Location
School of History, University of Kent
Moveable Types is a three-day conference which aims to re-examine the processes of cultural exchange in early modern Europe. Traditional historiography has tended to focus on a bilateral transfer of cultures, which, however meaningful, also lift out individual moments of cultural exchange from the environment which made such encounters not only possible, but also significant. By considering cultural exchange in discrete, isolated moments, one runs the risk of oversimplifying the complex networks of cultural exchange in Europe, and thereby skewing European history into a nation-centred perspective.
Recent scholarship such as histoire croisée, entangled histories, cultural translation and actor network theory (ANT) are, meanwhile, looking at such processes in their entirety, as a noisy hubbub rather than a dialogue between binaries (writer and reader, buyer and seller, one nation and another). These approaches explore a network of different elements and characters, all of which are given equal agency in shaping each others’ views of the world.
This conference will explore the implications of these recent developments in scholarship taking an interdisciplinary approach to cultural exchange in the early modern period. The objective is thus to question the binaries of traditional scholarship, and to suggest new ways of considering the cultural connections that were being formed, broken and reformed in this period.
Keynote speakers: Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews); Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford); Gilles Bertrand (Université Pierre Mendès France, Grenoble);
Read more – http://moveabletypes.wordpress.com/
School of History, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX
School of History, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX
SchSchool of History, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NXool of History, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX