Past Early Modern Europe Seminars
SPRING 2024 SEMINARS
Feb. 13: Ron Harris, "Managing Agencies, Tea and Rubber Plantations, and Company Law in India and Malaya"
Feb. 20: Alastair Bellany, "Restoring Stonehenge to the Danes"
Feb. 27: Robert Travers, "Law Between Empires: Late Mughal Politics and The Impeachment of Warren Hastings"
March 5: Noah Millstone, "Sites of a Book Talk"
March 12: Paul Halliday, "The Stuff of Law: An Extra-Textual History of Law Across England and Empire in Two Books"
March 26: Mariana Candido, "Gendering Political Leadership: Changing Perspectives on West Central Africa Women’s Roles"
April 9: Barbara Zepeda, "Law and Religion in the Personal Library of José de Gálvez"
April 23: Cécile Vidal, "The Words, Figures, and Documents of Slave Suicides"
SPRING 2023 SEMINARS
January 24: Yasmin Haskell, "Who Let the Gods Out? Pagan Powers, Passions, and Their Proxies in Jesuit Latin Epic"
January 31: Evan Heafeli, "Andrew Marvell’s 'Bermudas,' the Bahamas, and the Revolutionary Puritan Atlantic, 1647-1653"
February 14: Bruce Hall, "Where is Islamic Law in Trans-Saharan Trade?"
March 7: Anne Dunlop, "Qingbai in Naples and an Embassy from the Yuan"
March 14: Elizabeth Bearden, "Descending the Mountain: Petrarch's Journey of Mental Disability and Consolation"
March 21: Elizabeth Kassler-Taub, "Elastic Empire: Architecture, Urbanism, and Identity in Early Modern Sicily"
March 28: Joel Blecher, "Profit and Prophecy: Islam and the Spice Trade"
April 4: Thiago Krause, "'That Cursed Bewitching Weed': Consumer Preference and the Global History of Brazilian Tobacco (c. 1620 – 1760)"
April 11: Esther Liberman Cuenca, "Custom, Community, and the Common Good in Urban Law"
April 18: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "Basseporte's Hand"
FALL 2022 SEMINARS
Oct. 4: Sharon Strocchia, "Fare la prova: The Use of Human Subjects in Renaissance Drug Trials"
Oct. 25: Bruce Hall, "Re-Reading West Africa’s Oldest Arabic Book: Al-Maghīlī’s ‘Replies’ to Askia al-ḥājj Muḥammad and Songhay Styles of Sovereignty"
Nov. 15: Francesca Trivellato, "Chapter 1: A Different Kind of (In)equality"
Dec. 6: Thiago Krause, "After the Fall (of Recife): Preserving and Recreating Dutch-Brazilian Ties in the South Atlantic, c. 1655-1730"
SPRING 2022 SEMINARS
March 1: Ayesha A. Irani, "The Auspicious Rise of the Seka: Reimagining the Islamic Conquest of Bengal"
March 8: Ana Lucia Araujo, "An Eighteenth-Century Gift in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade"
March 15: Francesca Trivellato, "The Credit Nexus"
March 22: Patricia Gaborik, "Mussolini’s Cesare: Roman History as Italy’s Present and Future"
April 5: Gabriele Pedullà, "Niccolò Machiavelli"
April 12: Asheesh Kapur Siddique, "The Experience of the Archive: Knowledge and the Making of the Early Modern British Empire"
April 19: Emily Kadens, "Cheaters in a Moral Economy: Commercial Deceit in England, ca. 1200–1640"
April 26: Ramnarayan Singh Rawat, "Swami Achutanand: Mofussil Activist and Cosmopolitan Intellectual"
Fall 2021 SEMINARS
October 12: Jillian Porter, "The Living Line: Origins and Afterlives of the Soviet Queue"
October 19: Asheesh Saddique, "The Contentious Archive"
October 26: Ramnarayan S. Rawat, "Bhajans of Liberties: Songs as a Method of Critical Dialogue"
November 2: Diana Kim, "'Untouchability' and Transnational Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea"
November 9: Karen Graubart, "Religious Republics in Seville, 1248–1502"
November 16: Jérémie Foa, "Investigating the Executioners of the Saint Bartholomew's Day
Massacre (France, 1572)"
November 23: Peter Lake, "On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic, and Politics during the Personal Rule of Charles I"
Spring 2021 SEMINARS
January 19: Samantha Kelly, "Translating Ethiopian Sanctity: Two Pilgrims in Pisa, 1516"
February 2: Jeremy R. Schneider, "Reawakening the Ammonites: A Biography of an Extinct Lineage"
February 16: Angelo Torre, "Ethnography of the Commons"
March 2: Valeria López-Fadul, "The Etymologies of Phillip II"
March 16: Isabelle Poutrin, "Corcos and Boncompagni: The Costs and Benefits of Religious Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Rome"
March 30: Arnaud Orain, "French Merchant Capitalism, State Reform, and Science of Commerce in the Age of Enlightenment"
April 13: Francesca Trivellato, "What Differences Make a Difference? Global History and Microanalysis Revisited"
April 27: Simona Cerutti, "The Loving Attention Towards the Poor: Jurisdiction and Market Rules (the Savoyard State in the 18th Century)"
May 11: Eleanor Hubbard, "Curiosity and Compulsion: The Reformations of an Elizabethan Seaman"
FALL 2020 SEMINARS
October 13: Valeria López-Fadul, "On Knowledge-Gathering, Language, and History Writing in the Spanish Empire"
October 27: Eleanor Hubbard, "Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630" (Chapter: A Plundering People)
November 10: Pamela O. Long, "Tiber River Flooding in Rome: Responses to a Recurring Disaster, 1476-1598"
November 24: Jonathan Sheehan, "Gods of Paste: Sacrifice and the Anthropology of Error"
December 1: Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj between Empires: Muslim Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals" (Chapter 1: Pilgrim Passages)"
SPRING 2020 SEMINARS
January 16: Deirdre Loughridge, Northeastern University, "Man Alone Sings"
January 27: Justin Stearns, New York University Abu Dhabi, "The Place of Sorcery in the Thought of a Seventeenth Century Moroccan Astronomer and Alchemist"
February 3: Hal Parker, Saint Louis University, "The Globalization of Calvinism and Dutch Society"
February 13: Francesca Trivellato with Guillaume Calafat in videoconference, " "The Shipwreck of the Turks": Law of Nations, Sovereignty, and the Boundaries of Hospitality in the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean"
March 5: Daniel Hershenzon, University of Connecticut, "The Maghreb in Spain: Slave and Muslims in Eighteenth-Century Cartagena"
March 27: Matt Kadane, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, "The Enlightenment and Original Sin"
April 13: Laurie Benton, Vanderbilt University, "The Blood of Households: Private Violence and Legalities of Raiding in Early European Empires"
May 15: Daniel Strum, University of Sao Paulo, "Coevolution of judicial and reputational institutions in contract enforcement across the early Atlantic sugar route"
FALL 2019 SEMINARS
October 10: Hal Parker, Saint Louis University, "Indigenizing Calvinism in the Dutch Empire"
October 28: Beth Plummer, University of Arizona, "No Better than a Brothel"
November 4: Andrew Sartori, New York University, "Metallism and the Social Theory of Money in Seventeenth-Century England"
November 25: Daniel Hershenzon, University of Connecticut, "Religious Artifacts and Slaves in the Early Modern Mediterranean"
December 2: Lisa Regazzoni, Goethe-Universität, "Signs of History. A Historical Inquiry into the Monument as an Object of Knowledge"
SPRING 2019 SEMINARS
January 24: Francesca Trivellato, "A Missed Encounter: Burckhardt and Economic Historians"
January 31: Eric Schluessel, "Marketing and Social Structure in Pre-Modern Xinjiang (East Turkestan)"
February 7: Gabriele Pedullà, "Humanist Republicanism: Toward a New Paradigm"
February 21: Seth Kimmel, "Sites of Antiquarianism: Between Seville and San Lorenzo"
March 7: Maartje Van Gelder, "Popular Politics in Early Modern Venice. The Arsenalotti's Protest of 1569"
April 4: Carina Johnson, "Europa Virgo, the Indies, and an Early Modern Family Romance"
April 11: Pier Mattia Tommasino, "Reading the Qur’an Backwards: the story of ms. Magliabechi XXXIV.31"
April 25: Glenda Goodman, "Land and Conversion: New Frameworks for Colonial American Hymnody"
FALL 2018 SEMINARS
October 4: Francesca Trivellato, "The Medieval/Early Modern Divide along the Franco-Spanish Border"
October 18: Sabine Go, "Shared burdens: Mutuality, governance constructs, and third-party enforcement in early modern Europe. The case of General Averages in the Netherlands (16th- 17th centuries)”
November 1: Michelle Armstrong-Partida, "Sex and Priestly Masculinities in Late Medieval Europe"
November 15: Seth Kimmel, "Hernando Colón’s Cosmography"
November 29: Earle Havens, "Reading Readers Writing about Reading: The Information Cultures of John Dee and Gabriel Harvey"
December 6: Pier Mattia Tommasino, "Reading the Qur'an Backwards: Orientalism, Science, and Philology in Seventeenth-Century Florence"