CELL: Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives





Centre for Editing Lives & Letters (CELL)
University College London
June 6th-8th 2019
Venue: University College London, IAS Common Ground

This symposium brings together a group of UK-based academics and librarians, as well as key Continental scholars, in an attempt to consolidate current research, for the first time, on seventeenth-century libraries and book collecting. Much research has been done, but it remains scattered across disciplinary divides. Until separate findings have been amalgamated, we will not be able to establish the patterns of book acquisition and library formation for this important period.

Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives will address questions of topography and typology, networks of library activity, administration, visual identity, dispersal, owners and content, and definitions of public and private. The symposium will also confront current topics of cultural and intellectual history – especially heritage and antiquarianism, the circulation and management of knowledge, and the rise of consumerism and the culture of collecting, as presented in such books as Arthur MacGregor’s Curiosity and Enlightenment (2007), Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know (2010), and Linda Levy Peck’s Consuming Splendor (2005).

CALL FOR PAPERS: 13th International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference

The Thirteenth International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference 6-9 June 2019, Trondheim, Norway

HOST: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
THEME: Natures, Pictures: Cavendish and Early Modern Science, Technology, and Creativity

The society welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers on topics related directly or indirectly to the theme, or on any aspects of Cavendish, her work, her family (including William Cavendish, Jane Cavendish, and Elizabeth Cavendish) and her contemporaries, influences, and responses to her work. In particular, we invite panel proposals on the work of Anne Conway and other early modern women scientists and philosophers.

Papers may explore, but are not limited to, the following disciplines:
  • art history
  • social history
  • book history
  • digital humanities
  • the history of science
  • political theory
  • literature
  • ecocriticism
  • gender studies
  • philosophy
  • translation studies
  • pedagogical approaches


The 2019 conference will feature invited speaker Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World (2014):

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poems, four collections of essays, six novels, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction 2014. Hustvedt has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.


Abstracts of 150 to 200 words should be emailed to Lara Dodds (LDodds@english.mssate.edu) and Lisa Walters (walterl@hope.ac.uk) together with a brief CV by December 1st, 2018.

For more information, or to register for the conference, please visit the website of the Margaret Cavendish Society