It’s been a while since the project blog was updated, but rest assured that project elves have been beavering away in the background all this time! Our partners at the British Library have been working with the project research assistant, Sarah Backhouse, ISA lecturer Matthew Hill, and the team at ULCC on the digital library, which will be hitting metaphorical online shelves very soon. In my new post at the University of Leicester, I have also been overseeing the development of the digital library and spreading the Liberalism in the Americas excitement to the East Midlands!

Partly to celebrate the culmination of the digital library, and to further develop several themes that have emerged from previous project events, I will be convening a 2-day conference at the University of Leicester on “Liberalism in the Americas: Popular, Gendered and Global Perspectives” on 4 and 5 July 2013. Above all, like our previous events series, the conference seeks to explore the contested ways in which liberal ideas and practices were accepted, adapted, translated, and rejected in different local, regional, national, and international contexts. Following the transnational and comparative aims of the project as a whole, the conference programme includes speakers working on different parts of Latin America, North America and the Atlantic World. Our two plenary speakers also represent the transnational and comparative dimensions of the conference: Dr Nicholas Guyatt (University of York), will be speaking on “‘The High Ground of Humanity’: Liberal Understandings of Racial Removal in the Nineteenth-Century Americas” and Dr Gabriel Paquette (Johns Hopkins University), will be talking “Liberals and Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian Atlantic World.”

I hope you’ll be able to join us for this exciting conference programme, and the culmination of 2 years work on the Liberalism in the Americas project.

Thanks to the continued generous sponsorship of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, the registration fee is heavily subsidised and an absolute bargain! Further details, and the online registration system, can be found here. Places are limited, and the deadline for registration is 16 June, so don’t delay in reserving your place!

As always, any questions – just contact me!