Call for Papers:
2nd International Society for Regional History (ISRH)
Conference at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
4-6 November 2024

People, Places, Landscape and Memory

Regional histories require a re-examining of the notion of history itself. It is the sum of innumerable small actions and reactions by ordinary people over centuries as they encountered other different societies. Broadly viewed, landscapes and places can be considered as areas of human connectivity. Landscapes encompass wild, cultivated, urban, feral, and fallow spaces and human and nonhuman entities who inhabit and shape them. Memory refers to the interpretation of experience as it exists in the present, bridging temporally discrete moments through the intentional or unintentional act of remembering. Memory studies, from the example anthropology’s view, include explorations of individual forms of remembrance, and the collective, heterogeneous ways of marking, interpreting, and erasing the past. Taken together, place, landscape, and memory (in written and formally recorded form) co-constitute one another: landscapes store, depict, and evoke memories while memories in places recall, revise, and shape landscapes. There are, and have always been, many kinds of evolutive regions as exposed in many historiographies and in different vocabularies of what a region may be: Not only politically or administratively formed, but also regions formed on basis of landscape, culture, or some functional or economic criteria.