Communication and Exchange in the Early Modern: ‘A Continent in Conversation’
Event Timing: 11th – 12th June 2026
Event Address: Gwleidyddiaeth Ryngwladol International Politics Building, Penglias Campus, Aberystwyth University SY23 3FE.
Contact us at: [email protected]
Link to google registration form: https://forms.gle/uoCnHwFsHkETeKE99
After two successful conferences in May 2024 and June 2025 we are proud to advertise the third annual Communication and Exchange in the Early Modern 1500-1850 meeting at Aberystwyth University. Our project aims to bring together researchers from around the globe for authoritative and constructive discussion on the medium of communication history. The conference is broad in its approach, encouraging innovative research from scholars across the Arts and Social Sciences.
From merchants to messengers, printers to politicians and spies to sovereigns, people were always busy in conversation. The sheer availability of paper, inks and writing instruments combined with the vast developments in printing and infrastructure, cumulatively improved the way that Europeans corresponded and thus created a continent in conversation. People from across all social orders and national boundaries harnessed these new developments, using avant-garde methods of print media to communicate to a national and international public which was usually facilitated by a mobile network of confidential and reliable correspondents. Communication and exchange fundamentally transformed the European scene, turning the continent into a nursery for the public sphere. Amid such change surfaced new stages for conversation, both loud and quiet, taking hold of the public and shaping intellectual minds to come. Our intention for this year’s theme, ‘a continent in conversation,’ is to approach the wide-ranging topic of the public sphere. This conference will explore the value of cultural and intellectual exchange as well as the diverse practices of networking in the early modern world.
Keynote Speaker: Jason Peacey (University College London)
Aberystwyth University was established in 1872 and is the oldest academic institution in Wales. The University has a distinct international academic pedigree and is a forefront of modern arts and humanities scholarship in Wales. The university neighbours the highly prestigious National Library of Wales. The Communication and Exchange conference is convened by Dr Joseph Crozier, Heather Nicholas and Rachael Harman.
Provisional Conference Programme:
Thursday 11th June 2026
8:45 Registration.
9:00 Opening Remarks.
9:10 Panels 1A and 1B.
Panel 1A – Travel, Communication and Cultural Exchange
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Professor William Gibson (University of Oxford) Travels and Travails: the breach between Edward Lhuyd and John Wynne in 1708.
Dr Daniel Reed (University of Oxford) Pleasant and Advantageous: Cultural Exchange and Personal Formation in the Travel Diaries of Charles Wither, 1702-04.
Dr Nigel Aston (University of York) ‘Liberal communications between the learned’: William Jones’s Observations in a journey to Paris by way of Flanders, in the month of August 1776.
Panel 1B – Power and Attire
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Dr Anne-Kristine Sindvald Larsen (Museum of West Funen) Communicating Clothing. Newspaper Advertisements in Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen.
Dr Laura Martínez Cayado (University of Murcia) Habsburg Women and Their Political, Cultural, and Artistic Networks in the Sixteenth Century.
Andrea Barceló Rodríguez (University of Murcia) “The Use of Portrait-Within-Portrait at the Bourbon Court: the Case of Anne of Austria (1601-1666)”.
10:40 Refreshment Break.
11:00 Panels 2A and 2B.
Panel 2A – Ballads and Satires
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Olivia Golby-Kirk (University of Birmingham) The Taylor No Man: The Expression of Occupational Masculinity in Early Modern Broadside Ballads.
Dr Ningfen Wang (Queen Mary, University of London) Black Africans figures in Wenceslaus Hollar’s illustrations of an English translation of Juvenal’s Satires.
Dr Luke Walters (University of Reading) The Ballad of Avery and Kidd: Pirates and Early Modern Print Culture.
Panel 2B – Structures of Communication
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Alina-Maria Crăciun (Babeș Bolyai University) Papal Networks on the Eastern Frontier: The Aldobrandinis and the Romanian Principalities during the Long Turkish War (1593–1606).
Shubhanga Pandey (University of California) Nepal and the Asian information Order.
João Gabriel Covolan Silva (Scuola Normale Superiore) Atlantic News in Motion: England and the Dutch-Iberian Struggle for Bahia, 1624-1625.
12:30 Lunch.
13:30 Panels 3A and 3B.
Panel 3A – News and Journalism
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Dr Basil Bowdler (University of St Andrews) Reporting and Debating English Politics and Religion in the Dutch Public Sphere, 1678-1681.
Dr Ruairí Nolan (Independent Scholar) Stepping into Journalism: Revd. William F. Jackson and the London Daily Press, 1772-94.
Dr Lena Liapi (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Gazeteers and Audiences: Newspapers, intertextuality, and ‘the public’ during the Nine Years War.
Dr Bláithín Hurley (Open University) A Town in Conversation: Global News in late Eighteenth-Century Provincial Ireland.
Panel 3B – Esoteric Voices
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Dr M.a Ángeles González Luque (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Biblical exegesis and ascetic pedagogy in the Segunda parte de las epístolas familiares by Friar Antonio de Guevara.
Kate Mechedou (University of Warwick) Thematic strand: Stages, soundscapes and spaces of conversation.
Dr Joy McAlpine-Black (Independent Scholar) The Girls’ Guide to Becoming a Wesleyan Influencer: Ann Shaw, ‘Mother of Methodism in South Africa’ (1788-1854).
Elsa Pinto Prieto (University of Granada) Listening to the Margins: Afro-Descendant Sounds, Moral Order, and Soundscape Design in Early Modern Mexico.
15:15 Comfort Break.
15:30 Panel 4A – Keynote Address.
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Professor Jason Peacey (University College London)
The Power and Perils of Public Diplomacy in Seventeenth Century Europe.
18:30 Conference Dinner @Glengower.
Friday 12th June 2026
9:00 Registration.
9:10. Panels 5A and 5B.
Panel 5A – Femininity and Print Culture
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Fiona Feane (University of Bristol) To Reveal and Create the Woman: Communicating morality through gesture and dress in seventeenth century popular print.
Miroslava Soláriková (Slovak National Library) The Widow’s Imprint: Female Printers as Media Agents in Early Modern Central Europe (1700–1850).
Dr Stanislava Knapčoková (Slovak National Library) Between Letter and Image: Itinerant Engravers and Female Voices in the Print Culture of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Panel 5B – Conversation and the Public Sphere
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Professor Dr İbrahim Hamaloğlu (Ege University) Beyond Coffeehouses: Rethinking the Early Modern Public Sphere through Ottoman Diplomacy.
Dr Susan Whyman (Independent Scholar) The Bath Philosophical Society: Knowledge Brokers and Social Mobility in the Eighteenth Century.
Laura de Silva Duarte (University of Coimbra) Intellectual Sociability and the Periodical Press: Academics in the Gazete de Lisboa (1715-1802).
10:40 Refreshment Break
11:00 Panels 6A and 6B.
Panel 6A – The Lives of Letters
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Dr Tristan Griffin (Independent Scholar) Walter Ralegh’s Letters: Contemporary Copying and Circulation.
Dr Zoe Screti (University of Oxford) Fearing the Public Eye: The Destruction of Manuscript Letters in Early Modern Europe.
William Lewis (University of Glasgow) ‘The Leters betwixt England and Scotland ar opened’: Circulating and Suppressing Scottish Print, 1639-1640.
Panel 6B – Power and Imagery
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Adrián Alvarado Boscán (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) Communicating the Military Model: Norms, Images, and Uniforms between Spain and the Captaincies of Chile and Venezuela (1768-1800).
Dr Noé Vagner-Clévenot (Austrian Academy of Sciences) Communicating a Habsburg princely image. A comparative study of the early years of Franz Stephan (1736–1745) and Franz Joseph (1848–1860).
Dr Joanna Smith (Independent Scholar) ‘Communicating Kingship in English Restoration Kingdoms and Colonies’.
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Panels 7A and 7B.
Panel 7A – Early Modern Networks
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Matea Marušić (Croatian Institute of History) Friar on the Move: Andrija Dorotić in Dalmatian Diplomatic and Clandestine Networks at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
Monica Teoldi (University of Milan) Letters as Manuals of ‘Devout Heresy’: Epistolary Networks and Heterodox Knowledge Exchange in Early Sixteenth-Century Milan.
Dr James Kendrick (Independent Scholar) The Alumni networks of Elizabethan Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
Dr Tamsin Pritchard (Independent Scholar) ‘The League which I propose is a power composed of diuers members’: A Pan European Conversation from Venice to London during the Thirty Years War.
Panel 7B – Ephemera and Political Culture
Room: West Room, International Politics Building
Chair:
Felipe Oliverio Bergonso (University of São Paulo) A Revolution in Conversation: Print, Parliament, and the Haitian Revolution in British Political Culture.
Raphaëlle Goyeau (University of East Anglia) Post and Precedents – Uses and Transmission of Medieval Charters in Early Modern Papers.
Joshua Grey (University of Monash) “the testimony of my patriotic feeling”: Loyalism in Letters and Print Ephemera of the Liverpool Correspondences, 1815-20.
Michael Partington (University of Aberdeen) Reading “The New World”: John Ogilby’s America (1671) and the political culture of Restoration Britain.
15:15 Comfort Break.
15:30 Panel 8A – Plenary Speaker.
Room: Main Hall, International Politics Building
Chair:
Dr Joseph Crozier (Aberystwyth University)
Gentlemanliness in the International Espionage of James Johnston (1690-92).
16:30: Closing Remarks.
Drinks @Tŷ Seidr.