Call for Contributions: Literary & Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity

General Editors: Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, and Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University

For more than a decade now, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity, http://www.ashgate.com/LITSCI, has provided a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals that address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic production, utopia—and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual methods of newly emergent 'scientific' fields such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections, and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.

As the series continues to evolve, we particularly seek submissions to do with:

· alchemy
· science in the New World
· meteorology
· knowledge networks
· global science
· machines
· poetics and science
· navigation/mapmaking

To submit a proposal, or for more information, please contact: Erika Gaffney, Publishing Manager with Ashgate: egaffney@ashgate.com

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www.ashgate.com

Thomas Harriot Seminar 2015

Durham Castle, University of Durham, 6-7 July 2015

The Thomas Harriot Seminar celebrates the life and times of the mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), and welcomes papers on Harriot himself as well as on the history of mathematics and science in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century more generally. We particularly welcome papers on subjects of interest to Harriot, which included: pure and applied mathematics, the new world, astronomy, natural philosophy, alchemy, optics, linguistics, and the art of war. For more information about the Seminar please visit the Thomas Harriot Seminar website:


Richard Osterhoof (CRASSH University of Cambridge) “Gabriel Harvey and the utility of mathematics”

Robert Goulding (University of Notre Dame), “Through a glass, darkly: shadows, light, and prismatic colours.”

Glyn Parry (University of Roehampton), “The Ordeal of Thomas Digges”

Cathy France (University of Leeds), “Thomas Digges and the ballistic trajectory”

Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), “Edward Wright at Sea – Detected and Corrected”.

David Harris Sacks (Reed College, Oregon), “Learning to Know: Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot in Oxford.”

Todd Andrew Borlik (University of Huddersfield), “John Dee’s ‘Hydragogie’ and Fen Drainage in the Seventeenth Century”

Susan Maxwell (Independent Scholar), “Preparing for circumnavigation: Thomas Cavendish and Francis Drake”

Registration fee: £95 (includes accommodation at the Castle, drinks reception, conference dinner on the 6th and buffet lunch on the 7th). Non-residential fee (without dinner and lunch): £35. Two bursaries are available for MA or PhD students, covering residential registration (if you would like to apply for one of these, please email the Chairman explaining why attending the seminar would be useful to your research). To register please email the Chairman Dr Stephen Clucas.


Dr Stephen Clucas
Editor, Intellectual History Review
Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History,
English and Humanities,
Birkbeck, Univesity of London,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HX

Renaissance Old Worlds: English Encounters from the Levant to the Far East

At The British Library, 29 June - 1 July 2012

The early modern period saw England establishing its first colonies in the New World, but its ideas and expectations about foreign nations, travel and its identity as a political and economic power on the global stage were influenced largely by its experiences in other distant but familiar nations. This conference will investigate English interactions with the ‘old worlds’ of the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East. It will ask how such cross-encounters may have shaped not only the literature, art and cultures of England and the host nations, but also a broad range of intellectual, political, cultural, religious and economic determinants of England’s relationship with the wider world.

Overarching questions to be investigated by the conference include:

(1) How did English cultural memories of the Old World, from art, literature and political events such as conflicts in the Islamic Mediterranean, influence actual travel encounters?

(2) How did information and expertise about distant places circulate, and who were the agents of such circulation (from missionaries, merchants, administrators, and indigenous informants, to artisans and scholars)?

(3) What form did the information take (from maps and texts to material artefacts)?

(4) How did religion inflect political and social negotiations? (How is anxiety about piracy in the Islamic Mediterranean and North Africa, for instance, connected to anxieties about conversion between Christianity and Islam?)

(5) What role did trading companies, both those established by the English and their European trading competitors, play in determining structures of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters?

Proposals are invited for complete panels of three or four papers, as well as individual papers on one of the following themes:

· Interplay between ‘old worlds’ and ‘new’
· Circulation networks
· Visual and material culture (art, cartography, crafts)
· Trade, diplomacy, piracy
· Gift-exchange
· Religion and conversion
· Translation and transformation

Please send abstracts (250 words for individual papers and 500 words for complete panels) and a brief biographical statement (if proposing a panel, one for each participant) to Nandini Das at row@liverpool.ac.uk by 1 March 2012. Papers should take between 15–20 minutes to present, and panels should last no longer than 1 hour and 20 minutes.

On Kings and Cannibals: Ethnography, Ethnology and Mapping the Americas in Early Modern Europe

The Institute of Historical Research, and the University of Notre Dame present a series of seminars in GLOBAL HISTORY at the London Centre of the University of Notre Dame, 1 Suffolk Street, SW1Y 4HG (off Pall Mall East, west of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery) on Wednesdays at 5.30 p.m.

Registration essential; please email Charlotte Parkyn (cparkyn@nd.edu).
Forthcoming Programme for 2012

15th February: Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), “On Kings and Cannibals: Ethnography, Ethnology and Mapping the Americas in Early Modern Europe”

Dr Davies´s articles on early modern cartography, ethnography, and mirabilia have attracted much admiration. Having completed a book on New World ethnography and maps, she is working on the global history of colonial science.

The University of Notre Dame invites seminar-goers to wine at or after the seminars. Seminar-goers who would like to dine with the speaker should send a cheque for £40 to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, UND, 1 Suffolk Street, London SW1Y 4HG at least a fortnight in advance. Men wear suit and tie to the dinner parties and women are kindly asked to dress accordingly. Steering group: William Clarence-Smith (SOAS), Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Notre Dame), Geoffrey Hosking (SEES, UCL). N.B: Seminar-goers should register with cparkyn@nd.edu. Enquiries to FELIPE.FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO@nd.edu.