CfP: Global Histories of Hair, c. 1500-2026
An international, interdisciplinary conference, organised by the SNSF Starting Grant Team “Matter of Distinction: Early Modern Hair, Race, Trade, and Multispecies History” (Annika Bärwald, Laura Schleiss, Sarah-Maria Schober) at the University of Lucerne on October 8–10, 2026. Hyper-present on almost all heads and bodies, hair is a forceful matter of difference. It signals gender, class, sometimes religion or politics – as well as racialised distinction. As such, hair connects and disconnects humans and other species across the globe and throughout history. The conference “Global Histories of Hair” aims to bring together researchers working on hair as a matter of distinction in the early modern and modern worlds. One temporal focus is on the period between approximately 1500 and 1850, encapsulating the European and colonial “age of the wig”. Alongside various types of animal hair reaching their position as “commodities of empire” during this time, human hair was cut, collected and...