Past Events
Amanda Valdes Sanchez (Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, Brown University), TBA
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Hussein Fancy (Associate Professor, Yale University), Chapter Two: “The Impostor State” of the project titled “The Impostor Sea: The Medieval Mediterranean beyond Encounter”.
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Benjamin Hein (Assistant Professor, History Department, Brown University), "Rethinking the Kompaniewirtschaft Contract Regiments and Industrialization in the Eighteenth Century".
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Elizabeth Nielsen (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University), "Stories from the Archive".
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Amanda Madden (George Mason University), “The Diary of Polissena Pioppi: A Microhistory of Networks in Sixteenth-Century Modena”
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
The 44th William F. Church Lecture by Jennifer Morgan (NYU), “On Race and Reinscription: Writing Enslaved Women into the Early Modern Archive.”
Thursday, November 16th,
5:30 - 7 PM
Smith-Buonanno Hall 106
Tiraana Bains (Assistant Professor, History Department, Brown University), “Company, Parliament, and Mughal: Constituting Imperial Governance.”
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Dillon Webster (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University), "Conquered Lands, Strengthened Hands."
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
4:30-6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Neil Safier (Brown University). “Translating the Plantationocene from the Prerevolutionary Caribbean to Colonial Brazil.”
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
5:00 PM 6:30 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
How was the language of plantation society ported from the French and English-dominated Caribbean to colonial Brazil in the eighteenth century? What role did agro-industrial treatises play in the perpetuation of systems of enslaved labor as plantation societies shifted from sugar production to a wider array of foodstuffs, beverages, and profit-oriented utilitarian crops? Long understood to be powerful manuals for naturalists and plantation masters alike, these pragmatic instructional texts, focused around questions of climate, natural history, and commodity-driven agriculture, have only recently been understood to have circulated outside the narrow Caribbean world for which they were destined. One iconic protagonist of this translation process was the Franciscan friar José Mariano da Conceição Vellozo (1742-1811), who served as a linguistic conduit for moving natural knowledge from an array of texts produced in colonial cultures around the globe into print – and into Portuguese in particular. This talk examines Vellozo’s multi-volume and multi-faceted Fazendeiro do Brazil (1798-1806) with an eye toward connecting the eighteenth-century natural sciences, the ambitions of expanding plantation-based economies, and the politics of translation across the multilingual geographies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Stacey Murrell (Brown University). “Extra-Legitimate Mothering: Feminine Inheritance and Intergenerational Practice in Islamic and Christian Iberia, c.900-1300 CE.”
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
This chapter explores how concubinage complicates medieval and modern conceptions of what it means to be a mother, particularly in terms of daughters, using case studies from al-Andalus and several Christian kingdoms of Iberia. I focus on procreative and non-procreative forms of mothering, as well as concubinage practiced in a multi-generational frame. My interest is in tracing how women socialized their daughters, passing on knowledge about patronage practices, as well as the possibilities and realities of concubinage.
Matthew Kadane (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), “Mind-Forged Manicules, or, What was “Enlightenment”?
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
This paper focuses on the first person to use the now common English word “enlightenment,” a naval surgeon named James Rymer (1750-1827). “The Enlightenment” existed without Rymer’s word—this is not an exercise in Begriffsgeschichte. But the investigation of the word nevertheless opens up an unexpected world in which obscure people have an important role to play in intellectual history. Exploring the nature of that role is the methodological aim of the paper, while its more substantive goal is to reconstruct Rymer’s story, which, like the Enlightenment itself, is at times serious, at times farcical, and offers an object lesson in the difficulty of disentangling humanitarian from instrumentalist motives.
Yekai (Kyle) Zhang (grad student, History, Brown University), “The Representation and Social Memory of the 1641 Irish Rebellion in Protestant England, c. 1642-1689.”
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
5:00 PM 6:30 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
43rd William Church Lecture, John Jeffries Martin (Duke University), “From the Apocalypse to the Idea of Progress in Early Modern Europe.”
Thursday, November 3, 2022
5:30 PM 7:00 PM
Smith-Buonanno, 106.
In the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, Europeans expressed their hopes for the future within an apocalyptic, even millenarian frame. But in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century a new language of hope emerged as the Idea of Progress took hold. This presentation explores this transition with attention both to the emergence of secular values and to shifting notions of Divine Providence in the early modern world.
John Jeffries Martin is a historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), and A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (2022) as well as some 50 articles and essays.
Elias Muhanna (Brown University). “The Unlettered Prophet.”
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
This paper explores the history of Arabic in the early seventh century, focusing on evidence supplied by the Quran and its textual record. It synthesizes various debates relating to the transition from Old Arabic to Classical Arabic that began in the mid-19th century and places them in the context of new developments in Quranic paleography and codicology.
Andrew Romig (NYU Gallatin). “The Wrong Kind of Flattery: Critique and Praise in Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici.”
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici (On the Image of Tetricus) juxtaposes panegyric for Louis the Pious with an embellished and stylized reflection on an equestrian statue of Theodoric the Great that allegedly stood on the Aachen palace grounds. This essay explores the possibility that an encomium for Louis at the end of the poem, performed in the voice of Strabo himself, is actually a mocking representation of bad panegyric art, the kind of empty and fawning flattery that leads an emperor astray and to which Carolingian leadership had perhaps, according to the poem’s central allusion, fallen victim.
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University). “Multispecies Migrations in the Fifteenth-Century Atlantic: Empire, Slavery and Capitalism in the Global Commons.”
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
My book project aims to provide an account of the social relations and materialities of empire, capitalism, and slavery in the fifteenth-century Atlantic web of life. I proceed from the premise that between the early 1400s and 1480s, a diverse range of Africans and Europeans (fishworkers, traders, soldiers, forced exiles) joined ancient trans-regional corridors of multispecies migration. Through negotiation and struggle, people of varied backgrounds co-constructed a series of social and political formations along East Atlantic currents and flyways on terms that varied and shifted across time and place. My proposed approach to early Atlantic history seeks to reorient narratives away from European navigational feats or establishments of colonial “laboratories” that prefigured later developments in the Americas, and more towards the gradual, often violent processes behind the emergence of collective domains – what I call the global commons – that carried within them different potentials of capture and liberation experienced unevenly across human and species divides.
Anne E. Lester (John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Professor of Medieval History, Johns Hopkins University). “Authority in the Aftermath: Power, Memory, and the Narrative Capacity of Things.”
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
In the years following the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) the lordships (major and minor) of northern France saw prolonged periods of rule by crusade widows and female kin who held power in the absence, death, or delay of their male relatives. Women became adept users of documents of practice, namely charters and letters patent, as well as personal seals to reaffirm the authority vested in them by their departing male kin. Papal protections following from the crusade vow further reaffirmed the authority women wielded as widows and regents. Women also learned to deploy aspects of sacred authority that inhered in their status as crusade wives and widows and as arbiters of holy objects and legacies associated with crusader status. In this capacity they came to narrate and deploy a form of political memory that was different and distinct from that developed in more public, formal, and ecclesiastical settings. This chapter interrogates the role of objects as carriers of memory, of ideology, and of authority and suggests ways in which objects held alternative scripts for the process of re-memory and commemoration. Drawing on a corpus of documents and things that moved from east to west in the decades after 1204, this chapter addresses how women realigned and renegotiated practices of power during this period of anxiety and social change.
Jonathan Conant (Associate Professor of History and Classics, Brown University), “Fragments of a Narrative: Combat Trauma in the Early Medieval West.”
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Sarah Christensen (PhD student in History, Brown University), “Remembering Enslaved Mothers in the Medieval Icelandic Laxdæla saga.”
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
The thirteenth-century Old Norse Laxdæla saga relates the fictionalized tale of Melkorka Mýrkjartansdóttir, a princess enslaved in Ireland at the age of fifteen and taken to Iceland in the tenth century as a domestic servant. Melkorka gives birth to her master’s son, a boy named Óláf, and the saga traces his quest to overcome the stigma of his dishonored birth and join Iceland’s elite class. My paper examines the entwined discourses of motherhood, gender, class, and cultural belonging that shaped the history of women’s enslavement in Iceland and across medieval Europe. The story of Melkorka and Óláf offers insight into two critical aspects of the legacy of gendered slavery: first, the largely invisible emotional lives of women who experienced family separation, forced migration, and sexual violence, and developed tools for survival in their new surroundings; and second, the existential discomfort that accompanied the presence of enslaved women in intimate spaces and the uncertain status of their children.
The 42nd William F. Church Memorial Lecture, Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University) and Meredith Martin (New York Univesity). “Remembering Mediterranean Slavery in Early Modern France.”
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
5:30 PM 7:00 PM
Smith-Buonanno, 106.
The transnational movement to confront the legacies of Atlantic slavery has seen statues topple, memorials rise and exhibitions open across the globe. For the most part, however, the phenomenon of early modern galley slavery – and, in particular, enslaved Muslim oarsmen on France’s Mediterranean galleys – has escaped contemporary reckoning. This lecture explores the traces of two thousand esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks) purchased to row on King Louis XIV’s vessels while considering some of the factors shaping their depiction in monuments and museum displays. Ship design, naval weapons, medals, paintings, and prints depicting Ottoman and Moroccan subjects helped proclaim royal supremacy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What are the stakes of remembering these individuals today?
Zhang Yekai (History, grad. student). ‘Ballads, Poems and the Political Culture of the Second and Third Dutch Wars in Britain, c. 1664-1674.’
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
4:00 PM 5:30 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Hannah Marcus (Harvard University). “Cassandra Fedele and the Spectacle of Old Age in Early Modern Venice.”
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
On May 1, 1556, the 91-year-old humanist and former child prodigy, Cassandra Fedele, performed a Latin oration celebrating a visit to Venice by the Polish Queen. In this chapter draft from my new book project, I reread Fedele’s life and works, focusing not on her famous childhood, but on her experiences as a very old woman living in Venice during a period that was increasingly fixated on the possibilities of long life. I argue that her precarious situation and public performances were part of a broader culture in sixteenth-century Italy that at once valorized and made a spectacle of the elderly in the space of the city.
Charles Carroll (frm. gr.stud., History). “‘To Know the Ordinances of the Heavens’: Preaching Manliness at the University of Paris.”
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Online
Mayer Juni (gr. stud., History,) “The Politics of Biography: Inquisition, Empire, and Identification in the Spanish Atlantic (1570-1610).”
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Online
Amy Remensnyder (History,) “The Restless Sea: Storm Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.a. 1000-c.a. 1700.”
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Online
Marina Rustow (Princeton University,) “Petitions from Medieval Egypt and the Problem of Premodern Rights.”
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Online
The 41st William F. Church Memorial Lecture, John McNeill (Georgetown University), “Revisiting Mosquito Empires in the time of COVID-19.”
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
5:30 PM 7:00 PM
Online
In this lecture, environmental historian J.R. McNeill will revisit arguments he made a decade ago in his book, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, which dealt with the extraordinary virulence and historical consequences of epidemics in the Caribbean, ca. 1650-1900. Looking back at his study from the vantage point of the pandemic year 2020 will also permit him to reflect on the importance of disease history in the contemporary world.
J.R. McNeill, currently University Professor and Professor of History at Georgetown University, has held two Fulbright awards and fellowships from Guggenheim, MacArthur and the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has authored or edited 23 books, including Something New Under the Sun (2000), listed by the London Times among the 10 best science books ever written (despite being a history book); and Mosquito Empires (2010), which won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association; and most recently The Webs of Humankind (2020), 2 vols. In 2018, he received the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former president of both the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.
Shahzad Bashir (Middle East Studies, History, Religious Studies,) “Globalizing the Middle Ages: The Market in Poetry in the Persian World.”
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Online
“Poetic speech is a pearl, connected to the king’s ear.” This statement gestures to words as objects of material value sought by those with power and resources. Prof. Bashir provides a sense for the texture of the Persian world by discussing what made poetry precious. By focusing on reports on poets’ lives, he illuminates the social scene in which poetry was produced and consumed. The study substantiates the interdependency between cultural and material reproduction of society.
Leland Grigoli, “Monastic Technologies of Authority: Cistercian Diplomatic Praxis, Crusade, and the Colonization of the Midi.”
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
The 40th William F. Church Memorial Lecture, Nick Wilding (Georgia State University,) “False Impressions: A History of Print Forgery.”
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
5:30 PM 7:00 PM
Smith-Buonanno Hall, 106.
Prof. Nick Wilding is a historian of early modern Italy, of the book, and of science. A recipient of many awards and fellowships, and author of many works, most notably Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge (2014), he also became visible internationally when in 2012 he exposed a grand fraud. Wilding proved that a proffered copy of Galileo’s famous treatise on the use of a telescope to observe the stars, Sidereus Nuncius (1610), purportedly including Galileo’s own watercolors of the moon, was a clever forgery. It helped to bring the director of the Girolamini Library in Naples, Marino Massimo De Caro – part of the Berlusconi network – to justice. (De Caro was also found to have embezzled many hundreds of books from the library he oversaw.) Wilding also featured prominently in the PBS documentary about how the fraud was exposed, “Galileo’s Moon” (which premiered on July 2, 2019).
Sabrina Minuzzi, “«Merchandise for Profit» and «Merchandise for Honor» Artisans of Secrets and their contribution to Early Modern Italian pharmacopoeia.”
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
5:00 PM 6:30 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Kajun Chen (East Asian Studies), “Imperial Models: Design and Technology in State-Controlled Porcelain Manufacture in Early Modern China.”
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Kristen Block, (University of Tennessee but currently a fellow at the JCB,) “Contagious Insensibility: The Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the Enlightenment in the French Antilles.”
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department
Tara Nummedal (History,) “Sound and Vision: The Alchemical Epistemology of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens.”
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
4:30 PM 6:00 PM
Pavilion Room at the Brown History Department