27 April 2012

9am -5:30 pm
The Royal Society, London

Registration for this event is now open online.

This conference considers the interrelationships between medicine and the endeavour of natural history in the seventeenth-century.  It will be held to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Martin Lister (1639-1712), Royal Physician and the first arachnologist and conchologist. The meeting will not only address Lister’s work but will consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. We will also explore how acquisition of natural history knowledge and new schemes of taxonomy affected perception and treatment of animals for medical and experimental use.

Speakers and session chairs include:
Prof. Tim Birkhead FRS, University of Sheffield
Dr Isabelle Charmantier, University of Exeter
Prof. Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University
Dr Sachiko Kusukawa, Trinity College, Cambridge
Dr Gillian Lewis, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
Dr Dániel Margócsy, Hunter College
Dr Brian Ogilvie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Dr Anna Marie Roos, University of Oxford
Dr Charlotte Sleigh, University of Kent
Dr Alexander Wragge-Morley, University College, London

Download abstracts of papers

Download the full conference programme

Registration

The conference is open to all, but pre-registration online is essential. The conference fee is £40 (full fee), or £30 (student/retired/unemployed). The conference fee includes lunch and refreshments. An optional conference dinner will be organised at an extra cost of £35. Please indicate any special dietary requirements in the ‘special requirements’ section on the registration form.

In the event of a registration being cancelled, the Society can only refund the payment if the cancellation is received no later than five working days before the conference.

Student Bursaries

Thanks to the generosity of the John Fell OUP Research Fund and the British Society for the History of Science there are a limited number of student bursaries available to assist with conference fees and travel expenses. If you are a graduate student and would like to apply for a bursary please email the conference organiser, Dr Anna Marie Roos, with a statement of 400 words or less describing how attendance at the conference will benefit your course of study and research plans.

Please email Felicity Henderson with any queries about this event.

‘All is folly that I can see’: Fools and Folly in Early Modern Europe
Saturday 18 February 2012, 9.30am-6.00pm
University of Southampton and Chawton House Library, Alton, Hampshire

Please download the registration form.
Registration: £40 (£30 for students, and there are a few postgraduate bursaries left…)

This one-day symposium on Fools and Folly in Early Modern Europe will bring together historians, art-historians and literary scholars from the UK, Europe and beyond to discuss their recent research. While the ‘wisdom’ of folly in the early modern period has become a familiar concept, it has lacked significant cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural investigation. This symposium will include papers on Erasmus’s character of Folly; the fools of Tudor interludes, French ‘soties’ and Shakespeare; king’s fools and court jesters; carnivals and festive folly; and the representation of folly in art. Speakers will examine and consider the many manifestations of folly in early modern Europe and consider its different political, religious and social purposes. The event will also, via roundtable discussions, invite contributions about other directions in research on folly, and related foolish things.

Speakers include:
Professor Luc Duerloo (Antwerp) on Hapsburg court culture
Dr Peter Happé (Southampton) on Ben Jonson
Professor Richard Hillman (Tours) on Mad Discourse
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb (UEA) on Tudor natural fools
Dr Alexander Samson (University College London) on Spanish folly and madness
Dr Peter Sillitoe (V&A) on Masques
Professor David Smith (New Hampshire) on Jan Steen
Professor Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh) on John Heywood
Dr Anna Whitelock (Royal Holloway) on Archie Armstrong

The symposium, hosted by the University of Southampton’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, will be held in the unique setting of Chawton House Library, an Elizabethan manor house and former home of Jane Austen’s brother. Lunch and drinks will be provided.

For further details, please contact:
Dr Alice Hunt
Lecturer in English
Faculty of Humanities
University of Southampton
SO17 1BJ

Tel: 023 8059 3210
www.soton.ac.uk/english/about/staff/ahunt.page

Following the announcement by Shakespeare’s Globe of their plans to construct an Indoor Jacobean Theatre on the London Bankside, the London Shakespeare Centre invites you to a one day symposium on recent research in to the London theatres and their cultural, architectural and political contexts.

Panels include papers on repertory, audience, costume and lighting in the indoor theatres, on Inigo Jones at the Queen’s House and Somerset House, and discussion of the Globe’s Indoor Jacobean Theatre Project.

Booking is now open (£25 waged/£15 unwaged), please click on the following link

For any queries please email: London Shakespeare Centre.

DRAFT PROGRAMME
10:00 Registration and Coffee
10:30 Welcome and introduction to IJT project
10:45 Panel 1 – Indoor Playing
12:30 Panel 2 – The Queens House
13:00 Lunch
13:45 Panel 3 – Geopolitics of Playing
15:05 Panel 4 – Engineering spectacle: Inigo Jones’ past and present performance at Somerset House
15:50 Coffee break
16:20 Keynote
17:20 Panel 5 – The Indoor Jacobean Theatre Project
18:20 Closing remarks

Found at London Shakespeare Centre’s Events Page

20 January 2012

09.00 – 09.45 Registration and coffee
09.45 – 10.00 Welcome

10.00 – 11.00 Panel 1: Death and Ritual
Maggie Vinter (John Hopkins University), ‘How to do things while dying: Volpone and the ars moriendi’
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester), ‘The Performance of Bad Death: The Strange Tale of the Shoemaker of Breslau’

11.00 – 11.15 Coffee Break

11.15 – 12.15 Panel 2: Music
Liam Haydon (University of Manchester), ‘Performing Perfection: Milton and the Music of the Spheres’
Dolly MacKinnon (University of Queensland), ‘If ever beene where bels have knell’d to Church’: The performance of parish bells in early modern England

12.15 – 12.30 Break

12.30 – 1.30 Keynote Lecture
Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham),
‘Within the Castle Walls: Historical Sites as Performance at Kenilworth and Ludlow’

1.30 – 2.30 Lunch

2.30 – 3.30 Panel 3: Space
Catherine Clifford (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), ‘From Wood to Stone: Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting House, and the Performance of Architecture in Court Drama, 1581-1621’
John Peacock (University of Southampton), ‘Architectural Performance: Inigo Jones and Bernini’

3.30 – 3.45 Break

3.45 – 4.45 Panel 4: Theatre and Ritual
Alison Findlay (University of Lancaster), ‘The State of Ceremony in Macbeth’
Brian Schneider (University of Manchester), ‘Extra –dramatic’ performance in early modern Prologues, Epilogues and Inductions

4.45 – 5.00 Coffee Break

5.00 – 6.00 Keynote Lecture
Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford),
‘Bitter, Black and Tragical’: Tragic Peformance on the Shakespearean Stage
6.00 – 6.30 Drinks.

Registration: £10
Speakers and guests are invited to join us for dinner at a local restaurant; to book a place please let us know when registering (dinner not included in the registration fee).

The Society for Renaissance Studies has granted us bursaries to help postgraduate students with the costs of travel and accommodation. If you want to be considered for one of the bursaries, please let us know.

To book a place at this event please contact Michael Durrant and Naya Tsentourou by 7 January 2012.

The event will be taking place at the Seminar Room of the historic building of the John Rylands Library at Deansgate. Due to limited space, please register early to avoid disappointment.

We hope to see you there! For more details see:
historicizingperformance.wordpress.com

Speakers: Gerry Abalone (Tate), Adriano Aymonino (independent scholar), Susannah Brooke (Queens’ College, Cambridge), Rodrigo Cañete (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Kevin Childs (British School at Rome), Dario Donetti (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Francesco Freddolini (Getty Research Institute), Friederike Drinkuth (Stately Palaces and Gardens Mecklenburg), Meriel May Geolot (independent scholar), Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis), Marika T. Knowles (Yale University),Tobias Locker (Technische Universität, Berlin), Catherine McCormack (UCL)

Art Against the Wall is the third symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern department. The symposium will provide an occasion for established and emerging scholars to present and discuss their research together.

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. Conversely, walls now had the power to redefine art works, giving them a new meaning through a new context; thus, in late sixteenth-century debates on the status of the religious image, walls – which map the division between sacred and secular space – take on crucial importance. Yet the wall could also become art, as the numerous examples of trompe l’oeil wall illustration to be found in seventeenth-century architecture and garden design suggest. Taking as its point of departure Derrida’s insight that there can be no clear separation of ergon (work) from parergon (not-the-work, ‘wall’), the symposium will attempt to investigate the rich questions raised by the phenomenon of art against the wall.

You can download a programme here (pdf). Abstracts are available here (pdf).

Ticket/entry details: £15 (£10 students) Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art , Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Art against the Wall’ symposium. For credit card bookings call 020 7848 2785 (9.30 – 18.00, weekdays only). For further information, send an email to Research Forum Events.

Organised by: Thomas Balfe and Jocelyn Anderson (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

In the ‘memory boom’ that has emerged in the humanities and social sciences since 1990, five major themes have captured most attention: (a) the relationship between politics and memory, (b) trauma and memories of violence, (c) the ‘mediatization’ of memory (d) the transmission of memory and identity formation (e) the relationship between memory, history and other concepts of the past. Yet most case studies relating to these themes have been concerned with events and evidence post-1800; indeed, many theorists of memory allege that there is something intrinsically ‘modern’ about them. The aim of this conference is to put this assumption to the test.

First, we want to ask to what extent, and in what ways, these five themes also played themselves out in the early modern period. Secondly, we want to analyze more closely how early modern cultural, social, political and religious frameworks affected cultures of memory. Who ‘managed’ early modern memories? What mechanisms were at work? What patterns can we establish? How distinctively ‘early modern’ are these?

The organisers invite late medievalists and early modernists to offer proposals for 20 minute papers on one of the following five themes. Details on the panels can be found below

Panel 1. Memory wars before the nation state
Panel 2. Coping with distressing memories
Panel 3. Memory landscapes as multimedial experiences
Panel 4. Memory transmission and identity formation
Panel 5. Sensations of change

The themes will be introduced in five keynote lectures. Confirmed keynote speakers include Philip Benedict, Susan Broomhall and Benjamin Schmidt. The conference will end with a round table in which experts on modern memory will comment on the findings of the conference.

We will be able to cover the expenses of economy travel and accommodation in Leiden for all speakers selected. Papers should be submitted two weeks before the conference and will be made available to all participants beforehand. Proposals can be submitted until 1 November 2011 by email

This conference is organised by the NWO VICI Research Team Tales of the Revolt. Memory, Oblivion and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566-1700, that is directed by Professor Judith Pollmann. Further information on the team and the project at www.earlymodernmemory.org

10.00
Registration, coffee*

10.30
Birkbeck Early Modern Society AGM

11.00
Conference ‘Aspirations’
Opening Remarks: Karen Chester

Session 1: Chair: Timothy Alves

11.15
Susan Gane, Birkbeck
The Aspirations of Common Soldiers in the Early Eighteenth Century

11.45
Laura Bolick, Open University
Cherishing Greece: Cardinal Bessarion and the Attempt to Save a Culture

12.15 Discussion

12.45 Lunch*

Session 2: Chair: Laura Jacobs

1.45
Sarah Watkins, Birkbeck
‘The Wonder of all Wonders’ or ‘a mind hardened in sin’? The Aspirations and Motivations of Early Modern Fasting Women and Their Commentators

2.15 Steve Orman, Canterbury Christ Church University
Nathan Field’s Literary Aspirations in the Early Seventeenth-Century

2.45 Jackie Watson, Birkbeck
Portrait of Aspiration: Thomas Overbury and Jacobean courtiership

3.15 Discussion

3.45 Closing remarks: Karen Chester

3.50 Wine reception

If you wish to attend the AGM, the Conference or both, please send Laura Jacobs an email. The events are free to attend but we need a rough idea of numbers for catering purposes.

10.00
Registration, coffee*

10.30
Birkbeck Early Modern Society AGM

11.00
Conference ‘Aspirations’
Opening Remarks: Karen Chester

Session 1: Chair: Timothy Alves

11.15
Susan Gane, Birkbeck
The Aspirations of Common Soldiers in the Early Eighteenth Century

11.45
Laura Bolick, Open University
Cherishing Greece: Cardinal Bessarion and the Attempt to Save a Culture

12.15 Discussion

12.45 Lunch*

Session 2: Chair: Laura Jacobs

1.45
Sarah Watkins, Birkbeck
‘The Wonder of all Wonders’ or ‘a mind hardened in sin’? The Aspirations and Motivations of Early Modern Fasting Women and Their Commentators

2.15 Steve Orman, Canterbury Christ Church University
Nathan Field’s Literary Aspirations in the Early Seventeenth-Century

2.45 Jackie Watson, Birkbeck
Portrait of Aspiration: Thomas Overbury and Jacobean courtiership

3.15 Discussion

3.45 Closing remarks: Karen Chester

3.50 Wine reception

If you wish to attend the AGM, the Conference or both, please send Laura Jacobs an email. The events are free to attend but we need a rough idea of numbers for catering purposes.

The event is the second conference of the research project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’, a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For full details of our activities, please visit: http://www.culturesofknowledge.org

The full conference programme, with paper abstracts and speaker biographies, is available online at www.tudorstuartireland.com/home/programme.

Registration is now open. The conference fee is €30 (or €20 for students/unwaged/retired). You may register online at www.tudorstuartireland.com/home/registration. The conference dinner will take place on Saturday, 3 September, at O’Connells in Donnybrook at an additional cost of €50.

If you have any further queries, please contact the organisers,
Suzanne Forbes, Neil Johnston and Eoin Kinsella, at
Tudor & Stuart Ireland.