Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period

Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 9-10, 2012

Keynote Speakers: Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky, and Daniel
Vitkus, Florida State University

The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the
University of Michigan, is seeking submissions for a conference on the
construction of nations and empires in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe. This conference will engage with the idea of emerging and changing
national identities in this period. More specifically, it will investigate
the particular social dynamics that characterize negotiations between
categories such as the foreign and the domestic or the individual and the
state. How is the status of the nation and its inhabitants defined? How does
the cultural production of nation engage with shifting political realities?
Do changes in geographical borders or ideologies produce new discourses of
difference in terms of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and/or
disability?

We welcome papers that examine how early modern writers, collectives, and
cultures grappled with these questions within a series of interrelated
realms-e.g., academic, artistic, economic, epistemological, geographical,
legal, medical, occult, philosophical, private, public, religious,
scientific, and theatrical. Potential topics might include radical religious
dissent, the rise of Protestantism and/or the Counter-Reformation,
colonialism and expansion in the Americas, the beginnings of the slave
trade, the shift from monarchy to commonwealth in seventeenth-century
England, relations between the East and West, or European interactions with
the Ottoman Empire.

Please send a 250-word abstract to Cordelia Zukerman (czukerma@umich.edu)
and Leila Watkins (lrwatkin@umich.edu) by January 15, 2012.

Conference Organizers: Cordelia Zukerman, Emily Shearer, Leila Watkins