Early Modern Notes

CFP (US): Society for Early Americanists conference, Virginia, March-April 2005. A diverse range of panels for which proposals are invited. Deadline: 15 September 2004.

CFP (UK): Celtic romanticism and Gothic revisionism, Bristol University, January 2005. To explore “the many surprising ways that ancient ‘Celtic’ and ‘Gothic’ identities have been employed to authenticate modern cultures and nations… Addressing scholarly revisions from c. 1600 to the present, Celtic Romanticism and Gothic Revisionism emphasises the inherently politicised relationships between authenticity, antiquity and reconstructed identities. Contributions are welcomed from a variety of academic fields and theoretical perspectives.” Deadline 1 October 2004.

CFP (UK): Still kissing the rod? Early modern women’s writing in 2005, Oxford, July 2005. “In part a celebration of the Perdita initiative, this conference reflects on the past 20 years and explores directions for the next phase in the study of early modern women’s writing.” Headline speakers include Germaine Greer and Margaret Ezell. Deadline for abstracts: 31 October 2004.

CFP (UK): Readers, audiences and coteries in early modern England, Keele University, April 2005. An interdisciplinary post-graduate conference. Papers invited “on any aspect of textual production, circulation and reception during the Early Modern period. Papers may wish to address issues such as the relationship between manuscript and print, theories of reception and discursive practice, the influence of manuscript or print on contemporary attitudes and events, developments in production and distribution techniques, or any other aspect of information exchange.” Deadline for abstracts: 21 January 2005.

Conference (US): Science, literature and the arts in medieval and early modern Europe, Binghamton University, New York, 22 October 2004.

Conference (UK): Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, V & A, London, 12-13 November 2004. “This conference complements the major V&A exhibition Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800 being held at the Museum from 23 September to 5 December 2004.”

Conference (UK): Biblical exegesis and the emergence of science in the early modern era, Birkbeck College, London, 26-27 November 2004. “This conference aims to examine how biblical hermeneutics in the early modern period contributed to the natural philosophy of the era. The emphasis of the conference on biblical reading practices, rather than ‘religion’ in general, is intended to focus on the specific procedures of interpretation and to propose models for how they interacted with scientific thought and discourse on the natural world.”

Useful listings:
Conference Alerts: History
RSA Renaissance Announcements

See also recent posts for upcoming conferences: August; July.

I won’t be doing a full conference bulletin till the end of the month, but I’ve had some interesting things from C-18L.

There is a CFP out for the American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies annual conference (Las Vegas, 31 March-3 April 2005). Deadline: 15 September 2004. (NB that you will have to be a member to give a paper.)

As a result, there have been calls for contributors to specific panels at C-18L.

“The Afterlife of Pre-modernity”: “proposals that seek to reevaluate or challenge the modernity of the eighteenth century".
Mary Helen McMurran
mcmurran.mary@uwlax.edu

“Habits, Good and Bad": papers “investigating eighteenth-century habits of all kinds: good, bad, and indifferent".
Kristin Jensen
jensen@virginia.edu

“Adapting the Eighteenth Century": “Critical, theoretical, or pedagogical considerations of modern and postmodern revisions of period texts".
Jill Bradbury
Jill.Bradbury@gallaudet.edu

There will no doubt be many more. If you’re interested, why not subscribe to C18-L today?

(Note to self: Must be more careful about line breaks when pasting stuff from e-mail messages…)

The Folger Institute has announced a 2004/5 program that almost makes me wish I lived somewhere near Washington DC.

Religion and toleration in the early modern world (seminar)
Culinary Cartographies: Food, Gender, and Race in the Early Modern Black Atlantic (seminar)
Emerging Ethnographies in Shakespeare’s England (seminar)
Renaissance Paleography in England (skills course)
Rethinking Word and Image: History/Literary History/Art History (colloquium)
British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory (conference)
In the Maelstrom of the Market: Women and the Birth of the European Market Economy (seminar)
Early Modern Books and Readers (seminar)
Ballads, Broadsides, and Eighteenth-Century Culture (seminar)
Technologies of Writing (seminar)
Reformation Transformations of Visual Culture (seminar)
Garrick and Theatrical Death (lecture)

A one-day conference on new trends in history and television; London, 15th October 2004.

History on television has never been more popular, but what sort of history are we being shown on our screens? Archive-based programmes, star presenters, dramatisations, reality television, digital recreations, and interactions with web resources have led to a rich but complex situation. What should the history programme’s attitude be towards its sources? What has the drive towards history-as-entertainment in a competitive market done for the popular understanding of history? How should television recreate the past ?

‘It May Be History, but Is It True?’ is a major one-day conference which will look at the state of history on television today, and where it may be going. It will bring together leading academics, archivists, producers and film researchers to discuss history and reality television, dramatisation in history programming, the changing use of archive film, and history programmes in the digital age.

The conference is being organised by the International Association for Media and History (IamHist) and the Imperial War Museum, in association with the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC).

The conference will take place 15th October 2004 at the Imperial War Museum. Further details will be published in due course.

For more information, contact
Toby Haggith (IWM) thaggith@iwm.org.uk
Christine Whittaker (IamHist) christine@whittgc.demon.co.uk

IAMHIST
Imperial War Museum

I think I might go to this one… Sounds fun.

UK and Ireland

Conference: Turning Points: Time and Place in Early American History, Norwich, 3-5 September 2004. Annual meeting of the British Group in Early American History. Notification by 15 August.

Conference: National Identity and Cultural Exchange in Ireland and Scotland, Edinburgh, 9-11 September 2004.

CFP: Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, Liverpool, October 2005. An international conference “which will reflect advances in research on transatlantic slavery” in the past 25 years. Deadline: 30 September 2004.

CFP: 34th Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-century Studies, Oxford, January 2005. Deadline: 30 September 2004.

North America

Conference: Creating Identity and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1492-1888, Greensboro, North Carolina, 17-18 September 2004. To “examine the varied forces which forged new identities among the communing and colliding inhabitants of the “Atlantic rim"-of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe".

Conference: North East Conference on British Studies, Montreal, Quebec, 1-2 October 2004.

CFP: Custom, Ritual, Fetish: Idols of the Eighteenth Century, Indiana University, May 2005. “Religious ritual, pagan fetishes, the customs of the unwashed, the habits of the unlettered: these were the idols eighteenth-century men and women sought to cleanse from human society and culture, at times by force of conquest…” Deadline: 4 January 2005.

CFP: Crossing the Atlantic: European Dimensions of American History, 1600-2000, Washington DC, March-April 2005. Graduate students in history and other disciplines are invited to “discuss the variety of cultural, social, political, intellectual, and economic encounters of the European world with the North American continent over the last 500 years.” Deadline: 1 October 2004.

CFP: The Nature of Knowledge: Eighteenth-century Engagements with the Natural World, Tampa, Florida, February 2005. “As evidenced by key works ranging from Robinson Crusoe to the writings of Rousseau, nature was a constant preoccupation of the eighteenth-century imagination. But what, exactly, was this thing called nature?". Deadline: 30 September 2004.

You should also check out the STAR project’s CFP and Events pages, which have several more events of interest to early modernists.