Greetings!
This list announces talks in the greater Boston area pertaining to the study of the early modern period ca. 1350-1800, in any discipline and with any regional specialization. We are announcing in-person and online events and activities relevant to the Boston area. Please forward announcements of events, including exhibits and application deadlines for future conferences in our region. We are planning a mailing roughly every two weeks—please therefore send notices of events at least two weeks in advance. Please forward announcements, in the format requested at the end of this message, and e-mail addresses to: earlymod(a)fas.harvard.edu.
For security reasons the list will not disseminate zoom links directly, but we can list an email contact to which to write for further details about attending. Alternatively, we can circulate registration information for events. All times are EDT.
* indicates a newly announced event, ** indicates an updated event
Upcoming Events
**Tuesday, February 21, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Alejandro Octavio Nodarse (History of Art and Architecture), “(Ir)reparable Errors: Marco Aurelio Severino’s Drawings as Surgical Practice”. Comments: Cynthia Klestinec.
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
Wednesday, 2/22/2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Lorraine Daston, Director emerita, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin: "The End of Natural Disasters" (The Inaugural Frederick A. Jakobiec Lecture, Harvard History of Science)<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/lorraine-daston-director-eme…>
Location: Harvard Loeb House Ballroom, 17 Quincy St., Cambridge
Reception to Follow.
*Thursday, February 23, 12pm
Mahindra Humanities Center Renaissance Studies & Cartography Seminars
Camille Serchuk (Fellow, Käte Hamburger Research Center, Munich; Professor of Art History, Dept. of Art & Design, Southern Connecticut State University)
Seminar, "Troubline Boundaries: Grotesque Ornament and Early Modern Cartography"
Location: Virtual
Please register here<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__harvard.zoom.us_meetin…> to receive the Zoom link for this event or write to tbanks(a)g.harvard.edu.
Thursday, February 23, 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Presented by the Harvard Warren Center’s Workshop on “Capitalism’s Hardwiring: Money, Credit, and Finance in a Globalizing World, 1620-2020”
Ellen M. Nye, “Early Modern Money Between England and the Ottoman Empire”
Location: Harvard Law School (WCC 3019)
Thursday, February 23, 2023, 5:30pm
Harvard Mahindra Center Seminar on Women, Gender, and Culture in the Early Modern World
Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Boston College, Department of History: “Playing the Vanguard: Boundary-Busting Women and the Baroque Academies That Loved Them.”
Barker Center, Room 133, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA, 02138
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/sarah-gwyneth-ross-tba
*February 23, 5:30 PM
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Center of Excellence: New Perspectives on New France
Marie-Christine Pioffet (York University, Canada): "Entre docilité apparente et rébellion ouverte : la résonnance des voix des femmes autochtones à travers les mailles du discours jésuite (1632-1672)" [in French]
Webinar, Registration link<https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sbz93ZBwTF23S-hwAqIJTg>
**Thursday, February 23, 6pm
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Studies
Travis Chi Wing Lau, Kenyon College: “The Pain of Race”
Online: registration link see
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/pain-race
This talk draws from a tentative second book project on the histories and theories of chronic pain in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Methodologically, this project wants to put into conversation disability theory and pain studies, both of which tend to be more presentist in their models of pain, to consider how historical models of pain may help us intervene in larger cultural crises surrounding pain like the current opioid crisis. Rather than imagine the history of pain and disability as only ever moving toward increasing forms of pathology and medicalization, what would it mean to excavate historical cripistemologies of pain that deviate from that teleological narrative? In this talk, I contend with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the paradoxical understandings of pain attached to enslaved Black people, which continue to animate current healthcare disparities and inequalities. How does pain's racialization underpin dominant models of pain management and determine whose pain gets to matter? How did enslaved people contest the painful narratives attached to them or even revise white narratives of pain in terms of other traditions of health and healing?
*February 24, 2023, 8:45am-2:00pm
Co-Sponsors: Yale University Art Gallery, History of Science and Technology Division (YPM), Early Modern Studies at Yale University
Symposium: Symposium accompanying exhibition, Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe, 1500-1800<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__nam12.safelinks.protec…>, at the Yale University Art Gallery
Speakers: Alexi Baker (Yale Peabody Museum); Marisa Bass (Yale University); Paola Bertucci (Yale University); Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University); Romita Ray (Syracuse University); Carolyn Roberts (Yale University); Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington); Margaret Schotte (York University)
Location: in-person and virtual. Registration required for virtual attendance; to register, visit https://bit.ly/3vLjU76 .
*Monday, 2/27/2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Harvard Premodern Race Seminar<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/harvard-premodern-race-semin…>
Location: HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Boylston 237, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA 02138
General inquiries: ancientstudies(a)harvard.edu
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 4:30pm
MEMHS, Brown University
Matthew Kadane (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), 'Mind-Forged Manicules, or, What was “Enlightenment”?'
Location: Brown University, to be announced. More information: https://blogs.brown.edu/memhs/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__blogs.brown.edu_memhs_…>
This paper focuses on the first person to use the now common English word “enlightenment,” a naval surgeon named James Rymer (1750-1827). “The Enlightenment” existed without Rymer’s word—this is not an exercise in Begriffsgeschichte. But the investigation of the word nevertheless opens up an unexpected world in which obscure people have an important role to play in intellectual history. Exploring the nature of that role is the methodological aim of the paper, while its more substantive goal is to reconstruct Rymer’s story, which, like the Enlightenment itself, is at times serious, at times farcical, and offers an object lesson in the difficulty of disentangling humanitarian from instrumentalist motives.
**Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Diana Henderson, Professor of Literature at MIT: "What were they thinking? Garnier's Les Juifves, Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, and the Dramatization of Religious Slaughter."
In-person event. Barker Center 211, Harvard University, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sites.google.com_g.har…>
*Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 5:30pm
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Claire Gilbert (Saint Louis University): "Exporting Expertise: Artists and Artisans Between Spanish and Moroccan Courts at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century"
Rhode Island Hall, 108, Brown University Providence RI
Friday, 3/3/2023 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar in History of the Book at Harvard University
Holly Shaffer (History of Art, Brown), "Table Land": James Forbes's Voyages and Travels (1765-1784) to a Colonial Source of Still Life.”<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/holly-shaffer-history-art-br…>
Location: Room 133, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge.
Please RSVP for lunch by Feb 24 here<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/holly-shaffer-history-art-br…>, or by email to agoeing at fas.harvard.edu .
Friday, March 3, 2023, 6:00 pm
Shakespearean Studies Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Christopher Pye, Professor of English, Williams College: “Shakespearean Comedy and Romance: the Aesthetic Turn”
ZOOM Meeting. You must register for this event at https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/shakespearean-comedy-and-r…
Tuesday, March 7, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Shireen Hamza (History of Science) and Eric Moses Gurevitch (NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University), “The Promise of Medieval Sciences, the Perils of Global History.”
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
Wednesday, 3/8/2023 12:00pm to 1:30pm
The Starr Seminar
Victor Couto Tiribás (Starr Fellow), Scuola Normale Superiore: “The Rabbi and the Painter: Menasseh ben Israel, Rembrandt van Rijn, and the ‘Glorious Stone’"<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/victor-couto-tirib%C3%A1s-st…>
Location: HMANE (Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, formerly the Semitic Museum, 6 Divinity Ave, Cambridge) RM201 or online
Note: Please confirm your attendance with Sandy Cantave cantave(a)fas.harvard.edu, as lunch (kosher) will be provided for these meetings. If you would like to attend remotely please write to Sandy Cantave to get the zoomlink.
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Kelly McCay (History), “The ABCs of Universal Characters”
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
Tuesday, March 21, 4:30pm
MEMHS, Brown University
Stacey Murrell (Brown University). More information will be coming soon.
Location: Brown University, to be announced. More information: https://blogs.brown.edu/memhs/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__blogs.brown.edu_memhs_…>
Wednesday, March 22, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
TBD
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sites.google.com_g.har…>
*March 23, 11:30am
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Center of Excellence: New Perspectives on New France
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Universite de Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris VIII): "L' Amerique dans les concours des Academies en France a l' epoque des Lumieres. Les concoursde Lyon (1781-1789) et de Toulouse (1784)" [in French]
Webinar. Registration link<https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BDMUm8QrSWS0Ahk7LSl2dg>
Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 4:30pm-6:15pm
Wesleyan University Renaissance Seminar
Sara Díaz, Fairfield University: "Margherita Costa's Love Letters. An Introduction."
Boger Hall 113, 41 Wyllys Ave., Middletown, CT 06459
For more information, see the Wesleyan Renaissance Seminar website<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__rensem.site.wesleyan.e…>.
Tuesday, April 4, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Valeria López Fadul (Assistant Professor of History and Latin American Studies, Wesleyan University), "Do Fish Breathe? Francisco Hernández, the Americas, and Renaissance Natural History.”
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
**Wednesday, April 5, 2023, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Folger Institute Information Session with Owen Williams, Interim Director of the Folger Institute and Associate Director for Scholarly Programs, on opportunities for graduate students of Renaissance literature at the Folger Institute.
Register for the Zoom event here. <https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvd-6hrjgrHtYXPhj8pOGEio1ZDZqzTK…>
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sites.google.com_g.har…>
Tuesday, April 11, 5-6:30pm
Co-sponsored by the Early Modern Workshop of the History Department and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Early Modern Workshop on Ways of Knowing Consent in Early Modern Europe, organized by Sonia Tycko (PhD 2019)
Location: Robinson Hall conference room (formerly Lower Library, on the ground floor), Harvard Yard.
The panel will consist of three fifteen-minute papers, followed by Q&A.
Elizabeth Kamali (Law, Harvard), chair
Carissa M. Harris (English, Temple), "'Sey what ye wyll': Epistemologies of Sexual Consent in Premodern Pastourelles"
Emanuele Conte (Law, Roma Tre) "The Most Presumed Consent: Mario Salamonio (1450-1533) and the Social Contract"
Sonia Tycko (History, Edinburgh), "The Currency of Consent: Coins and Labor Contracts in Early Modern England"
For more information on the Historicizing Consent research network: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/historicizingconsent
Thursday, April 13, 2023, 5:30pm
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center on Women, Gender, and Culture in the Early Modern World
Kimberly Coles, University of Maryland: TBA
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/kimberly-coles-tba
Tuesday, April 18, 4:30pm
MEMHS, Brown University
Neil Safier (Brown University). “Translating the Plantationocene from the Prerevolutionary Caribbean to Colonial Brazil.”
Location: Brown University, to be announced. More information: https://blogs.brown.edu/memhs/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__blogs.brown.edu_memhs_…>
How was the language of plantation society ported from the French and English-dominated Caribbean to colonial Brazil in the eighteenth century? What role did agro-industrial treatises play in the perpetuation of systems of enslaved labor as plantation societies shifted from sugar production to a wider array of foodstuffs, beverages, and profit-oriented utilitarian crops? Long understood to be powerful manuals for naturalists and plantation masters alike, these pragmatic instructional texts, focused around questions of climate, natural history, and commodity-driven agriculture, have only recently been understood to have circulated outside the narrow Caribbean world for which they were destined. One iconic protagonist of this translation process was the Franciscan friar José Mariano da Conceição Vellozo (1742-1811), who served as a linguistic conduit for moving natural knowledge from an array of texts produced in colonial cultures around the globe into print – and into Portuguese in particular. This talk examines Vellozo’s multi-volume and multi-faceted Fazendeiro do Brazil (1798-1806) with an eye toward connecting the eighteenth-century natural sciences, the ambitions of expanding plantation-based economies, and the politics of translation across the multilingual geographies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
**Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Debapriya Sarkar, Assistant Professor of English at University of Connecticut, "Geographies of Race in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra."
In-person event. Barker Center, 211, Harvard University, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sites.google.com_g.har…>
*April 20, 5:30 PM
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Center of Excellence: New Perspectives on New France
Micah True (University of Alberta, Canada)
"lndigenous Literacies and the Jesuit Relations from New France: The Case of Joseph
Chi hoatenhwa"
Webinar. Registration link<https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9gDkKN2yQPyQPNS5JmWCiw>
*Thursday, April 20, 2023, 7:00pm
British actor and writer Paterson Joseph will read from his brand new novel, The Secret Diaries of Ignatius Sancho. Co-sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard Hutchins Center and Harvard MHC Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Studies
Location: TBA, Harvard University
The novel, The Secret Life of Charles Ignatius Sancho<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegu…> is based on the life and published letters (1780) of the Black British letter-writer. The novel was released in the UK in October 2022 and will be released in the US in April 2023. The novel also draws upon the one-man performance Paterson created in 2014, Sancho, A Remembrance<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytim…>.
Friday, April 21, 2023, 5:30 pm reception, 6:00 pm Seminar
Shakespearean Studies Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Gregory Semenza, Professor of English, University of Connecticut, “‘Please, just no Shakespeare’: Reinventing Authorship in Station Eleven.”
Location: In-person Event, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Tuesday, April 25, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Maryam Patton (History and Middle Eastern Studies), “Past as Prelude: The Role of Historical Knowledge Among Early Ottoman Astrologers”
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
*Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 5:30pm
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Dr. Syrithe Pugh, Reader in English at the University of Aberdeen, Human Resources: Class and Cannibalism in ‘The Hock-Cart’.
Pembroke Hall, 305, Brown University, Providence, RI
*Thursday, April 27 to Sat, April 29, 2023
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
Conference: Nahuatl Texts and Contexts: Annual Meeting of the Association of Nahuatl Scholars
Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room, Brown University, Providence RI
Website Link<https://events.brown.edu/early-modern-world/event/240556-early-modern-confe…>
Monday, 5/1/2023
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Book History
Graduate Conference
Location: Brown University, Providence RI (In-person event)
Wednesday, May 3, 2023, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Closing Event
In-person event
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sites.google.com_g.har…>
Thursday, May 4, 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Presented by the Harvard Warren Center’s Workshop on “Capitalism’s Hardwiring: Money, Credit, and Finance in a Globalizing World, 1620-2020”
Simon Middleton (College of William and Mary), “Current Money and Community in Early America”
Harvard Law School (WCC 3019)
*Monday, May 8, 2023, 1:00pm to 5:30pm
Harvard MHC Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Studies
Symposium in two parts, presenting ideas recovered from “The Radical Eighteenth Century”
Location: Thomson Room of the Barker Center, Harvard University (12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA)
Twelve leading feminist scholars, including Ros Ballaster, Kristina Straub, Mona Narain, Jennie Batchelor, Tita Chico, Betty Schellenburg, Manushag Powell, Regulus Allen, and Susan Carlisle will present ideas recovered from “The Radical Eighteenth Century.” The first roundtable discussion, from 1-3 will be about “Critiques of Capitalism” that surfaced in the eighteenth century. The second roundtable discussion from 3:30 to 5:30, will be about those ideas that went against the grain of individualism but were examples of ”Thinking Through the Community.” Questions will also be taken from the floor and discussion among the participants and the audience will be encouraged.
Tuesday, May 16, 2023, 12pm
Harvard Early Sciences Working Group
Spencer Weinreich (Harvard Society of Fellows), “Daily Bread: Towards a Material History of the Eucharist”
Hybrid format: In-person at Science Center room 252 (SC252), Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA, 02138 and on Zoom (email Mateo Montoya, mateomontoya(a)g.harvard.edu, to register either for the in-person meeting or for the Zoom link, and to receive the precirculated paper)
***
*If you would like your announcement to be posted in an upcoming Early Mod Events listing please send your event details to: earlymod(a)fas.harvard.edu
To be included in the Early Mod Events mailing, the event must take place or (in case of online events) be relevant to the greater Boston area. Announcements are posted at the discretion of the Early Mod Listserv administrator. It would be a great help if you could follow this format:
Day, date, time
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Type of event (ex. Lecture/Symposium/Workshop), Event Title
Person giving talk (in bold), their home institution (if applicable)
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*If the event is virtual, please include either a Zoom registration link OR a contact email with the announcement. If your event is being held in-person, please specify this, and include location details.
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