Whether it be Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the Bhakti saints’ drive to reform the Indian caste system, or the tremendous upheaval that gripped China during the Cultural Revolution, accounts of history reveal the inscription and implosion of the lines that inform our understandings of the world.

‘Crossing the line’ thus evokes not only the lines that are declared, pushed, and transgressed by historical subjects, but also the blurring of the disciplinary boundaries that can divide and compartmentalise us as scholars. What has it meant in history to cross a line? What does the existence of the lines themselves mean? And what is at stake in the drawing, crossing, and redrawing of lines? As scholars, it is our responsibility to identify not only when and where lines have been crossed, but how crossing them was significant.

The graduate students of the Department of History at the University of Toronto are pleased to accept paper and panel proposals for the Sixth Annual Graduate History Symposium (AGHS), to be held February 5-6, 2010. The organizing committee suggests paper and panel submissions on the following topics:

• Socio-political, economic, and legal history
• Cultural and social history (class, race, gender, and sexuality)
• (Post)coloniality, imperialism, and diaspora (racial 'otherness', alienation)
• Environmental, material and food history
• History and philosophy of science
• Religious history
• History of ideas and ideologies
• Construction of identities
• Historiography
• Any and all reflections not readily delineated by the above

Please submit a 250-word proposal and a short biographical sketch to aghs@utoronto.ca by Tuesday, December 1, 2009. Successful submissions will be notified by mid-December.