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 and will consist of a series of panels and a roundtable.
To attend the colloquium, please sign up for a free ticket here: https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/2213474
Colloquium Theme
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.
Provisional Schedule
09:30 – Welcome and Coffee
10:00-11:30 – Panel 1: Race, Coloniality, and Globalisation
Speakers: Dr. Baihui Duan (Lancaster University), Jamie Gemmell (KCL), Dr. Casey Schmitt (Cornell University)
11:45-13:15 – Panel 2: Print, Media, and Knowledge Exchange
Speakers: Dr. Jacob Baxter (University of St. Andrews), Dr. Christophe Schellekens (University of Liège), and Dr. Jake Wiseman (Yale University)
13:15-14:15 – Lunch
14:15-15:45 – Panel 3: Lenses on Early Modernity
Speakers: Dr. Pankhuri Singh (University of Exeter), Dr. Patrick Durdel (St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford), Veronica Lahodinski (University of York)
16:00-17:00 – Roundtable: Reflecting on Periodisation
Chair: Dr. Hannah Crawforth