Early Americans spoke of monstrous births and depicted dancing skeletons on gravestones. They complained about loosened corsets and uncomfortable wigs and passed sumptuary laws to control what people wore. Bodies crossed oceans in cramped spaces, destined for sale as commodities on distant auction blocks. Constructions of bodily difference from early America shape perceptions of race and gender even today. Controlling the bodies of others could be a source of power as well as wealth. Some early Americans conceived of their bodies as earthly proxies in touch with spiritual beings. Still others employed them as sites of performance, inscribing identities in the flesh. In sum, early America took shape as a place of intermingling bodies and bodily conceptions in ways that historians have only just begun to explore.

What social and cultural meanings lie in the diverse relations early Americans had with bodies, both physical and metaphorical? Corpus americanus seeks to decipher the images, events, objects, and abstractions of the body that entered into the encounters among different groups in the Americas and into the making of new peoples and states. Investigating "the body" in early America promises to open new prospects on all aspects of early American life, including law, science, gender, politics, religion, and race.

To chart this unfolding terrain of scholarship, the University of Connecticut History Department and the American Antiquarian Society invited graduate students to submit paper proposals for the Third James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies, to be held in Storrs, Connecticut and Worcester, Massachusetts from Thursday to Saturday, September 18- 20, 2008. We encouraged broad-ranging, interdisciplinary presentations investigating bodies as sites and representations of changing and emerging cultural and social meanings in the Americas and the Atlantic world from the beginnings of Native American, European, and African encounters down to the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

This year's conference features a keynote address by Walter Johnson, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Closing remarks will be delivered by John Wood Sweet, Associate Professor of History, at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We hope to see you in the fall!

The Draper Committee Erin Bartram, Gloria Boyd, Alea Henle, Adam Jacobs, Jessica Linker, William Mathews, and Linda Meditz draperconference@uconn.edu