A Short History of FEEGI

The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (F.E.E.G.I.) was founded in April 1994 at a meeting held at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. Thirty historians from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands met at a forum entitled "European Expansion (and Reaction)." Over the course of three days, the plans for F.E.E.G.I. were laid. According to a press release issued later in the year, the new organization would be "linked to the European Science Foundation's Network on the History of European Expansion and with the Leiden University Institute for the History of European Expansion and the Reactions to It."

You may read the founding conference program and the press release in their entirety.

The first biennial meeting of F.E.E.G.I. was held in 1996 in Minneapolis. A complete set of the biennial meeting programs can be found on the Conferences page of this web site. The first meeting established a practice that continues to the present: panels at F.E.E.G.I. meetings are organized topically, rather than geographically or by nation, to encourage comparative thinking across large amounts of space and time.

The Forum is an affiliated organization of the American Historical Association. Since F.E.E.G.I. meets only in even-numbered years, it has become the practice to seek panels to cosponsor at the American Historical Association annual meeting, particularly in odd-numbered years. One example of this sort of sponsored panel was "The Atlantic World: Emerging Themes in a New Teaching Field", with an accompanying web site that is still available with an overview and several sample syllabi.

A distinguished group of scholars have led the organization into its second decade of existence. Many of the founding group remain active as well. You are welcome to see the changing leadership over the years.