Making, Unmaking, and Remaking the Early Modern Era: 1500-1800

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking the Early Modern Era: 1500-1800

Patricia Fumerton (English,UCSB)
Pamela Smith (History, Columbia)
Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28 / 9:00 AM
Alumni Hall and West Conference Center

We seek to explore the various kinds and forms of making. From manufacturing a sheet of paper, to printing a ballad, to conducting an experiment, to producing a play, to fashioning an identity, to consolidating a monarchical and political body, this conference is broadly interested in the concept of early modern making. Patricia Fumerton’s interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and literature, high and popular culture, visual culture, subjectivity, and postmodernism. She is the author of Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. She is currently the director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (link is external) (EBBA). Pamela Smith’s current research focuses on attitudes to nature in early modern Europe and the Scientific Revolution, with particular attention to craft knowledge and historical techniques. Her publications include Making Knowledge in Early modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, and Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe. She is founding director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.

Sponsored by the IHC, Graduate Division, the Dept.of English, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of History of Art and Architecture, the Dept. of Philosophy,  the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, the Dept. of Linguistics, the Dept. of Film and Media Studies, the Dept. of Global and International Studies, the Dept. of Comparative Literature, and the Dept. of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies.
Website: https://earlymodernmaking.wordpress.com/cfp/