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Inhabiting the Body / Inhabiting the World:
An Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference
March 19-20, 2004
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Plenary Lectures:
Steven Mullaney (University of Michigan): “Affective Irony: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage.”
John Sutton (Macquarie University, Sydney): “The Cognitive Life of Things: External Memory and Social Memory in Early Modern Culture”
Gail Kern Paster (Director, The Folger Shakespeare Library): “Air and Anger: The Pneumatics of Quarreling in Shakespeare and Jonson”
Lorraine Daston (Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science): “Imagination and Self in Early Modern Europe”
This conference will focus on selfhood, embodiment and environment in the early modern world. Most broadly, the conference will consider what notions of selfhood are provoked by approaching a range of cultural texts from an "ecological" perspective - one in which the microcosmic "body" is seen as continuous with and permeated by the macrocosmic "environment." Papers from a range of disciplines, regional specializations and theoretical positions are invited. Topics might include: how the depiction of various "environments" is linked to the depiction of subjectivity; how representations of activity, repose, drinking, air, or emotion often emphasize (with and without anxiety) the malleable subject's openness to external agents; how the humoral emphasis on both bodily permeability and the fully somatic nature of cognition affect the way in which we understand mind-body relations; how the representation of early modern subjectivity is linked not only to notions of "inwardness," but to those of "outwardness" or liminality; and how both travel, within and across national boundaries, and cross-cultural encounters posed problems for conceptions of the subject predicated upon its environmental and cultural situatedness.
Registration is due March 1st. For more information contact::
Mary Floyd-Wilson <floydwil@email.unc.edu>
and
Garrett Sullivan <gas11@psu.edu>
On our Keynote Speakers:
The history of the relationship of the body, self, and environment in the early modern period is best informed by variety of disciplinary approaches, including anthropology, the history of science and medicine, classical scholarship, cognitive theory, together with Renaissance cultural studies. Our keynote speakers will reflect this interdisciplinary interest.
John Sutton (Macquarie University, Sydney) is the author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism, which juxtaposes early modern ideas about memory and the body with cognitive scientific debates about control and confusion in remembering. He is co-editor (with Stephen Gaukroger and John Schuster) of a major collection of essays on Descartes' Natural Philosophy. In recent work on interdisciplinarity in the study of memory, Sutton seeks to integrate historical investigations of embodiment, artefacts, media, and technologies with the framework of distributed or situated cognition.
Gail Kern Paster, editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, has changed the landscape of English Renaissance literary studies with her book The Body Embarrassed. Her forthcoming book Humoring the Body: Affects, Materialism and the Early Modern Stage expands her pioneering work on humoralism to consider the early modern body's embeddedness in a cosmological network of correspondences and sympathies. She is also the co-editor (with Mary Floyd-Wilson and Katherine Rowe) of a collection of essays entitled Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Steven Mullaney, (University of Michigan), is the author of The Place of the Stage, a pivotal study of the politics of space and theater in early modern London. His forthcoming book, The Work of the Stage: Affect and Ideology in the Age of Shakespeare, examines the reformation of emotions provoked by the trauma of the religious cataclysms of the sixteenth century. In particular, Mullaney highlights the ways in which the early modern stage rehearsed new dynamics of being and feeling in public and experimented with new constructions of social selves. He argues that the stage not only reflects but also participates in the affective and ideological reconfiguration of the early modern subject.
Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and co-author (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, described as follows at the MIT press website:
Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
Daston is currently completing a book with Peter Galison on the Images of Objectivity, as well as a book on The Moral and Natural Orders, based on the Tanner Lectures she delivered at Harvard in November 2002.
Thanks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English, Department of Anthropology, The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Provost.
An Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference
March 19-20, 2004
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Plenary Lectures:
Steven Mullaney (University of Michigan): “Affective Irony: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage.”
John Sutton (Macquarie University, Sydney): “The Cognitive Life of Things: External Memory and Social Memory in Early Modern Culture”
Gail Kern Paster (Director, The Folger Shakespeare Library): “Air and Anger: The Pneumatics of Quarreling in Shakespeare and Jonson”
Lorraine Daston (Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science): “Imagination and Self in Early Modern Europe”
This conference will focus on selfhood, embodiment and environment in the early modern world. Most broadly, the conference will consider what notions of selfhood are provoked by approaching a range of cultural texts from an "ecological" perspective - one in which the microcosmic "body" is seen as continuous with and permeated by the macrocosmic "environment." Papers from a range of disciplines, regional specializations and theoretical positions are invited. Topics might include: how the depiction of various "environments" is linked to the depiction of subjectivity; how representations of activity, repose, drinking, air, or emotion often emphasize (with and without anxiety) the malleable subject's openness to external agents; how the humoral emphasis on both bodily permeability and the fully somatic nature of cognition affect the way in which we understand mind-body relations; how the representation of early modern subjectivity is linked not only to notions of "inwardness," but to those of "outwardness" or liminality; and how both travel, within and across national boundaries, and cross-cultural encounters posed problems for conceptions of the subject predicated upon its environmental and cultural situatedness.
Registration is due March 1st. For more information contact::
Mary Floyd-Wilson <floydwil@email.unc.edu>
and
Garrett Sullivan <gas11@psu.edu>
On our Keynote Speakers:
The history of the relationship of the body, self, and environment in the early modern period is best informed by variety of disciplinary approaches, including anthropology, the history of science and medicine, classical scholarship, cognitive theory, together with Renaissance cultural studies. Our keynote speakers will reflect this interdisciplinary interest.
John Sutton (Macquarie University, Sydney) is the author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism, which juxtaposes early modern ideas about memory and the body with cognitive scientific debates about control and confusion in remembering. He is co-editor (with Stephen Gaukroger and John Schuster) of a major collection of essays on Descartes' Natural Philosophy. In recent work on interdisciplinarity in the study of memory, Sutton seeks to integrate historical investigations of embodiment, artefacts, media, and technologies with the framework of distributed or situated cognition.
Gail Kern Paster, editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, has changed the landscape of English Renaissance literary studies with her book The Body Embarrassed. Her forthcoming book Humoring the Body: Affects, Materialism and the Early Modern Stage expands her pioneering work on humoralism to consider the early modern body's embeddedness in a cosmological network of correspondences and sympathies. She is also the co-editor (with Mary Floyd-Wilson and Katherine Rowe) of a collection of essays entitled Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Steven Mullaney, (University of Michigan), is the author of The Place of the Stage, a pivotal study of the politics of space and theater in early modern London. His forthcoming book, The Work of the Stage: Affect and Ideology in the Age of Shakespeare, examines the reformation of emotions provoked by the trauma of the religious cataclysms of the sixteenth century. In particular, Mullaney highlights the ways in which the early modern stage rehearsed new dynamics of being and feeling in public and experimented with new constructions of social selves. He argues that the stage not only reflects but also participates in the affective and ideological reconfiguration of the early modern subject.
Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and co-author (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, described as follows at the MIT press website:
Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
Daston is currently completing a book with Peter Galison on the Images of Objectivity, as well as a book on The Moral and Natural Orders, based on the Tanner Lectures she delivered at Harvard in November 2002.
Thanks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English, Department of Anthropology, The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Provost.