Early Modern News

Transforming Objects: Call for Papers

Sharon Howard — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:40:55 +0000

Call for Papers: Transforming Objects

28-29 May 2012, Northumbria University

This two-day conference invites papers that consider the transformation of objects and the transformations effected by objects from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Approaches to this theme are welcomed from established scholars and especially from postgraduate research students.

Object theory and discourses of materiality largely engage with objects as stable items of a permanent nature; this conference seeks to address those moments which slip through the gaps of such readings. We wish to explore the method and process of transformation, the between-ness or not fully realised state of an object or discipline, and to consider its effect upon the culture. …

http://transformingobjects.blogspot.com/p/call-for-papers.html

CFP: Street Literature: Cheap Print, Popular Culture, and the Book Trade

Sharon Howard — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:53:24 +0000

A conference organized jointly by ‘Print Networks’ and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester (July 2012)

Offers are invited for conference papers of 30 minutes’ duration. The theme of STREET LITERATURE: CHEAP PRINT, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE BOOK TRADE is broadly defined. Papers may relate to aspects of the production, distribution and reception of ‘street literature’ (chapbooks, ballads, broadsides, newspapers, popular prints and other cheap printed matter) in the British Isles, or in other English-speaking parts of the world, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, inclusive.

An abstract (up to 650 words) of the offered paper and a biographical statement (up to 100 words) should be submitted, preferably as an email attachment, by 31st January 2012

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=2023

Call for Papers: Bedtime Stories – Beds and Bedding in Britain, 1650-1850 (June 2012, Leeds)

Sharon Howard — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:39:08 +0000

This conference is being held as part of a year long celebratory exhibition of beds at bedrooms at Temple Newsam House, following the restoration of the Queen Anne State Bed from Hinton House. The conference brings together both museum professionals and scholars to share insights on historic beds and bedrooms in order to further understanding and inform the interpretation of beds and bedroom interiors. …

Topics to consider are:

Conservation or restoration projects related to beds and bedroom interiors
Material culture of the bedroom; waking up, going to sleep, making and cleaning beds and other rituals and practices associated with the bedroom
Interpretation of beds and bedrooms to different audiences within museums and other heritage settings
Upholstery and textiles of the bedroom
Types of beds, nomenclature, materials and construction
The bedroom and its place in relation to other domestic spaces.

Deadline for titles and abstracts (no more than 300 words): 30th January 2012.

http://historiesofhomessn.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/call-for-papers-bedtime-stories-beds-and-bedding-in-britain-1650-1850/

The Courtauld Institute of Art: Third Early Modern Symposium: Art Against the Wall

Sharon Howard — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:34:43 +0000

This one-day symposium will explore the relationship between walls and art in early modern visual culture. During the period 1550-1850 the interplay between work and wall became increasingly complex as art objects began to pull away from the walls which had previously defined them. The enduring association between artistic skill and craft production meant that many art works were often still regarded as elements in overarching decorative schemes; paintings installed in eighteenth-century English domestic interiors, for example, continue to be described as part of the ornamentation, even as the furniture, of a room…

Saturday, 19 November 2011
10.00 – 17.30, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre
The Courtauld Institute of Art

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2011/autumn/nov19_ArtAgainsttheWall.shtml

CFP Memory Cultures in Early Modern Europe

Sharon Howard — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:26:00 +0000

Memory before Modernity.

Memory Cultures in Early Modern Europe

Leiden University, The Netherlands

20-22 June 2012
https://collab.vuw.leidenuniv.nl/sites/tales/emm/Pages/Conference.aspx
Tags: emnews, conference, cfp

CFP: COMMONS: Shared Resources and Collective Activity in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance

Sharon Howard — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:10:20 +0000

Fourth Annual Graduate Student Conference for the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, The University of California, Irvine

April 20 – 21, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Julian Yates, University of Delaware

The commons once referred to tracts of land – forests and meadows, seas and waterways – open to collective use
by members of one or more communities… The commons
also referred to a people distinguished from nobility by virtue of their birth, occupations, and cultural practices. There was a distinctly political characteristic to the commons that implied the bearing of communal burdens and the sharing of certain limited rights and privileges…

This conference aims to gather models of the commons in its various modes including but not limited to land, public space, joint ownership, and collective action in medieval and Renaissance practice, with some sense of their viability as models for alternative economic, spatial, artistic, and political practice today.
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/bin/display_news_detail.php?recid=1626&dept_code_val=993&css_path=earlycultures&bkgd=e7d9ac
Tags: emnews, conference, postgrad, cfp

Conference: Migration of Knowledge, Oxford, March 2012

Sharon Howard — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:10:17 +0000

How the secularization of religious houses transformed the libraries of Europe, 16th-19th centuries

The closure of religious houses, in varying circumstances, affected all of Europe at some point between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. At different times and in different countries the consequences were widely varied, in some cases preserving medieval and early modern collections intact, in others abandoning books to their fate, or transferring them piecemeal into new ownership to serve different cultural purposes.

What impact did these historic changes have on the shape of libraries, access to libraries, and in particular on the preservation or otherwise of books from the past —the intellectual heritage of Europe?
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm
Tags: emnews, conference, religion

CFP: COMMONS: Shared Resources and Collective Activity in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance

Sharon Howard — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 08:10:11 +0000

Fourth Annual Graduate Student Conference for the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, The University of California, Irvine

April 20 – 21, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Julian Yates, University of Delaware

Law and Governance in pre-Modern Britain (14-15 Oct 2011)

Sharon Howard — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:25:17 +0000

Law and Governance in pre-Modern Britain is the third conference on this general theme held at The University of Western Ontario, and the first to focus entirely on the pre-modern period. Over the course of two days we will hear from an international group of leading legal historians with interests in literature, gender, marriage, and rebellion as well as legal education, the development of the profession, pardon, process and performance. The theme of the conference is intentionally broad, and the speakers have been asked simply to talk about whatever aspect of their research interests them most at the time.
http://history.uwo.ca/law-and-governance/index.html
Tags: emnews, conference

Play in the Eighteenth Century (cfp 2012)

Sharon Howard — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:40:16 +0000

The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University is pleased to announce the eleventh Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, to be held on May 9-11, 2012. The workshop is part of a series of annual interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with a dozen or so scholars presenting and discussing papers on a broad topic in a congenial setting.

Our subject for 2012 is “Play.” From the aesthetics of Schiller to the card tables of socialites; from Pascal’s wager to Emile’s childhood (“which is or ought to be only games and frolicsome play”)—the long eighteenth century was a century of play. …

We invite papers that range across aesthetic, anthropological, historical, and philosophical registers, and that offer new ways to see the relation between these fields and disciplines. …

[Deadline for applications Friday, January 13, 2012.]
http://www.indiana.edu/~voltaire/cfp2012.html
Tags: emnews, conference, c18th