“Women on the Move: Gender and Migration in the Early Modern Period”
Call for Papers – Panel at the 67th Annual Renaissance Society of America Meeting, 2020
Dublin, Ireland, April 7-10, 2021

Although globalization is thought to be a recent phenomenon, the early modern period saw an intense uptick in global migration, specifically within the European continent and throughout the Atlantic World. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which women navigated this newly global system through structures of voluntary and forced migration for a variety of religious, social, and economic reasons. Women migrated as wives, laborers, missionaries, indentured servants, and enslaved persons. This panel especially seeks proposals that are committed to interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches that are historically sensitive and theoretically innovative. In analyzing the specific ways early modern women’s gender affected their experience of migration in the Atlantic world, this panel broadens the conversation of early modern globalization.

Paper topics might include but are not limited to:

-Women’s travel writings
-The intersection of religion, gender, and migration
-Gender, travel and migration in the early modern imagination
-The limits of women’s travel or migration
-Conceptions of travelling, gender, and “the Other” in the early modern world
-Migration and gender in the context of emerging settler colonial systems
-Migration as a mode of increased globalization
-Migration, colonialization, and the early modern economy

Please send a CV, a presentation title, and a 150-word abstract to the session organizer Kelly Douma Kaelin (ked17@psu.edu). In addition, please detail any A/V requirements that you expect to have.

All presenters must register for the 67th Annual Renaissance Society of America Meeting, be committed to attending the conference in Dublin, and make their own travel arrangements.

For more information about the RSA Annual Meeting, please see the conference website.

The deadline for the submission of materials for this panel is Saturday, August 1, 2020.