Moveable Types: People, Ideas, and Objects is an international conference on cultural exchanges in early modern Europe, taking place at the University of Kent between 27-29 November 2014. To register, or to find out more information, please visit the ‘Moveable Types’ registration page.
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 by inviting papers with 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);
- Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary, University of London).
Registration Fees:
£35 standard rate / £25 student rate
Optional conference dinner:
28th November, at Café du Soleil, Canterbury – £23 (includes welcome drink and 2 course meal).