Conference – 8 to 9 January 2025 at Newcastle University
This conference will build on the recent growth in research into the visual and material culture of Early Modern Britain. The material turn has revealed much about everyday lives and social status in the early modern period, uncovering domestic spaces and places, exploring gender identities, emotions, morality and behaviour, and telling us much about the practice of piety and the experience of life as part of a religious minority.
This conference is part of the AHRC-funded project – ‘Integrating the Visual: using printed images in early modern Britain’ – which considers how non-textual sources might be further integrated into historical practice. The project considers what visual sources add to our knowledge of early modern Britain. Do they complement our understanding of the period, or challenge it? Do they ask us to reframe existing questions and debates? And what challenges (practical and intellectual) do we face in using them? The conference will interrogate these questions. It is ultimately concerned with how images and objects should be used by scholars of the Early Modern period.
This conference is being held to celebrate the relaunch of the British Printed Images to 1700 (BPI) database in 2024. It hopes to encourage use of the BPI archive and to promote conversation about the use of visual and material sources in the study of the past more broadly.
It is intended that a publication will develop out of the conference.
Call for Papers, deadline – 30 June 2024
We welcome 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the visual and/or material culture of Early Modern Britain. Proposals might include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Approaches to visual and/or material culture.
- Using visual and/or material culture to research the social, cultural, religious, political, or intellectual histories of Early Modern Britain.
- The visual and/or material culture of the senses and/or emotions.
- The visual and/or material culture of space and place.
- The visual and/or material culture of race, genders, bodies, identities, or stereotypes.
- Images, illustrations, figures, and diagrams and the History of the Book.
- Iconography, allegory, and emblems.
- Challenges posed by working with non-textual sources.
Proposals should be emailed to: adam.morton@ncl.ac.uk
Proposals from early career colleagues are particularly welcome, as are those from established researchers who not routinely work with visual or material sources.
Deadline: 30 June 2024
Image: Wiki Commons
_Assembled_at_Westminster_1640.jpg){kind=link}