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. As
last year 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’re 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
**Wednesday, February 1, 2023, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Gordon Teskey, Professor of English at Harvard, "Prophetic Philology: Paradise Lost
in the Twenty-First Century."
In-person event, Barker Center, Room 211, Harvard University, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
Monday, 2/6/2023 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Medieval Studies
Opening meeting: Michelle Warren (Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College), author of
Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (2022) in conversation with Ann Blair
(History, Harvard)
Location: Tsai Auditorium, CGIS South Building (1730 Cambridge Street)
Prior to this event, from 4pm to 5:30pm, the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies
invites all interested to join them for their Spring Semester welcoming reception,
featuring food, drink, and lively conversation. The location is in front of Tsai
Auditorium, at CGIS South Building Lower Concourse, 1730 Cambridge Street.
Wednesday, 2/8/2023 5:15pm
Co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminars on Diagrams Across Disciplines and
the History of the Book
Matthew Landrus (Oxford University and Rhode Island School of Design), “Diagrammatic
reasoning for early modern artist/engineers, with particular attention to Leonardo da
Vinci.”<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/matthew-landrus-o…
Location: Room 133, Barker Center, Harvard University 12 Quincy St, Cambridge MA, 02138
*Friday, February 10, 2023, 6:00 pm
Shakespearean Studies Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Bradley J. Irish, Associate Professor of English, Arizona State University, “The Cycles of
Disgust in Timon of Athens”
ZOOM Meeting. You must register for this event at
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/cycles-disgust-timon-athens
Wednesday, February 15th, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
Katherine Horgan, doctoral candidate in English at Harvard, "Playing Sappho:
Biography as Form in Early Modern Sapphic Reception."
In-person event
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
Wednesday, 2/15/2023 5:15pm
Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Early Modern Workshop, and the Mahindra
Humanities Center Seminars in the History of the Book and Diagrams Across Disciplines
J.H. Chajes (Wolfson Professor of Jewish Religious Thought, University of Haifa), “Seeing
the Kabbalah Through Its Trees: The New Perspectives of The Kabbalistic
Tree.”<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/jh-chajes-wolfson-…
Location: HMANE (Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, formerly the Semitic Museum, 6
Divinity Ave, Cambridge) Room 201.
*Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 6pm
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on American Literature and Culture
Meredith Neuman, Clark University: “Book Copies and Textual Desires: Reading Early
American Poetry Against the Imprint.” Respondent: Sarah Robbins, Tufts University
Barker Center, Room 133, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge MA, 02138
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/book-copies-and-textual-de…
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”
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-…
Location: Harvard Loeb House Ballroom, 17 Quincy St., Cambridge
Reception to Follow.
*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
*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
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/
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.
In-person event
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
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-hist…
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-histor…=0>,
or by email to agoeing(a)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…
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/
Wednesday, March 22, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
TBD
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
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…Et9RKM5DQ5cfvdt2pFU&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
TBD
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
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/
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
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
*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)
Monday, 5/1/2023
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Book History
Save the date: Harvard-Yale-Brown grad conference in book history
<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/save-date-harvard-yale-brown-grad-conference-book-history-will-take-place?delta=0>
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…
*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)
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
Sponsor (if available)
Type of event (ex. Lecture/Symposium/Workshop), Event Title
Person giving talk (in bold), their home institution (if applicable)
Location: in-person or virtual
*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.
Additional info (no more than a couple of sentences)
RSVP or Registration information/link