Meeting Theme / Call for Papers
ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING
EHA 2023 Annual Meeting
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 8-10, 2023
Pittsburgh is a vibrant city with a captivating blend of history, culture, and natural beauty. Its skyline showcases its industrial past, while its modern charm and innovation have transformed it into a must-visit destination.
Pittsburgh is a vibrant city with a captivating blend of history, culture, and natural beauty. Its skyline showcases its industrial past, while its modern charm and innovation have transformed it into a must-visit destination.
Economic History Association
The theme for EHA 2023 is Love and Toil, Care and Work.
The theme for EHA 2023 is Love and Toil, Care and Work.
While Adam Smith defined economics in terms of wealth creation and Lionel Robbins in terms of limited means and unlimited ends, Alfred Marshall thought of it as ‘…a study of men (sic) as they live and move and think in the ordinary business of life’. Nothing could be more ordinary than caring. It takes place all the time and all around us. It involves diverse tasks, which can be commercialised but are often unpaid, although sometimes very labour-intensive. Care can be provided domestically or in the community, but today it is increasingly globalised. Most importantly, care adds significantly to well-being and simultaneously enhances productivity. However (and here I build on last year’s theme), caring work is hidden in plain sight. This is perhaps understandable since it is often unpaid and performed in private households, yet we recognise and impute values to other non-market activities. Moreover, commercialised caring is also neglected and undervalued, despite constituting a significant sector of most economies. It takes a pandemic of catastrophic proportions to reveal care’s importance. But while we applauded our carers not so long ago, they and their product are already fading from our economic consciousness. The program committee calls for papers identifying caring’s importance, not only to secure a complete account of the ordinary business of life but also to augment, perhaps even correct, standard interpretations of economic history framed in terms of Smithian enrichment or Robbinsian rational allocative order. The Program Committee, chaired by Eric Schneider (London School of Economics), welcomes submissions on all subjects in economic history, though some preference will be given to papers that fit the conference’s theme. Papers should be submitted individually, but authors may suggest to the Committee that three particular papers fit well together in a panel. In addition to typical research papers, egg timer talks, and 10-minute talks without questions will be trialed at EHA in 2023. These talks allow speakers to lay out the main findings of their research and receive informal feedback after the sessions from attendees. Work being presented should, in all cases, be in progress rather than accepted or published. Submitters should let the program committee know at the time of application if the paper they
are proposing has already been submitted for publication. Individuals who presented or co-authored a paper given at the 2022 meeting are not eligible for inclusion in the 2023 program. Proposals for papers, egg timer talks, and sessions should be submitted online with the following submission form: https://eh.net/eha/2023-eha-meeting-proposal/. The submission system will be available starting September 18, 2022. Paper and egg timer talk proposals should include a 3–5-page proposal and a 150–word abstract suitable for publication in the Journal of Economic History and should be submitted by January 31, 2023, to ensure consideration. Please note that at least one of the authors must be a EHA member.
Graduate students are encouraged to attend the meeting, and the association offers students subsidies for travel, hotel, registration, and meals, including a special graduate student dinner. A poster session welcomes work from dissertations in progress. The poster submission system will open on March 1, 2023. Applications for the poster session are due online on the meeting’s website no later than May 21, 2023. The dissertation session, convened by Vellore Arthi (University of California, Irvine) and Patrick Wallis (London School of Economics), will honor six dissertations completed during the 2022-2023 academic year. The submission deadline is May 31, 2023. The Allan Nevins and Alexander Gerschenkron prizes will be awarded to the best dissertations on North American and non-North American topics, respectively. Dissertations must be submitted as a single PDF file. Files of less than 5 MB in size may be sent directly to the conveners as an email attachment. To submit a file over 5 MB, please supply a download link in an email message. The Nevins prize submissions should be sent to: varthi@uci.edu and the Gerschenkron prize submissions to: P.H.Wallis@lse.ac.uk. All submissions will be acknowledged by return email.
If you have any questions about the general conference or are a graduate student interested in the subsidies, please email the EHA Meetings Coordinator, Jeremy Land (jeremy.land@helsinki.fi).