This year’s colloquium is on ‘Periodizing the Early/Modern and organised by Dr. Hannah Crawforth, Dr. Sarah Lewis, Prof. Lucy Munro, and Dr. Hannah Murphy. The colloquium will take place on Thursday 11th June at King’s College London. We are currently looking for 20-minute papers from early career researchers and postgraduate researchers that reflect on this topic. To apply, please send a 250-word abstract and 100-word bio to cems@kcl.ac.uk by 7th April. The full CfP is available below.

Call for Papers

When does early modernity begin and end? How do we understand the relation between the early modern and the historical periods that precede and follow it? Is it important to how we construe of early modernity that it be thought of as a boundaried entity, complete in itself? Or might the early modern be less a historical period and more a mode of thought? Much has been written about periodization in relation to the early modern. The Medieval/Renaissance divide (or lack of divide) has been theorized by a range of scholars, most notably perhaps Margreta De Grazia. But this symposium will consider the question of periodizing the early modern in a more forward-looking way, situating this temporal and theoretical construct in relation to our own contemporary moment.

Global and postcolonial approaches by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Carlos Garrido Castellano, David Scott, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others have challenged the spatial and temporal period boundaries, demanding a rethinking of early modernity from a variety of points of view. This symposium will likewise rethink the various positions from which early modernity is construed, aiming to engage scholars from a range of disciplines including contemporary literature and theory, post-colonial studies, history, music, and philosophy, law, medicine, classics and war studies. We will explore the differing ways in which early modernity is and has been periodized within these fields, as well as considering how these different disciplines understand the early modern engagement with (or rejection of) periodisation itself. We will also ask what role periodization has played in enabling the oppressive power structures founded in early modernity to persist into our own present, and what periodizing the early modern can mean for the deconstruction and dismantling of these systems.

We invite proposals for 20-minute talks on the topic of ‘Periodizing the Early/Modern.’ Submissions from early career scholars and graduate students are particularly welcomed. Please submit an abstract of not more than 250 words and a 100 word bio to cems@kcl.ac.uk by 7th April 2026.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• The relationship between disciplinarity and periodization

• How periodization reifies hierarchies and inequities of race, social class or gender

• Global and postcolonial approaches to periodizing the early modern

• How periodized time relates to other temporal models such as Queer Temporalities

• What resources other models (such as geological time) can offer us for rethinking periodization

• How early moderns conceptualised periodisation, or didn’t, and how early modern understandings of time and temporality have informed the way we engage with periodisation today