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
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, 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.u…
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, “Turning Global Money into Imperial Coinage: Reasserting Ottoman Monetary
Sovereignty at the End of the Seventeenth Century”
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 accompanying exhibition, Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe,
1500-1800<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__nam12.saf…bLJfk7cOiORF5u65Op0&e=>,
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: Yale University, Humanities Quadrangle 276 (320 York Street, New Haven,
Connecticut)
Registration required for virtual attendance:
https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdu2qrz8rG9z34Ru0UtTqZb1TZX5mrKRM&…
*February 24, 2023, 3:00-5:00pm
Sponsor: Yale University Art Gallery
Type of event: Public Program
“Collaboration across Campus: The Making of Crafting
Worldviews<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__artgalle…
Speakers: Jessie Park (Yale University Art Gallery) and Paola Bertucci (Yale University)
Location: McNeil Lecture Hall, Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel Street, New Haven,
Connecticut)
Registration required for virtual attendance:
https://bit.ly/3vLjU76<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-…
.
Monday, 2/27/2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Harvard Premodern Race
Seminar<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/harvard-premodern…
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?…
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…
*Wednesday, 3/1/2023 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Harvard Human Flourishing Program
Can History Make Us Happy? A Conversation with Darrin McMahon, Dartmouth
College<https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/event/can-history-make-…
Location: Emerson 305, Harvard Yard, Cambridge MA, 02138
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
*Thursday, March 2, 2023, 5 pm
Mahindra Humanities Center Renaissance Studies Seminar
Stephanie Inverso (University of Massachusetts, Boston), "Heretical Hearts: Cordiform
Maps and the Early Modern Imagination"
Please register
here<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__harvard.zoom.u…
to receive the zoom link for this event.
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 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…
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 Zoom link.
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?…
*March 21st 2023 4:30pm - 6:30pm
Five College Renaissance Seminar
Christopher Nygren, Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of
Pittsburgh: 'Salt, Water, and Stone: The Ecology of Art in Renaissance Venice'
Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies, 650 East Pleasant St., Amherst
https://www.umass.edu/renaissance/event/fcrs-nygren-2023
Wednesday, March 22, 5pm EST
Harvard English Department Renaissance Colloquium
TBD
https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/harvard-eng-grad-colloquium/renaissa…
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>
*March 23, 5:30pm
Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Women, Gender, and Culture in the Early
Modern World
"Margery Kempe’s Thermal Dynamics"
Micah Goodrich, Department of English, Boston University
Barker Center (room TBA), 12 Quincy St, Cambridge MA
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/women-gender-and-culture-early-m…
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
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-6hrjgrHtYXPhj8pOGEio1ZDZqzTKZ_>
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/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?…
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…
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%2…
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…amp;reserved=0>.
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-mode…
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…
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)
*June 5-9, 2023
Co-sponsored by Folger Institute and Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance
Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Introduction to English Paleography (course)
Course Director: Dr. Heather
Wolfe<https://www.folger.edu/staff/dr-heather-wolfe>fe>,
Curator of Manuscripts and Archivist, Folger Shakespeare Library.
This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern
England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The course will highlight the strengths of our rare book collection
and materials related to The Renaissance of the Earth. Find more information
here<https://www.folger.edu/research/the-folger-institute/scholarly-prog…
Apply<https://www.folger.edu/research/the-folger-institute/scholarly-pro…
March 2023 for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute
Consortium<https://www.folger.edu/research/the-folger-institute/scholarl…
affiliates.
***
*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