Seminar Programmes for the Current Academic Year

Convenors: Lorna Hutson, Joe Moshenska, Bart Van Es

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5 & 7

Time: 5.15-7.00 p.m. (except Week 7)

Venue: TS Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College

Week 1, 28 April

 Professor Gordon Teskey (Harvard University)

‘Dark Energy: John Donne's Saint Lucy Nocturnal’

Abstract:

The most challenging of Donne’s lyric poems, “A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day”, is set at a boundary moment between worlds: at midnight, winter solstice, 1617, four months after the death of the poet’s wife. Donne strove to come to terms with this loss twice before: in Holy Sonnet 17, where his wife is inaccessibly in Heaven; and in the Latin inscription for her grave marker, where his ashes join hers in a “new marriage.” In the Saint Lucy Nocturnal, the poet raises the Parmenidean question of being and not-being by continually and ingeniously affirming his nonentity: “I am by her death … Of the first nothing, the elixir grown.” Are such statements merely nonsense, though powerful expressions of feeling? Do they have a further purpose? The key is in the poet’s reference to them as preparation. I contend we may see them as a meditative practice akin to the Buddhist notions of nothingness and no-self, a thinning-toward-nothing. The poet prepares to enter a third space between life and death, one where his wife already “enjoys her long night’s festival.”

Week 3, 12 May

Oxford CEMS: Global Early Modern Conversations I

Nandini Das in conversation with Wes Williams (French) and Bart Van Es (English) on This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Week 5, 26 May

Douglas Clark (Wadham) ‘The Miscellaneous Poetry of Elizabeth Bidgood: A New Archival Discovery' 

Abstract:

My paper offers the first examination of Elizabeth Bidgood’s unique acrostic poetry, as found in the Newberry Library’s manuscript miscellany, Y 1845.7. This rather badly damaged miscellany contains a wealth of original elegiac and panegyric poetry written by Bidgood which, in part, celebrates the lives of a broad network of women associated with the Bidgood family (c. 1670-1720). I’ll consider how Bidgood’s work can advance our understanding of non-professional poetic practice, while also offering some practical advice on how to conduct research on early modern manuscript materials.

Beatrice Groves (Trinity) ‘ “Sternhold & Hopkins” and Shakespeare’

Abstract:

One reason for the psalms’ importance for Shakespeare – a text alluded to over four hundred times across his work - lies in their status as poetry, a sacred eloquence that “made this book one of the primary models for lyric poetry in the Western tradition.” This talk, however, will argue (perhaps surprisingly) for the influence on Shakespeare of a translation – “Sternhold & Hopkins'” (The Whole Booke of the Psalmes, 1562) – which has been widely castigated as poetry. These metrical psalms were the outstanding best-seller of Shakespeare’s lifetime and his allusions to them are both evidence for the fluidity and flexibility of his source use and of his engagement with a profoundly popular text. The Whole Booke would have been heard and sung by the vast majority of Englishmen and women during Shakespeare’s lifetime and its presence in Shakespeare’s work forms an oft-overlooked aspect of his interaction with the popular culture of his time.

Week 7, 9 June, 5.30pm (please note change of time)

Oxford CEMS: Global Early Modern Conversations II

Kirsten Macfarlane (University of Chicago) in conversation with Adam Smyth (Book History) and Lloyd Pratt (American literature) on Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World (Oxford: 2025)

Refreshments served

All welcome

Convenors: Natalia Nowakowska, Giora Sternberg, Giuseppe Marcocci, Filippo de Vivo, Howard Hotson

This seminar does not usually run in Trinity Term, but this term there will be one talk, which has been rescheduled from Michaelmas. Please note the venue is different from usual.

Week 2: Tuesday 5 May 2026, 2pm

St Edmund Hall, Old Dining Hall

Peter Burke (Cambridge): ‘Toward a History of Misunderstandings: The Missionaries’ Dilemma’

Chair: Filippo de Vivo

Convenors: Dr Tracey Sowerby and Antonio Pattori

Time: Tuesdays 4.15–5.45pm (unless otherwise indicated)
Venue: Schwartzman Centre room 20.402 and online (unless otherwise indicated)

28 April (Week 1)

Toby Osborne (University of Durham): ‘“He who despises you, despises me.”  Some reflections on the nature of the ambassador as a representative and representation of the prince.’

*NB. Change of venue & time: Schwartzman Centre for the Humanities, History Faculty, History of Art Seminar room 20.501, at 2pm.

19 May (Week 4)

Elena Calvillo (University of Richmond, Virginia) & Nicholas Scott Baker (Macquarie University, Sidney; University of Richmond, Virginia): ‘The Art of War: Giulio Clovio and Medici Diplomacy.’

*NB. Change of venue & time: Doctorow Hall, St Edmund’s Hall, at 4.30pm.

2 June (Week 6)

Philippa Jackson (Independent Scholar): ‘Girolamo Ghinucci (1480-1541): Papal Judge and English Ambassador’

16 June (Week 8)

Marcos Marinho Fernandes (Aix-Marseille Université): ‘Comparing Royal Matrimonial Diplomatic Strategies between Portugal, Spain, France, and the Habsburgs, 1490-1519’

Convenors: Marina Perkins, Rachel Hindmarsh, Wes Williams, and Georgina Walker

Dates: Thursdays, Weeks 1, 3 & 7

Time: 12.30 – 2.00 p.m. (except Week 3)

Venue: Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College (Weeks 1 & 3); Salon, Maison Française d’Oxford (Week 7) 

Week 1: 30 April, 12.30-2.00 p.m.

Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College

Emma Gilby (Cambridge University): ‘The Making of Modern Languages: Disciplinary History in the Archives’

Abstract:

My current research investigates the early history of modern languages as a university discipline. Prompted by my own encounter with the interwar editorial work of two early modernists (H. Bibas and K.T. Butler), I envisage this as a network study, expanding outwards from these two women via their predecessors, role models, colleagues, sisters, correspondents etc. The aim is to offer glimpses of connections and affinities that suggest and enrich a much bigger picture. Who were the first modern linguists, and what kinds of modern lives did they want to lead? What did they borrow from the study of ancient languages, and what did they reject? This paper will consider Kathleen Butler’s reception of the medievalist Jessie L. Weston (1850-1928), in the form of undergraduate reading and lecture notes (Newnham College, Cambridge, c. 1910). It will also take in the wider impact of Weston, and of her medievalism, in other teaching archives, notably that of Mary Williams, appointed to the Chair of French Language and Literature in Swansea in 1921.

Week 3: 14 May, 12.15-1.50 p.m.

Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College

Olivia Russell (Worcester College): ‘Non-Consent and the Problem of Influence in Marie-Jeanne Roland’s Mémoires particuliers’

Abstract:

In June 1793, Marie-Jeanne Roland was arrested amidst the political upheavals of the French Revolution. During her five-month imprisonment, she began writing her memoirs: first the Notices historiques, which offer observations and reflections on the Revolution and its leading figures, and then the Mémoires particuliers, which recount her childhood and early adulthood. Although unfinished at the time of her execution in November 1793, these personal memoirs are striking for their candour, particularly in Roland’s revelation that she was sexually assaulted at the age of ten.

Since the first uncensored publication of the Mémoires particuliers in 1864, the account of sexual assault has been subject to problematic interpretation. Some critics have questioned Roland’s non-consent, accused her of embellishment, or read the episode through her admiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, assuming she was inspired by his own portrayal of sexual harassment in the Confessions.

This paper challenges such readings by reconsidering Roland’s account on its own terms. It argues that her narrative offers a radical portrayal of non-consent that diverges from contemporaneous understandings of resistance and female virtue. It also reassesses the question of Rousseau’s influence. By situating the account in its original context and tracing its subsequent reception, this paper demonstrates that Roland’s memoirs constitute an original intervention in the autobiographical form, as well as a radical assertion of female voice in an era that sought to constrain it.

Week 7: 11 June, 12.30-2.00 p.m.

Salon, Maison française d’Oxford

Kathryn Banks (Durham University): ‘Rabelaisian Interactions’

Abstract:

Rabelais depicts characters in interaction, including within a strange friendship – between the hero Pantagruel and the joker Panurge – which constitutes, to translate André Tournon, the ‘most controversial aspect’ of Rabelais’s fiction. This friendship has often been interpreted as a vehicle for Bakhtinian dialogism, conceived as an interplay of discourses which undermines authoritative meaning and thus invites readers to participate in the construction of meaning. Tournon showed brilliantly how the diverse perspectives offered by the two friends impact readers’ interpretations of Rabelais. However, from this perspective, dialogism seems to explain away the oddity of the friendship central to Rabelais’s fiction. By contrast, I will suggest that the oddity is the point: Rabelais is interested in not only diversity of perspectives but also how characters negotiate this diversity in interaction. Over the course of his works, Rabelais increasingly experiments with interactive sense-making, particularly across difference. Thus, he is interested not only in epistemology but also in what the cognitive sciences call social cognition – social understanding, or how we make meaning together. Social cognition research has been most famously deployed in literary study in the form of the Theory of Mind model, which foregrounds how we interpret others’ behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires (Zunshine). By contrast, I draw on the most extensive consideration of social cognition from an interactive perspective, the ‘participatory sense-making’ model, which places at the heart of interaction processes fundamental to much fiction, including Rabelais’s: namely, engaging with difference and negotiating competing genres. At the same time, I return to Bakhtin, for whom dialogism was characteristic of all human interaction, and novels mattered because they revealed the nature of human interaction. My aim is to offer new understanding of Rabelais, as well as reflections on reading with the cognitive sciences.

Convenors: Filippo de Vivo (St Edmund Hall); Leah Clark (Kellogg); Jane Crawshaw Stevens (Brookes); Zoe Farrell (St Edmund Hall); Federica Gigante (History of Science Museum); Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter); Emanuela Vai (Worcester)

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 4, 5 & 7

Time: 4.30 p.m. 

Venue: Varies, see below

28 April (Week 1), Kloppenburg Room, Exeter College
Robert Brennan (Courtauld): ‘Thresholds of Art in Renaissance Italy’

12 May (Week 3), Doctorow Hall, St Edmund Hall
Saundra Weddle (Drury University): ‘The Braided Networks of the Venetian Sex Trade’

19 May (Week 4), Doctorow Room, St Edmund Hall
Elena Calvillo (University of Richmond, Virginia) and Nicholas Scott Baker (Macquarie University, Sydney): ‘The Art of War: Giulio Clovio and Medici Diplomacy’

26 May (Week 5), Doctorow Hall, St Edmund Hall
Diego Pirillo (Berkeley): ‘Does the Refugee Speak? Negotiating Displacement in Early Modern Italy’

9 June (Week 7), Old Dining Hall, St Edmund Hall
Kathleen Christian (Berlin): ‘Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus’

Convenors: Sylvia Alvares-Correa (Christ Church), Michael Bax (Magdalene College), Tania Bride (Balliol College), Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College), Daniel O’Driscoll (Jesus College), and Glyn Redworth (Exeter College)

Timing: Wednesdays at 4.30pm (Weeks 2, 4 and 6) and Thursdays at 5pm (Weeks 4 and 8)

Venue: Rector’s Drawing Room, Exeter College (except Thursday of Week 4)

Wednesday 6 May (Week 2), 4.30-6.30pm

Edward Wilson-Lee and Giuseppe Marcocci: ‘Laughter in the Archive: Half-Serious Storytelling and Religious Encounters in Portuguese India’

Wednesday 20 May (Week 4), 4.30-6.30pm

Natasha Bailey: ‘“The Resistance of This Province”: Protest, Negotiation and Octli/Pulque in Seventeenth-Century Mexico’

Thursday 21 May (Week 4), 5.00pm

Main Seminar Room, Latin American Centre, 1 Church Walk, Oxford, and Zoom

Joint Session with the Spanish Research Seminar

‘The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World: A Conversation’

Participants: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas-Austin); Adrian Masters (Trier University, Germany); Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College, Oxford)

The event can also be attended via Zoom. To join online, please register in advance by clicking here.

Wednesday 3 June (Week 6), 4:30-6:30pm

Isabelle Kent: ‘Labours of Empire: Hercules and the Making of the Hall of Realms’

Thursday 18 June (Week 8), 5.00-6.30pm

Joint Session with the Latin American History Seminar

Caterina Pizzigoni: ‘“Santitos”: Saints and People in the Indigenous Household in Colonial Mexico and Beyond’

Convenors: Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, Nicole Pohl, Tess Somervell, David Taylor, Carly Watson, Abigail Williams

Dates: Tuesdays in Weeks 2, 4 & 6

Time: 5.30 p.m. (except Week 6)

Venue: Schwarzman 10.303

Week 2: 5 May, 5.30pm    

Julia S. Carlson (University of Cincinnati), ‘Printing, Folding, & Posting the Abolitionist Word:  William Cowper, Thomas Clarkson, & Ballad Remediation’

Week 4: 19 May, 5.30pm  

Emily Senior (Cambridge), ‘Colonial Ecologies of the Book’

Week 6: 2 June, 12.30pm (sandwich lunch provided)

Anna Brunton (Oxford), ‘“that real and animating form which guided the geniuses at Athens”:  James “Hermes” Harris and the Problem of  “Taste”’

Aditi Upmanyu (Oxford), ‘Progressive Maternal Voices:  Women’s Fiction in the Revolutionary Decade, 1790-1810’

Convenors: Nicholas Cronk (St Edmund Hall) and Jacob Chatterjee (New College)

Dates: Varies (see below)

Time: 5.00 p.m (unless otherwise specified)

Venue: New College, Lecture Room 6 (unless otherwise specified)

An interdisciplinary research seminar supported by the Faculty of History, the  Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Voltaire Foundation

Thursday 30 April

Maison Française d’Oxford

Voltaire Foundation Workshop on Digital Enlightenment Studies

2.00–2.30pm: Welcome

2.30–3.00pm: Nicholas Cronk et al.: Oxford University Voltaire

3.00–3.30pm: Gillian Pink, Miguel Arana-Catania & Glenn Roe: Indexing Voltaire

3.30–4.00pm: Andrew Kahn & Clovis Gladstone: Russia18

4.00–4.30pm: Coffee break

4.30–5.00pm: Patrick Flood (New College): Scottish Enlightenment Networks

5.00–5.30pm: Kimberley Williams & Eric Crahan: Princeton University Press

Friday 1 May

Maison Française d’Oxford

Voltaire Foundation Workshop on Digital Enlightenment Studies

9.30–10.00am: Welcome (coffee and pastries)

10.00–11.30am: Mikko Tolonen, Lidia Pivovarova & Ruilin Wang (Helsinki Computational History Group)

11.30am–1.00pm: Glenn Roe, Dario Nicolosi, Clément Castellon & Martial de Jurquet (ERC ModERN project, ENS/Sorbonne)

1.00–2.00pm: Lunch

2.00–2.30pm: Katie McDonough (MapReader, Lancaster)

2.30–3.00pm: Rachel Tils (University of Chicago)

3.00–3.30pm: Pierre Musitelli (ENS)

3.30–4.00pm: Clovis Gladstone (ARTFL, University of Chicago)

4.00–4.30pm: Closing remarks

Weston Library, Broad Street

Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies

5.00pm: Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London): ‘Unmasking Aliases: A New Way to Find Hidden Identities in the Tudor State Papers’

Drinks to follow.

Monday 11 May 2026, 5.00pm

Lecture Room 6, New College
Keith Michael Baker (Stanford University): Book Talk on Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror (2025)

Wednesday 20 May, 5.00pm

Lecture Room 6, New College
Jessica Patterson (Trinity College, Cambridge): ‘Empire and the Idea of the Constitution in Enlightenment Political Thought’

Wednesday 3 June, 5.00pm

Lecture Room 6, New College

Maksymilian Del Mar (Queen Mary University): ‘Dancing with the Stars: Adam Smith and Lucian on Philosophical, Moral, and Pantomime Spectatorship’

Convenors: Sophie Aldred, Colin Donnelly, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Judith Maltby, and Grant Tapsell

Time: Thursdays, 5.00 p.m.
Venue: Roy Griffiths Room, Keble College

Week 1: 30 April (followed by drinks)

Dr Colin Donnelly (University of Oxford): ‘Sleeping the Sleep of Death: Radical Afterlife Beliefs in the Early English Reformation’

Week 2: 7 May

Dr Jon Fitzgibbons (University of Lincoln): ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Hebrew Republic, and Kingless Rule in 1650s Britain’

Week 3: 14 May

Dr James Hooks (Ohio State University): ‘Mary Astell’s Marginalia in the Cambridge Collection: Brain Traces and the Formation of Virtue’

Week 4: 21 May

Dr Oscar Patton (University of Oxford): ‘Making the Best of a Bad Job Market: The Social World of Pluralism in the Post-Reformation Cathedral’

Week 5: 28 May

Professor Hilary Bogert-Winkler (University of the South): ‘“The Communion of the Church of England and Ireland”: Independence and Flexible Conformity in the Church of Ireland, 1647–1649’

Week 6: 4 June

Professor Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge): ‘Doorways to Heaven? Architecture, Protestant Theology, and the Art of Inscription in Early Modern Britain’

Week 7: 11 June

Dr Braden Zufelt (University of Oxford): ‘Consensus as Orthodoxy: The English Conservative Defence of Transubstantiation in the Early 1520s’

Week 8: 18 June (followed by drinks)

Professor Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham): ‘Faith with a Flourish: Ornament and Visual Experience in Protestant Places of Worship in England, 1560–1700’

Convenor: Hanna Sinclair

Time: Mondays, 4.30 p.m.
Venue: Memorial Room, Jesus College

Seminars are followed by a wine reception, and are open to everyone.

27 April (Week 1)

Toby Osborne (Durham University): ‘Incognito Princes as Tourists in Early Modern Rome: the Medici and the Politics of Status’

11 May (Week 3)

Glenn Richardson (St. Mary’s University): ‘War, Government, and Patronage: The Court of Francis I of France’

18 May (Week 4): Doctoral student panel:

Emily Averiss (Warburg Institute): ‘Modes of Representation: The Visual Language of Dress in Portraits of Catherine de’ Medici (1533 1559)’

Sophie Charron (Christ Church, Oxford): ‘Supplicating the New Solomon: Queenly Intercession at the Court of Charles IV of Bohemia’

1 June (Week 6)

BOOK LAUNCH in conjunction with the Royal Studies Network

Matthieu Mensch (Université de Strasbourg): ‘Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France: Daughter of Marie Antoinette and Almost Queen’

Convenors: Angus Bowie (Queen’s), Ana Dias (History), Dirk Meyer (Queen’s), Clément Salah (Queen’s), Matthew Shaw (Queen’s), Lesley Smith (HMC)

Time: 5.15 p.m. (day of week varies)
Venue: Memorial Room, The Queen’s College

7 May (Week 2)  Global Manuscript and Text Cultures Seminar

Shaahin Pishbin (Queen’s) & Thomas Newbold (Asian University for Women, Chittagong): ‘Muhajir manuscripts: Field notes from the Alia Madrasa Library in Dhaka’

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp (New College): ‘What’s in a nisba? Manuscript makers and migrations in 16th-century Central Asia’

20 May (Week 4)

Provenance Unknown: Roberta Mazza (University of Bologna): ‘Beyond Provenance: Publishing Papyri and Other Manuscripts from Egypt in 2026’

26 May (Week 5)  Trinity Term Lecture

Gunnar Seelentag (Hannover & Münster): ‘Monumentalising Norms, not Names:  cartelisation and colossality in Archaic Crete’

28 May (Week 5)  Global Manuscript and Text Cultures Seminar

Lauren Dogaer (Univ): ‘How the Greek Text Culture Has Shaped Modern Views of Ptolemaic Egyptian Priests’

Fergus Bovill (Merton): ‘Rebuilding the Medieval, Preserving the 19th Century: Littifredi Corbizzi, Johann Anton Ramboux, and the making and breaking of a choirbook in Gubbio’

16–17 June (Week 8)  International Workshop: Forgotten Libraries

For more information: clement.salah@queens.ox.ac.uk or shaahin.pishbin@queens.ox.ac.uk

18 June (Week 8)  Global Manuscript and Text Cultures Seminar

Jessica Rahardjo (Khalili Research Centre): ‘A Critical Edition and Translation of Ṣirāṭ al-Mustaqīm: a 17thc Malay Shāfi’ī Legal Text’

Shane Patrick (Wolfson): ‘The Debate of Abu Qurrah and its Manuscript Circulation’

24–25 June (Week 9)  International Conference:

‘The Text and Thought of Early Chinese Manuscripts: Tsinghua Bamboo Slips and Beyond’ / ‘出土简帛的文本与思想国际学术研讨会：清华简及其延伸’

in conjunction with Tsinghua University, Beijing.  Held at the China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford.   For more information:  dirk.meyer@queens.ox.ac.uk

Papers in English (24^th) and Chinese (25^th).

Advance Notice

1–2 October  International Conference

‘Lost Docs: recalling the material foundations of forgetting’

Conference in conjunction with Nanjing University

More information:  dirk.meyer@queens.ox.ac.uk

Convenor: Dr Nuno Castel-Branco

Dates: Wednesdays, Weeks 2 & 3

Time: 2.00– 4.00 p.m.
Venue: Varies, see below

6 May (Week 2)

Maison Française d’Oxford

Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)

Title: ‘Colonial Climatology and Hydraulic Architecture in the Age of Revolutions’

Abstract: 

Colonial climatology and hydraulic architecture in the age of revolutions'. The talk is based on a study of the work of the French savants and engineers in Egypt during the Bonaparte expedition; and, in particular, the links between hydraulic engineering and climate surveys involved in that work. The analysis raises issues about the emergence of anything like a climate science in the contexts of colonial and extra-European encounters and exploitations at the revolutionary epoch.

13 May (Week 3)

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Professor Vera Keller (University of Oregon)

Title: ‘Taxis: Mobile Epistemic Infrastructures in the 17th Century and the Creation of Research Disciplines’

Abstract: Scholars commonly apply the moniker "taxonomic age" to the eighteenth century despite the fact that the term taxonomy did not exist during that century. Only in 1813 did the botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778-1841) coin taxonomie by conjoining taxis, or battle array, with nomos, or law. This talk revives the prior, seventeenth-century usage of the first of these terms, taxis, as an inherently anti-systematic, unstable, mobile, and conjectural order. Experimental philosophers deployed taxis to describe matter at a time when chemical analysis, microscopic observations, and new theories about the nature of matter rendered the substance and boundaries of material objects newly uncertain. The resurrection of taxis highlights ephemeral ontologies and probabilist epistemologies in early modern notions of order, from orders of matter to orders of knowledge or disciplines. Although probabilist, mobile epistemic infrastructures were second-best compared to the certainty that everyone craved, they were essential to reorienting the nature of disciplines in ways that would create what we currently think of as research disciplines. I will take as my central case the Taxis of Chambers, the name that Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693) gave to what he claimed was a new discipline concerning the best way to arrange a collection.

Convenors: Ellen Hausner (Oxford), Sergei Zotov (Warburg), and Jo Hedesan (Oxford)

Time: Wednesdays, 3.00 to 5.00 p.m.
Venue: Maison Française d’Oxford

Wednesday 13 May (Week 3)

Session 1 — Life and Nature in Early Modern Alchemy
Chair: Sergei Zotov (Warburg Institute)

Oana Matei (Western University of Arad): Can Life Rise from Ashes? Discussions on the Possibility of the Palingenesis of Plants in the Seventeenth Century

Xinyi Wen (Warburg Institute): Cosmos or Coitus? A Copy Census of Oswald Croll’s Basilica Chymica, 1609–1690

Wednesday 20 May (Week 4)

Session 2 — Spiritual Foundations of Alchemy
Chair: Ellen Hausner (Oxford)

Mark Edwards (Oxford): ‘Ancient Alchemy as Philosophy

Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute): Alchemy as Divination

Wednesday 3 June (Week 6)

Session 3 — Computational History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Chair: Rob Iliffe (Oxford)

Vojtěch Kaąe (University of West Bohemia, Plzeň), and Sarah Lang (Max Planck Institute, Berlin): Tracing the Histories of Early Modern Conceptual Ecosystems: Remote Sensing Methods for the Archaeology of Alchemical Knowledge

Guillermo Restrepo (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig): Computational History of Chemistry: How Big Data Illuminates Macrohistorical Trends and Microhistorical Events

Convenors: Estella Chen (Queens), Cameron Bowman (Keble)

Time: Tuesdays 4.15 p.m. (tea and coffee from 4.00 p.m.)
Venue: Lower Lecture Room, Lincoln College and online (contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk)

28 April (Week 1)

Matthew Mason (Brigham Young, USA): ‘Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World’

19 May (Week 4)

Sarah Grant and Oliver Cox (The V&A): ‘The Making of Marie Antionette Style at The V&A’

26 May (Week 5)

David Kennerley (Oxford): ‘“Alas, poor bird! Thy lay / And all its sweetness is forgot”: Listening to nature and radical political ecology in the Chartist movement’

9 June (Week 7)

Katherine D. Watson (Oxford Brookes): ‘Controlling Interpersonal Violence in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Coventry Act (1671) Reconsidered’

All research students working in this period are encouraged to attend; anyone else interested is very welcome.

For information about the seminar, and news of forthcoming events, visit our Facebook page by clicking here. We would be happy to post notices of interest to our group – contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Kathryn Hempstead

Dates: Wednesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6 & 8

Time: 5.15 p.m.

Venue: Schwarzman 30.020

A friendly and collaborative space for graduate students working on the early modern period across Faculties.

Week 2: 6 May
What is Early Modern?
An interdisciplinary roundtable discussion on how we define the early modern period, and how this shapes our research.
Reading suggestions will be circulated in advance via the mailing list.

Week 4: 20 May
Discussion Group
An opportunity to discuss current research, brainstorm ideas, and plan for the months ahead.

Week 6: 3 June
BIHN Crossover
Joint session with the Body in History Network.

Week 8: 17 June
IEMGW Social
Celebrate the end of the academic year!

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Ceola Daly

Dates: Tuesday, Week 2; further meetings T.B.C.

Time: 5.15-7.00 p.m., 

Venue: Schwarzman 10.424

5 May (Week 2)

Work-in-Progress Hour
Facing an early modern conundrum? Stuck on a tricky passage of secretary hand? Graduate students are invited to bring along a problem or question to seek advice from their peers in an informal roundtable discussion. 

Convenors: Dr Ted Tregear and Dr Michal Zechariah

Time: Tuesdays 5.15 p.m. (Weeks 2, 4 and 6)
Venue: Harrison Room, Merton College

Week 2: Tuesday 5 May, 5.15 p.m.

Readings: Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford, 1979). The Second Week: ‘The Vocation’, ‘The Fathers’, ‘The Lawe’. Available online.

Week 4: Tuesday 19 May, 5.15 p.m.

Readings: Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford, 1979). The Second Week: ‘The Captaines’, ‘The Tropheis’, ‘The Magnificence’. Available online.

Week 6: Tuesday 2 June, 5.15 p.m.

Readings: Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford, 1979). The Second Week: ‘The Schisme’, ‘The Decay’. Available online.