CONFERENCE: A History of Penal Regimes in Global Perspective 1800-2014 (Harvard, 5-7 March 2015)

(image: the Louviers prison, source: Criminocorpus (CNRS))

Harvard University organizes a conference on "penal regimes in global perspective 1800-2014".  The event is sponsored by the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, the Harvard University Asia Center; and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

Program:

Thursday March 5th
Penal Knowledge, Reform and Comparative Regimes, 4:00-6:00pm
Chair: Caroline Elkins, Professor, Department of History and African and African American Studies
“Lemos Britto and Prison Reform in Brazil”
Marcos Bretas, Professor, Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
“Between East and West: State-Building, Democratization and Imprisonment in 19th and early 20th Century Greece,”
Leonidas K. Cheliotis, Assistant Professor in Criminology, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science
“Writing a Global History of the Modern Prison: To What End? And How?”
Stephan Scheuzger, Professor of History, University of Bern, Switzerland
Commentator: Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Dinner and talk at 7pm (For conference panelists only)
“Rethinking Discipline and Punish: 40 Years Later”
Bernard Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Columbia University
Comment: Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University

Friday, March 6th

The Penitentiary in Global Perspective, Friday, 8:30-10:30 am
Chair: Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History, Harvard University
“The Birth of the Insular Prisons: The Bilibid Prisons as the Insular Prisons of the Colonial Philippines, 1866-1913”
Francis Alvarez Gealogo, Associate Professor, Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
“Revisiting The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America (almost) Twenty Years Later” Carlos Aguirre, Professor of History, University of Oregon & Ricardo Salvatore, Professor of History, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina
“Constructing the Prison in the Modern Middle East”
Anthony Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History, University of Edinburgh
Commentator: Tamar Herzog, Professor, Latin American History, Harvard University

Prisons and Bonds of Resistance, 10:45am-12:45pm
Chair: Emmanuel Akyeampong, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“The Cloak of Illegibility: Why do States Incarcerate Their Opponents?”
Padraic Kenney, Professor of History, Indiana University
“”Suffering and Protest in Rhodesian Prisons during the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle”
Munya Bryn Munochiveyi, Assistant Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross
“Prisoners on the Stage of International Politics: The Evidence from Risorgimento, Italy”
Steven Soper, Lecturer in History, University of Georgia
Commentator: Julia Rodriguez, Associate Professor of History, University of New Hampshire

Lunch Break 12:45-1:45

Penal Colonies: Globally and Locally, 2:00-3:30 pm
Chair: Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
“A Global History of Penal Colonies”
Clare Anderson, Professor of History, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
“The Andamans Cellular Jail”
Aparna Vaidik, Associate Professor of History, Ashoka University, India
“Contesting Colonial Rule: Mobility, Confinement and the Politics of Exile”
Uma Kothari, Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Commentator: Prasannan Parthasarathi, Professor of History, Boston College

State Collectivist Penal Regimes, 3:30-5:30
Chair, Lisa McGirr, Department of History, Harvard University
“Confinement in the “Cowshed”: The Extra-judicial Disciplinary Penalty during the Chinese Cultural Revolution”
Guo Wu, Associate Professor of History, Allegheny College
“Recruiting Compliance; Informant Networks in the Soviet Gulag, 1953-1964”
Jeff Hardy, Associate Professor of History, Brigham Young University
“Siberia-Land of Sorrow: Penal Regime as a Spatial Concept of Russian and Soviet Empire-Building”
Eva-Maria Stolberg, Associate Professor of Russian and Global History, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Comment: Terry Martin, Professor, Department of History, Harvard University

Saturday, March 7th

Convict Labor, 8:30-10:30 am
Chair: Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“From Eda to Upper Digul, Punishment, Imprisonment and Forced Labour in the Netherlands Indies (1730-1942)”
Matthias van Rossum, International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands
“Convicts, Prisons and Industrialists in South Africa, 1870-1970”
William Worger, Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Prison System in British and French Cameroon, 1922-1961: Comparing Incarceration and Penality”
Henry Kam Kah, Lecturer in History, University of Buea, Cameroon
Commentator: Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University- Bloomington
Mass Incarceration in the Americas, 10:45am -12:45pm
Chair: Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“Toward a Reassessment of the American Penal Regime: Foucault, Attica, and the Contingencies of Punitive Policy Triumph”
Heather Thompson, Professor of African American Studies and History, University of Michigan
“Historical Evolution and Global Changes in Women’s Imprisonment in Peru,”
Chloe Constant, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico
“Jail Time and the New Prison Social Order: Transformation in Venezuelan Prisons, 1980-2012”
Andres Antillano, Professor of Criminology, Universidad Central de Venezuela
Commentator, Lilian Bobea, Latin American Faculty of Social Science, FLACSO, Dominican Republic

Practical Information:

Jessica Barnard
1727 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138
jbarnard@wcfia.harvard.edu

Source: HSozKult.