This two-day conference on prisons and incarceration in England, 1500-1850, is taking place at Keble College, University of Oxford, UK on the 15th and 16th of July 2019. It will bring together senior academics and early career researchers to share their ongoing research into English imprisonment, discuss recent developments in the field, and set out new agendas for the history of prisons and imprisonment. The conference is interdisciplinary–our speakers are historians, literary scholars and criminologists–, spans a wide chronology, and takes an inclusive view of imprisonment, including not only criminal custody and incarceration, but also the imprisonment of debtors and prisoners of war. Together, our speakers seek to explain the role that imprisonment and prisoners played in English society, economy and political life. By recovering the early modern prison in all its variants and situating this work alongside new studies on the prison’s later incarnations, we hope this conference will suggest alternative frameworks from which to study imprisonment, provide new interpretations of incarceration, and advance different chronologies for the prison and its evolution. This conference is funded by the generosity of the Past and Present Society and Keble College, Oxford. It is organised by Kiran Mehta (Wolfson College, Oxford) and Dr. Richard Bell (Keble College, Oxford) and presented by the Keble Medieval and Renaissance Cluster.
There are no registration fees, but please register: http://oxfordprisonconference.eventbrite.co.uk/
Visit our website for additional information and a program: https://prisonsconference.wordpress.com/