Strange Currencies: Dynamic Economies in the Early Modern World

The Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group of the Graduate Center, City University of NY, invites proposals for papers for its third annual conference to be held on February , 2007 in New York City. We encourage scholars of all disciplines to submit papers related to the period inclusive of the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and we especially welcome papers with an interdisciplinary methodology. This conference will focus on Early Modern market representations and modes of exchange in financial, social, and sexual spheres. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:  

Philosophies of Economics
The physical marketplace
Economies of gender & sexuality
Housekeeping and domestic economies
Economics and the Law
Credit, loans & banking
Currency and Coinage
Wealth, Poverty & Charity
Money , exchange & business
Property, Inheritance & Real Estate
Publicity and the cult of celebrity
Advertising and desire
Anti-Semitism & Racism
Banking Families
Usury & Interest
Economic Crimes (counterfeiting, theft, fraud, debt, etc.)
Luxury goods
Imports and exports
Products, Services & Industries
The Guilds
Populuxe
Mercantile Stereotypes
The Slave trade
Professionals & Careers
Consumption & consumers
Taxation & State Finance
Church finance
Pragmatism
Trading spaces; trading bodies
Patronage
Class dynamics
Commodification of genres
The theatre and economics
Commercialism and Literature
Trading Companies (East India et al)

Send 250 word abstracts by December 20th, 2006 to emig.conference@gmail.com, or mail to Balaka Basu (English Department, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016). Please include your name and institutional affiliation, mailing address, email address, and phone number.