbie Doyle.  Or by mail to Debbie Doyle, American Historical Association, 400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.
Deadline: March 15, 2000.