THE NETHERLANDISH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND ITS AFTERLIVES

DUKE UNIVERSITY: MARCH 3, 2007
Keynote Speaker: Nigel Smith

Please submit abstracts (500 words) via email to rjl11@duke.edu (place "Netherlands Conference Abstract" in the subject line) by November 30, 2006.

This one-day symposium aims to recuperate the Netherlandish context in order to strengthen and complicate our understanding of philosophy, religion, language, literature, art, history, and political economy - the geopolitical shape of early modernity - with specific reference to the transformations of the United Provinces and attendant territories, in Europe and beyond. The symposium will examine the import of the Netherlands in a moment of greatly significant circum-Atlantic change - a moment which indeed set many of the parameters for culture and politics still with us today. We welcome submissions from a number of disciplines on related topics, which may, but need not, discuss related themes such as:

-The emergence of a modern market economy
-The Dutch Revolt and its iterations in other situations (for instance, in English Republican thought)
-The identification of a "Dutch" cycle of capital accumulation
-Remembering the Netherlandish context across a variety of disciplines (New Amsterdam in American Studies; the Dutch in the East Asian Studies; The Dutch roots of Arminianism, etc.)
-The post-Republic identification of the Dutch with (proto-national) liberation movements against dynastic rule
-The disparities between emergent French Absolutism and Dutch sovereignty
-Publishing and circulation of texts in the Netherlands, or Dutch cultural production and its impact in other European situations
-Netherlandish visual culture and the production and consumption of art; art as cultural identity, or explorations of notions of taste through imagery and economics
-The Revolt of the Netherlands in Spanish literature
-The history of philosophy, including Spinozism, in the Netherlands and beyond
-The Dutch slave trade in light of the Spanish, French and British trades
-The place of the Netherlands in British perpetuations of the Black Legend
-Anglo-Dutch; Spanish-Dutch; Franco-Dutch rivalry in the New World
-Netherlandish humanism