Organizing Committee, chair: Merry Wiesner-Hanks, University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin

Time: June 21-June 23, 2012
Venue: UWM School of Continuing Education Conference Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Website
Deadline for proposals: August 31, 2011
Send your proposal to: atw-12@uwm.edu.
Detailed instructions on submission here

How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner space of the body to the outer spaces of the cosmos? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways in which we think, write, and teach about the early modern world? Taking as our inspiration the move of „Attending to Early Modern Women“ from Maryland to Milwaukee, we will consider these issues in relationship to the following topics:

Communities
Women’s actions in neighborhoods, villages, cities, states, and empires; family and kinship networks; establishing and breaching boundaries in sexual and gender expression; religious communities; exclusions, exiles, and expulsions.

Environments
Gendered landscapes and soundscapes; the body and its borders; built and invented realms and frontiers; cartographic spaces; gender and the new cosmology and anatomy.

Exchanges
Travel, migration, and displacement; imagined spatial crossings; new interdisciplinary connections; the circulation of manuscripts, books, objects, and ideas; consumerism and material culture; transnational and transoceanic links.

Pedagogies
Traveling new routes in teaching; the virtual spaces of technology and teaching; early modern women in the realm of museums and galleries for adults and children; issues in academic institutions and in publishing.

The conference will retain its innovative format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote dialogue, augmented by a plenary session on each of the four conference topics: communities, environments, exchanges, and pedagogies. It will be held at the UWM School of Continuing Education Conference Center in the
heart of downtown Milwaukee, within easy walking distance of the lakeshore, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Amtrak station.

Attendees will stay in the near-by and newly renovated Doubletree Hotel. The conference will run from Thursday June 21 through Saturday June 23, 2012, and attendees will also have the opportunuity to participate in a special pre-conference seminar on Wednesday June 20 at the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.