7–10 July 2011
University of Aberdeen
Hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies

In 2011 ECSSS will hold its first conference in Aberdeen since 1995. The conference theme, The Arts and Sciences of Progress, is meant to focus attention on the notion of “progress”—and its limitations—in society, literature, science, and the arts. Proposals are welcome on all aspects of this theme, as well as on 18th-century Aberdeen and northeastern Scotland, Scottish Episcopalianism, Jacobitism, Highland culture, relations between Ireland and Scotland, and all other aspects of 18th-century Scottish thought and culture. In addition, this conference will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry in the early 1760s. David Hume’s 300th birthday will be duly noted, although we will leave the main celebration of that event to the Hume Society/IASH conference in Edinburgh one week afterwards.

Plenary lectures will be presented by Prof. Colin Kidd of Glasgow University: “Hypocrisy and Dissimulation in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson of Kilwinning” and Prof. Fiona Stafford of Oxford University: “Everything Unreconciled? The Place of Macpherson’s Ossian”.

Please e-mail or fax a title and one-page description of your proposed panel or proposed 20-minute paper, along with a one-page cv, by 15 November 2010 to:

Professor Cairns Craig
Director, Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies
Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds
Aberdeen AB24 3UG
Scotland, UK

Fax: 44(0)1224 273677

http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/universalreformation

The deadline for registration is Friday 10 September. The event is organised under the auspices of ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

For further details, please visit http://www.culturesofknowledge.org.

 Thursday 23 September 2010, 6.30 pm, room tbc, key-note address by Professor Jeroen Duindam, of Groningen University:

‘Exhilaration and Ossification: Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World’.

Prof. Duindam is an expert on early modern rituals and has published Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (New Studies in European History) (Cambridge, 2003) and Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early-modern European Court(Amsterdam 1995). At the moment he is co-editing Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Brill: Leiden, 2010).

 This event is free to attend and open to all, and will be followed by drinks.

The colloquium then takes place on Friday 24 September:

This event is organised by Stephen Brogan and Anne Byrne, for more information please contact ritualandceremony@googlemail.com

This colloquium is generously sponsored by the Royal Historical Society, the Society for the Study of French History, and the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.

It costs £20 to attend the colloquium, which includes lunch and drinks, or £10 if unwaged/student/member of Birkbeck’s Early Modern Society.

To register please click here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/about/conferences/usesofritualcolloquium

An interdisciplinary colloquium that will showcase cutting-edge work in the field of early-modern perceptions of the past, including the archaic, antiquity, the county and civic past, family history and the landscape.

Speakers include Ronald Hutton, Philip Baker, Jan Broadway, Fiona Youngman, Lucy Munro and Nicola Whyte.

Venue: Wolfson Research Exchange University of Warwick Library
Location: Coventry, West Midlands.

For more details, including registration, see
http://www.history.ac.uk/events/event/1758

10.00 Registration, tea and coffee in room B02

10.30 AGM

11.00 Robin Rowles: welcome to conference, introductions, opening comments

11. 10 Session 1:
Frank Ferrie, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (The Expectant Virgin Mary): A History of Decline and Restoration’

Liam Haydon, ‘Christopher Wase and the Promise of Restoration in Royalist Translation 1649-60’

Discussion

12.40 Lunch Room B02

13.40 Session 2:
Marilyn Lewis, ‘Cambridge Platonist networks in Restoration London’

Harman Bhogal, ‘The Idea of Restoration in Demonological Thought: Deacon and Walker and the Doctrine of the Cessation of Miracles’

Discussion

15.10 Concluding remarks

15.20 Wine reception, room B02

Attendance at our conference is free, including lunch, refreshments and post-conference reception, but it would be helpful if you complete a registration form so we can gauge numbers. You can download a registration form here (Word):Birkbeck Early Modern Society Conference Registration 2010. Please send your registration details to the Conference Organiser, Robin Rowles.

The aim of the conference is to bring together a range of postgraduate perspectives on cultural history from across the disciplinary spectrum. The focus is on unusual topics and unconventional approaches to otherwise familiar topics. Papers deal with cultural practices that have been neglected by traditional history, and engage with fields, trends, and themes that have been overlooked by existing scholarship.

Angles 2 is a free conference taking place on Saturday 19 June 2010 at Birkbeck, University of London.  Registration is free. To register, please visit http://www.bbk.ac.uk/angles/registration

ANGLES 2
Another interdisciplinary postgraduate conference on cultural history

Birkbeck, University of London
B04, 43 Gordon Square

Saturday 19 June 2010, 10:00-17:30
10:00 – Opening remarks from Professor Steven Connor (Birkbeck) and Professor Markman Ellis (QMUL)

Papers

Observations on the changes to the Tibetan black yak hair tent. Sihao Shen, University of Auckland

‘What’s happening at home?’: Burglary insurance and fear of crime, 1889-1939. Eloise Moss, University of Oxford

Looking for cultural identity where it’s supposed to be absent: The modern dwelling as a signifier of identity in Cyprus. Ceren Kurum, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

‘The old order changeth’: The shift to codification in late Victorian mountaineering. Alan McNee, Birkbeck

Head up and heels down: Critical (re)enactment and questioning the centaur. Monica Mattfeld, University of Kent

Spinning with spiders’ silk: Methods, histories, and seductions. Eleanor Morgan, UCL

The problem with newspaper history: Literary geography and the Soviet press, 1953-1968. Simon Huxtable, Birkbeck

The memory of everyday life: A study of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat. Pehr Englen, Birkbeck

Urban humour in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Heidi Hakkarainen, University of Turku

This is a free conference. Register at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/angles/registration

Co-organisers: Rachel Richardson, Thomas Turner, James Emmott (Birkbeck)
School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London www.bbk.ac.uk/arts
Department of History, Classics and Archaeologywww.bbk.ac.uk/hca
London Consortium www.londonconsortium.com

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/angles

Angles is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Details about registration will soon be available on the conference website: www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/about/conferences/powerandstate.

Keynote lecture: Prof. Jim Collins, Georgetown, USA

Speakers: Dr Catherine Casson (Newnham, Cambridge), Dr D’Maris Coffman (Newnham, Cambridge), Dr Daryl Dee (Wilfrid Laurier, Ontario, Canada), Prof. Joel Felix (Reading), Prof. Steve Hindle (Warwick), Prof. Marie-Laure Legay (Lille, France), Prof. Maarten Prak (Utrecht, Netherlands), Dr Hannah Smith (St Hilda’s, Oxford), Prof. Chris Storrs (Dundee).

State formation is a vibrant and contentious area of enquiry that has, in recent years, shown the merits of international and interdisciplinary collaboration. Yet the subject still has an image problem. It is often perceived by non-specialists to be an exclusive and inaccessible field that bears little relation to mainstream political, social or cultural history. Relatively abstracted concepts of fiscal, military and governmental development do not always relate easily to the specifically historical issues of political and social change. Theories of state formation based on the methodologies of the social sciences continue to be criticized for sustaining determinist narratives and imposing an anachronistic language of modernity onto past societies. The subject remains dominated by the study of a handful of large, powerful survivor states, which were unrepresentative of the several hundred diverse political entities in existence around 1600.

All Birkbeck Early Modern Society members and Birkbeck students are being offered a discount rate of £17.50 for the conference. The keynote lecture by Prof. Jim Collins will be groundbreaking exploration of theories of the state and competing ideologies of power. This lecture is free and open to all. All enquiries to Dr Laura Stewart

You can download the conference poster here.

Find out more about the keynote lecture, ‘Slaying the Hydra of Anarchy: France and the Invention of the Modern State’, here.

Over three days, conference delegates from more than 15 countries will present more than 200 papers in some 50 panels, representing a wide range of new research on Renaissance England, Europe and the wider world. In addition to plenary lectures by Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary), Iain Fenlon (Cambridge) and Penelope Gouk (Manchester) there will be workshops on publishing and research funding and tours of historic buildings around the city.

The conference is timed to follow immediately after the Leeds Medieval Congress and will coincide with the final weekend of the York Early Music Festival as well as street performances of the York Mystery Plays.

For more information see the conference website:
http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/srsconference/

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of the physician Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Well known as one of the greatest collectors of his age, he was also President of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, the major patron of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and a physician to Queen Anne, George I and George II. His name lives on in London place names such as Sloane Square. His enormous network of acquaintances and correspondents throughout the world established him as probably the single most influential British ‘scientist’ between Isaac Newton and Joseph Banks. After his death, Parliament purchased his collections, which laid the foundation for what are now three institutions: the British Library, British Museum, and Natural History Museum.

More details here: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event108568.html

(PS: There’s more about Sloane and Sloane events here: Happy Birthday, Sir Hans!. –KB)

Ronald Hutton, ‘Charles II in the Twenty-First Century’; Diana Dethloff, ‘Peter Lely and the royal image’; Karen Hearn, ‘John Michael Wright (1617-1694), “Picture Drawer in Ord[inary]“’; Robert Bucholz, ‘Restoration Courtiership:  the Evidence of Three Diaries (Pepys, Evelyn and Reresby)’; Stephen Brogan, ‘Medicine, Politics and Sin: The Rationale for the Royal Touch During the Stuart Restoration, 1660-85’; Helen Jacobsen, ‘Bringing it Home. English diplomats as cultural intermediaries, 1660-85’.

There will also be quided tours of those parts of the Royal Hospital site at Greenwich associated with Charles II.

Contact: admin@courtstudies.org or Society for Court Studies, PO Box 57089, LONDON EC1P 1RF