News & Events

The Early Modern Colloquium at the University of Michigan

invites abstracts for papers for their graduate conference

Violence in the Early Modern Period 

at the

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 15-16 February 2013

with conference keynotes by

Professors Melissa Sanchez (English, University of Pennsylvania) and Mitchell Merback (History of Art, Johns Hopkins University)

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the instances, effects, and functions of violence throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. How we understand violence effectively informs how we understand other far-reaching phenomena in the period—e.g., colonization; performances of ability, class, gender, race, and sex; public entertainment; religious reformation(s); social discipline; and urbanization. Recent scholarship has evinced a renewed interest particularly in the dynamics between violence and power, and this conference will therefore focus on a variety of related questions. When and where did violence serve the interests of hegemonic power? When and where did it thwart the interests of hegemonic power? How did violence shape identities, collectives, cultures? By whom or by what was violence practiced and endured? And at what cost?

 

 

 

University of Michigan

Early Modern Colloquium Graduate Conference

Violence in the Early Modern Period

 

3222 Angell Hall; 15-16 February 2013

 

15 February 2013

 

2:30-3:00 p.m.

Registration and Welcome

 

3:00-4:30 p.m.

Panel 1: Spectacles of Violence

 

Chair: Catherine Sanok

English, University of Michigan

 

Lauren Eriks

English, University of Michigan

The Conditions of Performance: Problem Plays and Jewish Violence in the Post-Auschwitz Merchant of Venice

 

Seth Williams

English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

The Dance of Death in A Larum for London

 

Alice Tsay

English, University of Michigan

Suffering and Spectatorship in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller

 

4:30-5:00 p.m.

Tea

 

5:00-6:00 p.m.

Keynote 1

 

Mitchell Merback

History of Art, Johns Hopkins University

From Sacrilege to Beautiful Violence: The Massacre of the Innocents in Art-Historical Perspective

 

 

16 February 2013

 

9:00-9:30 a.m.

Registration and Breakfast

 

9:30-11:00 a.m.

Panel 2: ‘Other’ Geographies

 

Chair: Michael Schoenfeldt

English, University of Michigan

 

Michael Lutz

English, Indiana University-Bloomington

Homewreckers: Two Lamentable Tragedies and the Anti-Geography of Domestic Violence

 

Kathryn Johnson

English, Swarthmore College

‘Afraid to Speak?’: Language and Systems of Oppression in Fletcher’s The Island Princess

 

Molly Tun

Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota

Conceptualizing Colonial Violence: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in De Bry’s America

 

 

11:00-11:30 a.m.

Tea

 

11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.

Panel 3: Spectacle and Voyeurism

 

Chair: Karla Mallette

Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

 

Kara Elizabeth Barfett

English, University of Western Ontario

Dissection and Consumption in the Early Modern Blazon and Wynkyn De Worde

 

Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey

English, University of Montana

Asserting Individuality at the Scaffold

 

Jessica Tabak

English, Brown University

From Sacred to Secular: Spectacular Wounds in The Faerie Queene, Book III

 

1:00-2:00 p.m.

Lunch

 

2:00-3:30 p.m.

Panel 4: Citizenship and Civil Identities

 

Chair: Linda Gregerson

English, University of Michigan

 

Yanay Israeli

History, University of Michigan

Narrative models and the meanings of violence: historians and conversos in Castile, 1460-1480

 

Erin Lichtenstein

History, Stanford University

‘The Honor of the World’: A Widow before the Court of Verona, 1575

 

Elizabeth Mathie

English, University of Michigan

Abandoning the Merchant: The Violence of Protecting in The Merchant of Venice

 

3:30-4:00 p.m.

Tea

 

4:00-5:00 p.m.

Keynote 2

 

Melissa Sanchez

English, University of Pennsylvania

‘Sacred Vehemence’: Biopolitics in Comus