News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750


Queen Mary, University of London, 26-28th July


How did news cross Europe, and how did news make Europe? News in early modern Europe was a distinctively transnational phenomenon; its topics were international in scope; the forms and terminologies of news, as well as the news itself, crossed national boundaries; practices of news-gathering relied on networks of international agents; it was widely translated; it travelled along commercial routes, or through postal networks that developed in express imitation of one another and were designed to be mutually connected; and the forces attempting to control the press operated, or attempted to operate, well outside of their actual jurisdiction. 

The spread of news and the appetite for it reflect changes in the geopolitical and confessional maps of Europe, spreading through ethnic and religious diasporas as well as diplomatic, mercantile and scholarly networks. It helped forge communities on a local, national and international scale. The purpose of the conference is to explore ways in which this history can be written. 

News and the Shape of Europe is the final stage of the Leverhulme international network, News Networks in Early Modern Europe, a two-year investigation of news communication laying the groundwork for a European history of news.

International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Registration for the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine (iCHSTM 2013), to be held in Manchester, UK from Sunday 21 to Sunday 28 July, is now open.

To register, please go to <http://www.ichstm2013.com/registration/> and follow the link to open the registration form. Registration will be available at the early discounted rate until Sunday 14 April, and at a higher rate until Monday 1 July, which is the final deadline.

Please note that the registration process is managed by the University of Manchester's conference services group. If you have any queries about registration, please direct them to mcc.reg@manchester.ac.uk .

Also, the first draft listing of of pre-arranged symposia, including individual abstracts for around 1100 papers, is now available and can be seen at<http://www.ichstm2013.com/programme/guide/>.

Stand-alone papers are not yet listed: they are still in the process of being grouped, and will be added to the programme around the beginning of March. Timetable / scheduling information will also be added around the same time.

If you are involved in the Congress as a presenter, symposium organiser, session chair or commentator, you should recently have received further details directly. If not, please contact us at submissions@ichstm2013.com and we will advise.

For the latest updates, you can also sign up to the Congress mailing list at<http://www.ichstm2013.com/mailinglist/>.

'Forging the Moon, or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo': A talk by Nick Wilding on Galileo’s Sidereus Nunciusas

The Bibliographical Society in conjunction with the British Library is pleased to announce that Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will talk about his recent work recognising a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nunciusas a forgery. It had been authenticated in 2011 by a team of experts as Galileo's autograph proof copy, and valued at $10m.


Dates: Thursday, July 18, 2013 - 18:00
Location: British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London


http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/event/nick-wilding-lecture-2013

Educating Women, an inter-disciplinary conference

Thursday 18 July 2013 | Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent UK

There have been issues around women and education since before Christine de Pizan wrote in 1404 that 

"Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did."

Progress since then has been varied. Lady Margaret Beaufort founded two Cambridge colleges in the early 1500s but it is less than 60 years since women were first awarded degrees from Cambridge. In the UK, although STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are integral to our economic success this is still a male dominated sector and in the last 10 years there has been no improvement in the uptake of women in mathematical sciences – 38% of students – or engineering and technology, where just 15% of students are women. Globally while the gender gap has narrowed over recent years, statistics from UNESCO in 2011 showed that girls are still at a disadvantage: in South and West Asia for example only 1 in 2 women can read or write compared with 7 out of 10 men. 

The idea for this conference, which will consider the education of and by women from the middle ages to the present day, came from a mother and daughter’s interests in education and early modern women. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to discuss issues around educating women (and girls) with a view to understanding the realities. 

Guidelines for submission of paper/symposia abstracts 

Abstracts for papers should not exceed 300 words. Symposia proposals and submissions from postgraduate students are welcome. The conference language is English. Possible topics could include (but are not restricted to): 
  • informal and formal education of women and girls 
  • pre-modern scholarly women 
  • attitudes to educating/educated women 
  • global inequalities 
  • girls, women and lifelong learning 
  • women leaders in education 
  • feminist/anti-feminist influences on educating women 

All abstracts for papers or other suggested presentations must be submitted by Monday 28 January 2013 to education.research@canterbury.ac.uk. 

Acceptance will be confirmed by Thursday 28 February 2013. 

It is hoped to publish a book of papers from the conference. 

For questions and enquiries about submissions, please contact lynne.graham-matheson@canterbury.ac.uk or helen.graham-matheson.12@ucl.ac.uk. 

Further details about the conference will follow.

BSHS Outreach and Education Committee Grant Scheme 2013

Are you an independent scholar working in the history of science, technology and medicine? Do you need to visit an archive as part of your research? If so, then why not apply for one of our OEC research grants? These awards, of up to £150, are specifically designed to cover travel, or similar costs, associated with archival visits. Please send all enquiries and completed application forms to outreach@bshs.org.uk. Grant recipients will be invited to write a short account of their most exciting archival find for the BSHS magazine, Viewpoint.

The application form is available from the OEC website: http://www.bshs.org.uk/outreach-and-education/outreach-and-education-committee-grants

The deadline for applications is 4pm on Friday 19th July.
Successful applicants will be notified by Friday 16th August.


James Stark (OEC Chair)

Dr James F. Stark
Research Fellow

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Instruments & arts of inquiry: natural history, natural magic and the production of knowledge in early modern Europe

Journal of Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for a special issue (Spring 2014)

Editors: Dana Jalobeanu & Cesare Pastorino
Deadline 1 October 2013

We seek papers exploring the intersections between the disciplines of natural history, natural magic and the books of secrets tradition in the early modern period. We are particularly interested in the various ways in which texts and practices in the tradition of natural magic and the books of secrets were absorbed, transformed and integrated in the renovated natural histories of the seventeenth century.

Further details at:
http://www.zetabooks.com/newsflash/cfp-jems-spring-2014.html

Guidelines for authors:
http://www.zetabooks.com/download2/JEMS-Guidelines.pdf

Please send your contribution by 1st of October 2013 to dana.jalobeanu@gmail.com.

dr. Dana Jalobeanu
University of Bucharest
Faculty of Philosophy
Splaiul Independentei 204
Bucuresti

Performance of "Lady Jane Lumley, Iphigenia at Aulis (c. 1555)"

performed by The Rose Company, directed by Emma Rucastle
8.30 pm, Tuesday 9 July, 2013 at the Minghella Theatre, University of Reading

‘The Tragedie of Euripedes called Iphigeneia’ was first ‘translated out of Greake into Englisshe’ c.1555 not by a male classicist but ‘by Lady Jane Lumley’, as the title page of her script announces.

Lumley’s prose translation of the tragedy, where Iphigenia is to be sacrificed in Aulis so that the Greek ships can sail to Troy, emphasizes the heroine’s agency. Iphigenia transcends the arguments between her father (the Greek leader Agamemnon), and her mother Clytemnestra, declaring ‘I will offer my selfe willing to deathe, for my countrie’. At the same time, Lumley’s stark prose emphasizes Agamemnon’s cruelty and the raw pain of parting felt by the family. Her translation is daring in finding moments of dark comedy in the ludicrous situations faced by the protagonists. It also speaks out against a tradition of male, military valour, since Lumley’s Greek hero is Iphigenia.
The Rose Company was established in 2013 out of the love of classic and historical performance texts and a belief in gender justice. This first production represents their commitment to bringing historical texts to contemporary life.
Tickets £5 on the door. To book a seat for the performance, email Jan Cox

Knowledge, Exchange, Encounter: Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1718

An interdisciplinary conference convened by Simon Mills (CRASSH), Scott Mandelbrote (Peterhouse) & Kate Fleet (Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College) with the support of CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Two minute video introduction on YouTube here.

8-9 July 2013 at CRASSH
The aim of this conference is to further our understanding of the ways in which knowledge was exchanged between Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the period from the conquest of Constantinople to the Treaty of Passarowitz. The conference, and the resulting collection of essays, will make an important contribution to the growing body of research concerned with the transfer of information between European and Ottoman societies in the early modern period which has emerged to challenge the long-held assumption that these societies developed along separate, and largely isolated, intellectual trajectories.

One key objective of the conference is to cover a broad disciplinary field. The six panels will focus on different kinds of knowledge, broadly construed to cover both a number of fields of intellectual enquiry – botany, geography, and antiquarianism – and a number of practical disciplines: architecture, health, military technology, and economics. The conference will also engage substantially with questions concerning the mechanics of cross-cultural exchange: how, where, and by whom was theoretical knowledge and practical information conveyed between Europe and the Ottoman world? In order to answer these questions, the three panels on the second day will investigate broader concerns such as the ‘culture of collecting’ in its European and Ottoman contexts and the functioning of ‘knowledge networks’. Significant attention will also be devoted to the relations between intellectual exchange and the diplomatic, mercantile, and religious infrastructures which connected Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the period.

A second key objective is to ensure that both the Ottoman and the European sides of these questions are equally addressed. In order to work against the grain of long-established disciplinary boundaries, each panel will combine a specialist in Ottoman history with a specialist in European history. This will ensure that the presentations, and the planned publication, draw on a range of sources rarely accessible to an individual scholar. Participants will include a number of historians who have been at the forefront of developing new approaches to delineating the workings of cross-cultural exchange in the early modern period. This will be complemented by the work of well-established scholars in various fields of Ottoman and European history. The conference is jointly organised by Kate Fleet (Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History and Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Cambridge), Scott Mandelbrote (Director of Studies in History and Perne Librarian, Peterhouse College, Cambridge), and Simon Mills (Mellon/Newton Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CRASSH, Cambridge.

Speakers include: 
Doris Behrens-Abouseif (SOAS)
Ebru Boyar (METU)
Sonja Brentjes (MPIWG) 
Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford)
Carmelina Gugliuzzo (Messina)
Feza Günergun (Istanbul)
Gottfried Hagen (Michigan)
Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway)
Deborah Howard (Cambridge)
Colin Imber (Manchester)
Scott Mandelbrote, Simon Mills (Cambridge)
Andrei Pippidi (Bucharest).

Full details and online registration.

Transitions Conference: CFP

The research centre hosts a biannual conference devoted to early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book. Following upon the success of our inaugural conference, Book Encounters, 1500-1750, this year’s conference will focus on the theme of Transitions, whether material, spatial and/or temporal in the period 1500-1750. This conference will held 4-5 July, 2013 at our wonderful Corsham Court centre, just outside Bath.

Plenary Speakers:
Professor Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham)
Professor Marcus Walsh (University of Liverpool)
Professor Henry Woudhuysen (Lincoln College, University of Oxford)

Transitions 1500-1750 aims to explore a wide range of transitions from a variety of critical and historical perspectives. We are particularly interested in papers that reflect on the impact that such transitions had on early modern subjects, institutions, material culture, habits of thought as well as literary, social and cultural practices. Different disciplinary perspectives are especially encouraged.

Possible topics of study include:
  • Transitional years (eg, 1534, 1558, 1603, 1660, 1707)
  • Celebrating/marking/remembering transition
  • Continuity/discontinuity
  • Succession literature
  • From stage to page
  • From manuscript to print (and vice versa)
  • Generic shifts
  • Shifting author-patron, author-readership relations
  • Progression/relocation/translocation
  • Historical/literary historical constructions of transition
  • The intersection of the residual and the emergent

Please send proposals for papers (20mins) and any queries to transitionsatbathspa@gmail.com by 1 March 2013.

London Critical Theory Summer School

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
1st July – 12th July 2013

The London Critical Theory Summer School will take place at Birkbeck College, London University from 1stJuly – 12th July 2013.. This unique opportunity is for graduate students and academics to follow a course which will foster exchange and debate. It will consist of at least 6 modules over the two weeks, each convened by one of the participating academics. This course does not offer transfer of credits.

Information and the application form is here – the deadline for applications is Friday 22ndMarch 2013.

Participating academics
Etienne Balibar
Drucilla Cornell
Costas Douzinas
Stephen Frosh
Esther Leslie
Catherine Malabou
Laura Mulvey
Slavoj Zizek