Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
March 9-10 2012

Keynote Speakers: Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky, and Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University

The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the University of Michigan, is seeking submissions for a conference on the construction of nations and empires in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This conference will engage with the idea of emerging and changing national identities in this period. More specifically, it will investigate the particular social dynamics that characterize negotiations between categories such as the foreign and the domestic or the individual and the state. How is the status of the nation and its inhabitants defined? How does the cultural production of nation engage with shifting political realities? Do changes in geographical borders or ideologies produce new discourses of difference in terms of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and/or disability?

We welcome papers that examine how early modern writers, collectives, and cultures grappled with these questions within a series of interrelated realms—e.g., academic, artistic, economic, epistemological, geographical, legal, medical, occult, philosophical, private, public, religious, scientific, and theatrical. Potential topics might include radical religious dissent, the rise of Protestantism and/or the Counter-Reformation, colonialism and expansion in the Americas, the beginnings of the slave trade, the shift from monarchy to commonwealth in seventeenth-century England, relations between the East and West, or European interactions with the Ottoman Empire.

Please send a 250-word abstract to Cordelia Zukerman (czukerma@umich.edu) and Leila Watkins (lrwatkin@umich.edu) by January 15, 2012.

Borderlines XVI – Site & Sound 20-22 April 2012
Queen’s University Belfast
Conference Website

Special guest speaker: Prof. Paul Strohm (Columbia University)

Borderlines is an annual postgraduate conference in medieval and early modern studies, which aims to bring together researchers in a variety of disciplines, at MA, PhD and postdoctoral level, from across Ireland, Britain, Europe and around the world. The theme of this year’s conference will be Site & Sound. Amongst our many inheritances from the medieval and early modern ages, perhaps the most apparent and accessible are the streets, churches and landscapes we share with our ancestors. Along with these sites we have inherited a host of cultural assumptions about our spaces – big and small – from the home, through the city and the country, to our nations and the wider world around us. While echoes persist in the spaces we inhabit, the languages we speak and the music we enjoy today, the sounds of the medieval and early modern ages are often obscured by the signal to noise ratio of the past to the present. In this conference, we hope to explore the sites and sounds of the past as the framework for an open and interdisciplinary consideration of current research in medieval and early modern studies. We welcome papers from researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Codicology, Drama, Film Studies, Folklore, Geography, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Music, Paleography, Philosophy and Theology.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Architecture and landscapes in the past and through time.
• Spatial dichotomies: urban/rural, public/private, male/female.
• The acoustics of space.
• The archaeological site and the idea(s) of excavation.
• The space of the page, the painting or the statue.
• The spaces and sounds of the text.
• Oral tradition.
• Drama on the stage and the page. Its spaces, sounds and spectacles.
• Art music, popular music and folkmusic in the past and in modern revivals.
• Music and space in the past and the present.
• Religious spaces, sounds and silences.
• Space, sound and the senses.
• (Re)creations of medieval and early modern spaces and sounds in film and television.

Please submit proposals of 250 words to borderlinesxvi@gmail.com by 1st March 2012.

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