Associate Professor of History Paul Musselwhite will host the 2023 Dartmouth History Institute, which will take place from June 20 to 23. This year's symposium, The Global and the Local: New Histories from Across the 17th-Century World, will explore the history of the 17th century from multiple global perspectives, with attention to questions of scale and chronology.
The annual symposium explores emerging trends and the best new work in a particular subfield of history by inviting finishing or recently-finished PhD students to present and workshop parts of their dissertations with senior scholars and editors. The theme changes from year to year.
This year, 14 scholars from around the world will workshop chapter and article drafts and discuss their book projects. Joining the discussion are Dartmouth's history faculty, distinguished guest historians (including Ellen Nye '14, a postdoc at Harvard who completed her doctorate at Yale), and Joshua Piker, editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American and early modern history.
"The main aim of the workshop is to build networks among scholars working in the particular subfield and seed collaborations that will place Dartmouth at the heart of new developments in historical research," Musselwhite says. "Previous directors have found that many of the scholars who attend go on to become important friends and colleagues who continue to share ideas, publish work in the publications of our faculty, and mentor each others' students."
Previous themes of the annual event include Illnesses in Asia: A Comparative History (2022, directed by Soyoung Suh, Douglas Haynes, and Erqi Cheng; New Directions in Medieval Religious History (2018, directed by Cecilia Gaposchkin and Walter Simons); and European Intellectual History (2017, directed by Udi Greenberg and Darrin McMahon).
The History Institute is made possible by the generous support of the Ethics Institute, the Department of History, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, and the Office of the Associate Dean of the Social Sciences.
