Early Modern History Workshop; Amanda Herbert and Olivia Weisser

Venue: NACBS, Denver
Time: Nov. 3-5 2017
Abstracts due: March 3, 2017

Participants in this workshop will explore early modern bodies, both material and imagined. In early modern Britain, the human body served as an important cultural vehicle, the site or object upon which politics, medicine, literature, economics, religion, science, philosophy, and art could (and did) work. In this workshop the organizers will explore early modern conceptions of the body, broadly defined: constructions of bodies politic, and bodies corporate; bodies of water and land; bodies of belief and faith; bodies of thought or knowledge.

How do „bodies“, both material and rhetorical, enable us as historians to access early modern beliefs and practices, including ideas about violence, difference, colonial exploitation, ecological use, political and religious change, or racial and sexual norms? How did ideas about physical or corporeal bodies contribute to thinking about bodies of other things? As scholars of the period, are „bodies“ useful to us and how can we problematize them in new ways? Papers on these issues or on related topics that fit broadly within the organizers aims are welcomed, particularly from graduate students and early career scholars, and from scholars working and living in the UK.

The session will feature 7-10 pre-circulated papers of 15-25 pages. All participants will be required to submit their papers by the last day of September, and to have read the entire session’s papers in advance of the conference. Please send a one-page abstract and one-to-two page CV to Amanda Herbert (aherbert@folger.edu) and Olivia Weisser (olivia.weisser@umb.edu) by March 3, 2017.

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