Transience, Garbage, Excess, Loss: The Ephemeral, 1500–1800
University of California, Santa Barbara
April 21–22, 2017

The Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites proposals for our annual conference, “Transience, Garbage, Excess, Loss: The Ephemeral, 1500–1800,” to be held on April 21 and 22, 2017.

We are happy to announce our two keynote speakers: Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook (UC, Santa Barbara) and Jonathan Goldberg (Emory).

We invite presentations that connect broadly to our theme of ephemerality in early modernity. With the present rise of ephemera studies, we hope to investigate the limits, depths, and abilities of the ephemeral as it may pertain to literature, art, music, history, religion, philosophy, or other fields of inquiry. How is the ephemeral intimately connected to our study of early modernity? And what is at stake in plumbing what is, by definition, “short-lived” or “transitory”? Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Im/permanence; im/materiality
• Sanitation, disease, sickness, plague, sewage or early modern plumbing
• Trash or the trashy
• Fragility or frailty
• Excessive femininity, sensibility, or emotional states
• Social production, overpopulation, over crowding
• Scavengers, pests, pestilence
• Food, consumption, intoxication
• Scarcity vs. plenty
• The exile, itinerant, or transient
• The pilgrim or pilgrimage
• Textuality; the ephemerality of print
• Art, artistry, or ornamentation
• The object vs the subject
• The transatlantic
• Environmental stakes

We invite abstracts of 300 words or less and a 1-page CV to be sent to EMCConference@gmail.com by December 15, 2016. In the spirit of the ephemeral, we envision both traditional conference presentations and also roundtables that engage with panelists, respondents, and audience. Please feel free to contact the conference organizer, Jeremy Chow, at emcfellow@gmail.com with any questions you may have.

Powerful Emotions / Emotions & Power c. 400-1850
Humanities Research Centre, University of York
28-30 June, 2017

Conference Website

Plenary Speakers:

• Professor Rita Copeland (The University of Pennsylvania)
• Professor David Lemmings (University of Adelaide)

‘Emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power’ (William Reddy, 1997)

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences are increasingly turning their attention to the affective dimension of power, and the way in which emotions are implicit in the exercise of power in all its forms. The language of power has long been used to calibrate the impact of emotions – feelings ‘shake’ and ‘grip’ us; we read of and recall moments when passions convulsed communities and animated violent actions. Strategic displays of emotion have regularly been used for the exercise and negotiation of power.

This conference will draw on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise to address the relationships between two fundamental concepts in social and historical inquiry: power and emotion. How are historical forms of cultural, social, religious, political and soft power linked with the expression, performance and control of emotions? How has power been negotiated and resisted through expressions of emotions? How have emotional cultures sustained or been produced by particular structures of power? How have understandings and expressions of emotion played out within cross-cultural encounters and conflicts? What has been the relationship between intimate, personal feeling and its public, collective manifestations?

Literary and artistic works as well as objects of diverse kinds are often said to produce or to have elicited powerful emotions. Yet how has this varied across time, space, cultures and gender? What visual, verbal and gestural rhetorics have been considered to act most potently upon the emotions in different periods? How have these conventions related to ideas of the inexpressibility of powerful or traumatic emotional experience, its resistance to aesthetic articulation? What are the implications of this for the recoverability of past emotional experience? And how does the study of the power of feeling relate to more traditionally social conceptions of hierarchy, society, and power? What new understandings of the workings of power do we gain through the perspective of a history of emotions?

This interdisciplinary conference is jointly organized by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Centres for Medieval Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. It invites papers that address the above issues from disciplines including, but not restricted to: history, religion, literature, art, music, politics, archaeology, philosophy and anthropology.

Papers and panels might focus on the following questions and themes:

• Emotion and political and social action: How have emotions been used by various political, religious and other groups to reinforce or to undermine social and political hierarchies? What role did gender play in these processes?
• Dynasty, rule and emotional display.
• The affective dimensions of war, protest, revolution and nation building
• Diplomacy and the negotiation of cross-cultural emotions
• Religious change, power and emotions
• How has the relationship between emotions / passions and power been understood and theorized across time?
• The micro-politics of intimate relationships and gendered power
• The role of ritual, object and liturgy in managing, intensifying, or disciplining political, religious or other emotions
• What techniques and venues have been used to construct and amplify collective emotions? Papers might consider mass meetings, crowds, congregations, theatres, assemblies and clubs.

The organisers welcome proposals for individual 20-minute papers, for panels (which may adopt a more innovative format, including round-tables, a larger number of short presentations), or for postgraduate poster presentations.

Proposals should be sent to Pam Bond, Administrative Officer at the Centre for the History of Emotions, The University of Western Australia. Email: emotions@uwa.edu.au by Friday 27 January, 2017.

European Court Culture & Greenwich Palace, 1500-1750
Queen’s House Conference 2017
National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House, Greenwich
20-22 April, 2017

Royal Museums Greenwich and the Society for Court Studies are pleased to announce this call for papers, for a major international conference to mark the 400th anniversary year of the Queen’s House, Greenwich. Designed by Inigo Jones in 1616 and completed in 1639, this royal villa is an acknowledged masterpiece of British architecture and the only remaining building of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century palace complex. Today the Queen’s House lies at the centre of the World Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich, which also includes the Royal Observatory and the Old Royal Naval College (previously Greenwich Hospital). The site as a whole is often celebrated as quintessentially ‘British’ – historically, culturally and artistically. Yet the sequence of queens associated with the Queen’s House and Greenwich more generally reflect a wider orientation towards Europe – from Anne of Denmark, who commissioned the House, to Henrietta Maria of France, Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena – in addition to Greenwich’s transformation under the patronage of Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Located on the River Thames at the gateway to London and to England, royal residences at Greenwich served an important function in the early modern period as a cultural link with the continent, and in particular, with England’s nearest neighbours in the Low Countries and France. After major refurbishment, the Queen’s House reopens in October 2016 with new displays that focus on a number of important themes to historians of art, architecture and culture, and strong links to politics, diplomacy, war and royal and maritime culture.

Some of the themes that might be considered (but are not limited to) include:

• Royal portraiture, in particular the representation of queens regnant and consorts
• ‘Princely magnificence’ and the design of royal spaces (such as the division between a King’s and Queen’s sides)
• Dynastic links between the houses of Stuart, Orange, Bourbon, Wittelsbach (Palatinate), and Portugal
• The history of Greenwich Palace as a royal residence and centre of power and culture
• The Queen’s House and Greenwich Palace situated in a wider royal and architectural context
• Connections between court life in Greenwich and the development of the navy (as represented by Thornhill’s allegorical paintings in the Painted Hall, and James, Duke of York, as Lord High Admiral, etc.)
• Fashions and artistic influences from overseas, notably Dutch, Flemish or French artists, architects and royal spaces (Inigo Jones, Orazio Gentileschi and James Thornhill), usage of allegory and mythology in royal/naval settings
• other areas patronized by the court, such as maritime exploration, scientific advances, prints, as represented by the Royal Observatory Greenwich

The conference will be held on the 20-22 April 2017 in the National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House. Keynote speakers will include Dr Simon Thurley.

We invite the submission of abstracts (300 to 400 words) for twenty-minute papers. The deadline for submissions is 1 December, 2016. Please direct queries, if any, to Janet Dickinson: janet.dickinson@conted.ox.ac.uk and proposals and a brief biography to research@rmg.co.uk

Conference organisers: Janet Dickinson (University of Oxford), Christine Riding (Royal Museums Greenwich) and Jonathan Spangler (Manchester Metropolitan University).