Strange Currencies: Dynamic Economies in the Early Modern World

The Third Annual Conference of the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group
February 16, 2007, 9 am to 6 pm
Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

The Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group invites you to join us for a full day of panels on topics ranging from credit to crime and culminating in a keynote address, Foreign Encounters with Domestic Economies, from Professor Kim Hall of Fordham University.

Both as a source of anxiety, upheaval and crisis and as a key driver of technological, artistic and intellectual accomplishment, economic influences underline many of the Early Modern periods radically shifting philosophies. This conference promises fruitful discussion on Early Modern market representations and modes of exchange in financial, social, and sexual spheres. We hope to see you there! Co-chairs Louise Geddes, Balaka Basu, and Margaret Robertson

The schedule of speakers is as follows:

9:00am – 10:15am

Seth M. Rudy – NYU: ““By any other name: Socio-Economic Equivalencies in A Caveat To Common Cursetors”

Emily Sherwood – CUNY GC: “The Articulation of Agency in the Early Modern Marriage Market.”

Patrick Derby Scott – CUNY GC: “Playing Favorites: The Economy of Affection and Proximity in the Royal Court of Early Modern Drama”

Shawn Rice – CUNY GC: “Prosthetic Fathers: Obsessional Neurosis, Melancholia, and Timon of Athens”

10:20am to 11:20am

Michael Tratner – Bryn Mawr: “Unfair Conversions: The Basis of Mercantile Economic Value in The Merchant of Venice”

Valerie Allen – John Jay College of Criminal Justice: “Jonson’s Alchemist and the Art of Angels”

 Ruth E. Friedman – University of Chicago: ““Some good comforts”? The Christian Confusion of Money and “Manna” in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice” 

11:25am to 12:25pm

Patricia Rocco – CUNY GC: “Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Gambling Prints: the Social Mapping of Leisure in Early Modern Bologna”

Simon Fortin – CUNY GC: “As ‘twixt a Miser and his Fortune”:Promiscuity, Triangulations and the Literality of Expenditure in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”

Donny Levit – CUNY GC: “Criminal Law Epistemology and the Economic Opportunism of Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl" 

LUNCH: 12:25pm – 1:25pm

1:30pm – 2:30pm

Swen Voekel – Wheelock College : “Cuttings, Cannibalism and Common Law: Creating a Space for Market Exchange in Tudor Ireland” 

Dan Venning – CUNY GC: ““To bee solde at the signe of the Gun”: The Printing of James Roberts, 1576-1606”

Gina Grimaldi – CUNY GC: ““Fast bind, fast find”: Contract and Time in The Merchant of Venice”

2:35pm – 3:35pm

Michael LaCombe – Adelphi : ““by shewing power purchasing authoritie”: The Politics of Food Exchange in the English Atlantic World”

Jenn Holl – CUNY GC: “Shakespeare’s Celebrity: Fame, Name and Credit in The Comedy of Errors”

Balaka Basu – CUNY GC: “Stage Business: Selling Belief in Early Modern Supernatural Drama”

4pm

Keynote Address: Kim Hall – Fordham University: “Foreign Encounters with Domestic Economies”