The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.1085 Saturday, 9 December 2006
From: Paul Yachnin <
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Date: Thursday, 07 Dec 2006 21:17:04 -0500
Subject: "Making Publics"
"Making Publics" SUMMER SEMINAR
http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca/
2007- July 18- August 13
MAKING PUBLICS IN INTERREGNUM ENGLAND
A Research Seminar for Dissertation-Stage PhD Students and Junior Faculty
Leaders: Lesley Cormack (Alberta) and Michael Bristol (McGill)
July 18-August 13, 2007 at McGill University
This summer school will focus on selected writing from the tumultuous
decades of the interregnum, roughly 1640 - 1660, with particular
attention to the fields of literature, public lfe, science and
religion. The chief aim of the seminar will be to understand conditions
for the possibility of engagement in public life during a time of
intense polarization and social effervescence in England during The
Commonwealth. We will be concerned with a number of specific questions:
How were publics made and who made them in seventeenth-century England?
How did authors imagine the target audiences reading their work? How
were common interests, beliefs, or inquiries circulated and in what
sense did this circulation create publics? How did the gradual shift
away from manuscript to the printed book as the privileged medium for
the dissemination of ideas affect the experience of public life. Were
publics created in the marketplace? The seminar will examine the
theory of publics through consideration of several case studies which
may include:
1. The growing interest in mathematical and geographical instruments and
information, especially focussed around the marketplace and growing
imperial aspirations.
2. The circulation of idiosyncratic and perhaps heterodox religious
ideas in the confessional texts of Sir Thomas Brown, the poetry of
Andrew Marvel, and the studies of comparative religion of Edward, Lord
Herbert of Cherbury.
3. The public significance of melancholia and the melancholy temperament
in prose writings of John Donne and Robert Burton
4. Robert Boyle's network of colleagues and publics, examining the
question of how 'facts' are created and agreed upon, through public
witnessing and acquiescence.
Participants will have an opportunity to workshop their own research
projects, which may focus on any aspect of early modern publics in the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We welcome both pre- and
post-PhD scholars, working in English and continental history,
literature, and cultural studies.
Sponsored by the MaPs Project (Making Publics: Media, markets, and
Association in Early Modern Europe), headquartered at McGill University
and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.. The "Making Publics" project will develop an innovative and
potentially transformative approach to the history of early modernity.
The project will illuminate the artistic, intellectual, religious,
social, and political culture of Britain and Western Europe between 1500
and 1700, and it will also have a bearing on issues that confront modern
society, especially questions about media, the culture market, and the
possibilities of social agency on the part of cultural producers and
consumers. At the heart of our work is the phenomenon that we are
calling "making publics" - the creation of small-scale forms of
association that represented a new way of connecting with others, a kind
of connection not founded in family, rank or vocation, but rather a form
of voluntary community built on the shared interests, tastes, and
desires of individuals.
We have adopted the word "publics" to refer to the open-membership
groups that coalesced around certain practices, areas of interest, and
forms of publication and/or performance. Publics differed from
traditional groupings such as guilds, universities, or parliaments,
which were characteristically exclusive, institutionalized, highly
credentialized, and hierarchical in their internal workings. Publics
were loosely organized, more or less egalitarian in their internal
workings, and open to anyone that had the interest, competence, money,
and time to participate. They fostered and were fostered by new
technologies of representation and dissemination-the printing press, new
pictorial forms, new sites for and styles of theatrical and musical
performance. They were encouraged by the development of a market in
works of art and/or printed works such as plays, paintings, musical
compositions, sermons, news pamphlets, maps, histories, and scientific
reports.
Canadian and non-Canadian dissertation-stage students and junior faculty
are invited to apply to take part in a research seminar focusing on the
political, intellectual, and cultural ferment of mid-seventeenth-century
England. We hope to recruit outstanding young scholars working on any
topic related to the seminar's central concerns across the span of the
century. The group's work on the interregnum will provide a background
for discussion of key issues. As many as 12 successful applicants will
participate in this seminar through mutual reading and discussion and by
developing and presenting their own research. Participants will have
access to McGill Library and important research collections such as the
Redpath tracts, the Osler Library, the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
microflim and electronic references such as EEBO, the Goldsmiths
Library, and the Landsdowne manuscripts.
The travel and living expenses of the participants in the seminar will
be covered by the MaPs project. The end of the seminar will coincide
with the annual meeting of the MaPs research team. Members of the
seminar will have the opportunity to participate in the annual team
meeting of the MaPs project.
Please visit http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca/ for application materials
and details. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2007.
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
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