“The Early Modern Now” working group brings together faculty and graduate students from across the university to explore four interlocking themes and questions, all focused around the contemporary relevance, and on-going critical importance, of the early modern age (c.1450-1750). First, we hope to foster interdisciplinary and transnational conversations about the state and future of early modern studies. These conversations will focus on questions of method; on debates about geographical and temporal definition and framing; and on the opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration not only inside the humanities, but also among the humanities, arts, social sciences, and paleo-sciences (including environmental studies, paleoclimatology, and scientific archaeology). Second, we want to explore the early modern genealogies of contemporary crises and dilemmas, whether the early modern intellectual, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental origins of the Anthropocene, or the early modern roots of modern globalism, capitalism, and racial and colonial hierarchies. Third, we are interested in the ways that early modern ideas and debates—about law and tyranny, about sexuality and consent, about identity and personhood, about the nature of freedom, or about new media, culture and politics—continue to resonate in our own vexed political and cultural moment. Finally, we hope to discuss the challenges (and opportunities) of teaching the early modern to contemporary audiences both inside and outside the university.
Organizers
Ann Baynes Coiro works on seventeenth-century English literature and culture, ranging from William Shakespeare to Aphra Behn. While book history and performance theory underlie her work, form and the history of form are central. Milton’s poetry is one primary focus, particularly its deep roots in drama and performance (she is a past president of the Milton Society of America). Her many articles address the significant but relatively neglected body of post-Shakespearean drama, the diverse range of Cavalier poetry, the poetry of Robert Herrick, Amelia Lanier and Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden’s critical work.
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Alastair Bellany is a Professor of History. My research to date has focused primarily on the political culture of early modern England and on the cultural origins of the English Revolution. This work has included an array of publications on news, media, and the political public sphere, on popular politics and political agency, on the interplay between early modern politics, literature and visual culture, on poison and medicine, and on the scandalous images of early Stuart court favorites. I am currently completing a textbook for Oxford University Press on the history of the Britannic Isles from prehistory to 1715, which has spun off an essay project on the politics of mid- and late- seventeenth-century antiquarian interpretations of Stonehenge. I am also beginning a major new project on late medieval and early modern climate history, tentatively titled “Looking for the Little Ice Age”, while continuing to work on a small book that explores the history of song through a socio-cultural analysis of a late Stuart hanging ballad and its migrations through various English and American afterlives.
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