Conferences
Annual EMC Conference | Making Publics, 1500-1800 | March 9-10, 2007
An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Early Modern Center. What were early modern publics? How were they formed? What needs did they serve for those who participated in them? And how did they relate to the emergence of a cultural formation that we recognize as distinctly early modern? These are among the questions we seek to address in this conference.
EMC Undergraduate Conference | May 25, 2007
South Hall 2635, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
This conference features exceptional work by undergraduates at UCSB. Reception to follow.
Events
Fall Colloquium | Paul Yachnin & Dena Goodman | November 17, 2006
Paul Yachnin, Professor of English, McGill University; title of talk: “Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England.”
Description: “How can we best describe the socio-political dimension of the play Hamlet?” The ideas about artistic and intellectual works and public making that are emerging from the Making Publics project can yield an answer to this question likely to be more historically and critically illuminating than either old-style or new-style readings for ideological content. A focus on public making will be able to explain the play’s socio-political dimension in terms of meaningful practices rather than textual meanings and in terms of the social agency of things such as performances and books rather than the agency of writers like Shakespeare. Such a focus is not at all to exclude textual meanings or artistic agency, but only to shift the interpretive task away from what could be called the imaginary field of literary public utterance.
Dena Goodman, Professor of History, University of Michigan; title of talk: “Habermas and Feminist Scholarship: Going Beyond the Public Sphere”
Description: Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been informing scholarship in eighteenth-century studies for the past twenty years. German scholars took note of it when it appeared in 1962, but it was not until the French translation (1978) and especially the English one (1989) appeared, that it began to play an important role in the interdisciplinary and transnational field of eighteenth-century studies. The publication in 1988 – a year before the English translation of Habermas – of Joan Landes’s Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution meant that from the beginning, the question of gender has been central to debates about Habermas and the public sphere as these have developed in eighteenth-century studies, just as Habermas and Landes have been central to the “cultural turn” in the history of women and gender in the eighteenth century, and to the interdisciplinary “cultural” ground at the intersection of women’s studies and eighteenth-century studies as this has taken shape. In other words, as debates on Habermas and the public sphere have taken gender as a central topos and problematic, Habermas and the public sphere have been equally central to debates concerning women and gender in the eighteenth century. In this talk, I would like to give a brief account of where this interest in Habermas, the public sphere, and women and gender in the eighteenth century has taken us and to suggest where we should go from here. I will draw on my own current research on women and letter writing in eighteenth-century France for examples of how Habermas can take us in new directions. In particular, I will propose that we leave the public sphere behind and take more seriously what Habermas has to say about privacy.
Each presenter will speak for 40-50 minutes, with a 10 minute discussion after each talk; Ken Hiltner and William Warner will be our faculty respondents, and Eric Nebeker and Laura Miller will be the EMC graduate respondents. The colloquium will conclude with a roundtable discussion followed by a reception.
Click here to visit the conference webpage.
Everett Zimmerman Seminar and Lecture | Roger Chartier | February 8-9, 2007
Seminar: South Hall 2635, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Lecture: State Street Room, University Center, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
We are very pleased to announce that Professor Roger Chartier, Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études in Paris, will direct the Everett Zimmerman Seminar, to be held February 8 and 9, 2007. Professor Chartier’s scholarship in early modern European history has been central to the study of print culture and the history of the book.
The Zimmerman Seminar, established in honor of Everett Zimmerman, Professor of English, brings a distinguished eighteenth-century scholar from a field such as literary studies, history, history of science, history of art, philosophy, law, religion, or music to campus to discuss his or her work with students and faculty. The Zimmerman Seminar is hosted by the Early Modern Center in the Department of English.
Lucie Skeaping Lecture & Performance | April 11, 2007
McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
An illustrated lecture and performance of seventeenth-century English broadside ballads by renowned British performer and BBC radio host, Lucie Skeaping, accompanied by instrumentalist Robin Jeffrey. For more information, visit www.lucieskeaping.co.uk (click on “Illustrated Lecture-Recital”). Reception will follow in the IHC.
This event is co-hosted with the Renaissance Studies Program.
Richard Halpern Lecture | April 13, 2007
“Eclipse of Action: Hamlet and Political Economy”
South Hall 2635, 3:00 PM
Please join us for Richard Halpern’s talk: “Eclipse of Action: Hamlet and Political Economy” on Friday, April 13, 3:00 p.m. in South Hall, 2635.Richard Halpern, professor of English at Johns Hopkins, is author of Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan (Penn, 2002), which explores relations between sexuality and aesthetics. Previous books include Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Cornell, 1997) and The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Cornell, 1991).
William St. Clair Discussion & Lecture | April 18, 2007
“The Political Economy of Reading”
South Hall 2635, discussion 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM; lecture 3:30 PM
The Cambridge book historian, William St. Clair, the author of The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, will be giving a lecture called “The Political Economy of Reading” in 2635 SH at 3:30 PM on Wednesday April 18, 2007. Prior to the lecture, he will be discussing his work with faculty and graduate students. The discussion will take place at 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM in 2635 SH.
Leslie Tuttle Lecture | April 24, 2007
“One people and one blood? Marriage and Miscegination in Louis XIV’s Atlantic Empire.”
HSSB 4020, 3:30 PM
Professor Tuttle is an Assistant Professor of History at Kansas. Her current research focuses on the role of gender and sexuality in the solidification and centralization of royal power in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. The book project she is working on, tentatively titled “Sacred and Politic Unions: Natalist Policy in Absolutist France,” examines Old Regime policies that accorded privileged status to men who married and fathered large families.
This event is sponsored by Renaissance Studies and the EMC.
Frank Lestringant Lecture | May 18, 2007
“Shipwreck with Beholder and Theatrum Mundi. On Life’s Metaphors in Renaissance Culture.”
SH 2635 or HSSB 1173, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Frank Lestringant, Professor of French Renaissance Literature at the Sorbonne, is the author of more than 30 books on travel, geography, religion, and many other aspects of the Renaissance. He has edited a book on French colonization of the Americas, Le France-Amérique (16th-18th centuries), and is author of Jean de Léry ou l’invention de sauvage, which examines representations of Brazilian Indians in Jean de Lery’s 16th-century travel writings.
This event is co-sponsored by the Renaissance Studies and the Department of French and Italian.
EMC Brown Bag Lunch | Tassie Gniady, Sören Hammerschmidt, & Megan Palmer | June 29, 2007
Presentation of work in progress by:
Tassie Gniady, “‘Finch Pulls a Milton’: Resisting Authority in the Literary Sphere”
Sören Hammerschmidt, “A Life in Transit: Travel, Maternity, and the Progress of Civilisation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence”
Megan Palmer, “Regarding Appropriateness: The Centrality of the Broadside Ballad Woodcut”
Please support these three graduate students by coming to the brown bag to enjoy and discuss their presentations!
EMC Brown Bag Lunch | Simone Chess, Kris McAbee, & Jessica C. Murphy | July 27, 2007
South Hall 2635, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Presenting work in progress by:
Simone Chess, “Men in Drag, or Boys in Dresses? Boyhood, Masculinity, and the Male to Female Crossdresser”
Kris McAbee, “‘Daphne from the Delphic god’: Aphra Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ and the Impotence of the Male Literary Tradition”
Jessica C. Murphy, “Man in the Mirror: Why is Britomart so Sick?”
Please support these graduate students by coming to the brown bag to enjoy and discuss their presentations!