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2019: Virginia 1619: A California Conversation
September 20, 2019

Conference organizer: Peter Mancall, University of Southern California

Emily Berquist Soule, California State University, Long Beach
“From Africa to the Ocean Sea: Slavery in the Origins of the Spanish Empire”

Alex Borucki, University of California, Irvine
“The White Lion and the Intra-American Slave Trade Database at www.slavevoyages.org”

Alejandra Dubcovsky, University of California, Riverside
“1619 from the Spanish Atlantic”

Jack P. Green, John Hopkins University
“1619, Latin America, and Public Memory”

Steven Hackel, University of California, Riverside
“1619/2019: Where are We?”

Mark Hanna, University of California, San Diego
“Jamestown, Nest of Pirates”

Alexander Haskell, University of California, Riverside
“Our Anniversaries, Our Selves”

Michael Jarvis, University of Rochester
“Visualizing the Worlds of 1619”

Katie Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Slavery and the Origins of American Money”

Melissa Morris, University of Wyoming
“Virginia 1619 and Early Modernity”

Paul Musselwhite, Dartmouth College
“Continental Histories of the Jamestown Era”

Lindsay O’Neill, University of Southern California
“Echoes of 1619: Slavery, Conversion & British Expansion 100 Years Later”

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California
“Revolutionaries Look Back”

Carla Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles
“1619 as synecdoche”

James Rice, Tufts University
“Some Reflections on Politics at the Founding, circa 1619”

Robert Ritchie, Huntington Library
“What about paint?”

Carole Shammas, University of Southern California
“1619 – Questions about the prequel and sequel”

Brenda Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
“Considering 1619: Looking Back from Home”

Dana Velasco Murillo, University of California, San Diego
“1616: Conquest and Indigenous Slavery in Northern New Spain”

2017: Indigenous Knowledge and the Making of Colonial Latin America
December 8 & 9, 2017

Conference co-organizers: Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
Kim Richter, Getty Research Institute

Amber Brian, University of Iowa
“Conquest Accounts, Native Knowledge, and the Trope of Authenticity”

Kelly McDonough, University of Texas at Austin
“Reframing the Relaciones Geográficas of Colonial Mexico: A Corpus View of Indigenous Knowledge”

Davide Domenici, Universitá di Bologna
“Colors of Knowledge, Knowledge of Colors”

Gabriela Siracusano, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero
“To Think about Nothing: Native Creativity between Material Practices and Representations in the Southern Andes”

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, University of Florida
“Indigenous Knowledge in the Home: Domestic Textiles in Colonial Peru and Mexico”

Claudia Brosseder, University of Illinois
“Recalling Conquest(s): Amazonian Feathers in the Making of Multicultural Colonial Peru”

Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
“The Legible Image: Translating Pictorial Knowledge in Early Colonial Mexico”

Mariana De Campos Françozo, Universiteit Leiden
“Indigenous Knowledge in Dutch Brazil: From Territorial Conquest to Natural History in the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae

Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“A Caribbean Natural History: Amerindians and the Creation of the New World”

Martha Few, Pennsylvania State University
“”These Noxious, Evil Little Animals”: Locust Swarms, Insect Extermination Campaigns, and the Politics of
Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Mesoamerica”

Allison Bigelow, University of Virginia
“Seasons of Gold: Rethinking Indigenous Knowledge Production in the Siglo de Oro”

Kris Lane, Tulane University
“Beyond El Dorado: Indigenous Knowledge of Mines and Metals in Early Colombia and Ecuador”

2017: Ideological Origins at 50: Power, Rights, and the Rise and Fall of Free States
April 20, 2017

Conference organizer: Peter Mancall, University of Southern California

Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
“Confessional Thoughts on Re-Reading: The Ideological Origins”

Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University
“Pragmatic Idealism: Its Causes, Comparative Meaning, and Current Future”

Jack Rakove, Stanford University
“Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causes”

Danielle Allan, Harvard University
“The Invention of “The People”: The Sussex Declaration”

Daniel Hulsebosch, New York University, School of Law
“The Ideological Fulfillment: Constitution-making and the Law of Nations”

Eric Nelson, Harvard University
“What Kind of Book is the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution?”

Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
“The Literature of Revolution and the Origins of Ideological Origins

Colin Kidd, University of St. Andrews
“Global Turns: Other States, Other Civilization”

Gordon Wood, Brown University
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: A Reassessment”

2015: World and Ground: New Early American Histories
March 6 & 7, 2015

Conference Organizer: Chris Grasso, College of William & Mary

Juliana Barr, University of Florida
“’There’s No Such Thing as ‘Pre-History’: What Chaco, Cahokia, and the Continent’s Longue Durée Can Tell Us about Colonial America”

Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California
“World History, Native Ground: Travels with Ezra Stiles”

Eric Hinderaker, University of Utah
“Arms in the Colonial City: The Military Revolution in the Americas, 1689–1775”

Susan Juster, University of Michigan
“Father Andrew White’s ‘Great Cross’: Rethinking the Protestant-Catholic Encounter in English America”

Cathy Matson, University of Delaware
“At the Ragged Edge: Philadelphia Counting Houses in a Revolutionary Era”

Gregory O’Malley, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Souls and Barrels: The Slave Market of Colonial Charleston”

Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley
“Boston and the Emergence of Capitalism, 1540–1815”

Joshua Piker, Editor of William & Mary Quarterly
“From Ground to World, Or, The Creek Who Went to London with an Eagle and Came Home with a Lion”

Brett Rushforth, College of William & Mary
“The Merchant and the Englishwoman: Intimate Networks, Colonial Law, and the Personality of Empire”

Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
“A Slave Sold Near the Liberty Tree: Scipio Moorhead and the End of Slavery”

Sophie White, University of Notre Dame
“”Not so denatured as to kill her child”: Slavery, Motherhood and the French Empire”

2013: Ephemerality and Durability in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture
September 27, 2013

Melissa Calaresu, University of Cambridge
“Street Food: Eating Out in Early Modern Europe”

Dale Kinney, Bryn Mawr
“The Stones of Rome”

Timothy McCall, Villanova University
“Ephemeral Phenomena and the Material Culture of Signorial Adornment and Array”

Lucy Razzall, University of Cambridge
“’Hail Holy Image’: Late Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts Pasted into Boxes”

Sean Roberts, University of Southern California
“Nature and Artifice in Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur

Mark Rosen, University of Texas, Dallas
“Freeing the Captives: Revolutionary Rhetoric and the Remaking of Royal Monuments”

Elizabeth Upper, University of Cambridge
“Saving Waste: Artifacts of the Earliest Color-Printing Techniques”

J.K Barret, University of Texas, Austin
“Imminent Futures: Ephemeral Legacy and Durable Form in Late Shakespeare”
Respondent: Keith Pluymers, University of Southern California

Suzanna Ivanic, University of Cambridge
“Meanings of Matter: Objects in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II of Prague (1583–16122)”
Respondent: Lauren Dodds, University of Southern California

Roundtable Discussion: Jessica Keating, Sean Roberts, Alexander Marr, Peter Mancall and Dale Kinney

Lavinia Maddaluno, University of Cambridge
“Durable Machines and Ephemeral Powers: Politics and Scientific Practices of a Late Eighteenth-Century Milanese Mathematician”
Respondent: Jeremy Glatstein, University of Southern California

Jose Ramon Marcaida, University of Cambridge
“Don Juan de Espina and his Chair: Material Culture and Ephemerality in a 17th-Century Spanish Collection”

Richard Serjeantson, University of Cambridge
“Investigating the Ephemeral in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy”

Emily Berquist Soule, Cal State University, Long Beach
“Pictures without Words, Objects without Bodies: The Confounding “Codex” and Collections of Trujillo, Peru”

Michelle Wallis, University of Cambridge
“Papering Over the Past: Ephemeral Print and the Early Modern History of Medicine, 1660–1720”
Respondent: Penelope Geng, University of Southern California

Sophie Waring, University of Cambridge
“In Pursuit of the Ephemeral and Durable: Weights, Measures and the Figure of the Earth”
Respondent: Nicholas Gliserman, University of Southern California

2013: Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World 
May 10, 2013

Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Queen’s University, Ontario
“From the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Paraguayan Outback: The Itinerant lives of Rococo Decorative Prints in Eighteenth-Century South America”

Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
“The Itinerant Lives of Mexican Codices”

Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
“Monumentality in Motion: A Mughal Audience Tent in Late Eighteenth-Century Jodhpur”

Chanchal Dadlani, Wake Forest University
“Translating, Transporting, and Transforming Mughal History: An Illustrated French Translation of the ‘Ain-I Akbari

Jessica Keating, University of Southern California
“Diana Transformed: The Case of the Diana Automaton

Dana Leibsohn, Smith College
“Coins for Candles: Asian Commodities and the Visual Culture of Spanish America”

Meredith Martin, Wellesley College
“Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship”

Sandy Prita Meier, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Porcelain Objects and Mercantile Aesthetics: Trading Culture in Coastal East Africa”

Avinoam Shalem, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich
“Classicizing the New: The Publication of the History of the New World (Tarih ül-Hind il garbi el-müsemma bi-Hadis-i nev)”

Mary Sheriff, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Technology in Paradise”

Claudia Swan, Northwestern University
“Trading in the Senses: Exotica On and Off the Early Modern Dutch Marketplace”

Nancy Um, State University of New York, Binghamton
“Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: On the Postures of Commercial Documentation in the Early Modern Indian Ocean”

2012: New World of Projects, 1550–1750
June 23, 2012

Eric Ash, Wayne State University
“Transforming the Future of the Fens: Drainage, Improvement, and Projectors in Seventeenth-Century England”

Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
“Projecting into the Future”

Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology
“Projectors and learned Projects in Early Modern England”

Jonsson Fredrik, University of Chicago
“Cornucopian Projects”

Vera Keller, University of Oregon
“Projecting New Worlds in Europe”

Thomas Leng, University of Sheffield
“Mastering the market in colonial staples: Benjamin Worsley’ ‘project’ of the growth of sugar”

Ted McCormick, Concordia University
“Population, Wealth, and Government: Three Seventeenth-Century Projects at the Disciplinary Margins”

Sarah Rivett, Princeton University
“Savage Sounds and Missionary Linguistics in Seventeenth-Century North America”

Abigail Swingen, Texas Tech University
“The 300 Malefactors: Convict Transportation and Unfree Labor in the English Caribbean Colonies”

Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College
“From Hartlib to Linnaeus: Science, Spirituality, and Political Economy”

Koji Yamamoto, University of Edinburgh
“Moses Stringer: A Chymical Projector taking an Imperial Turn”

Anya Zilberstein, Concordia and Rachel Carson Center
“’Mostly Temperate’: Projecting the Climate in Northeastern America”

2011: Ingenious Acts: The Nature of Invention in Early Modern Europe 
April 1, 2011

Paul Binski, University of Cambridge
“Gothic Invention”

Timothy Chesters, Royal Holloway, University of London
“Montaigne: The Lure of Invention”

Michael Cole, Columbia University
“What did Michelangelo Invent?”

Frances Gage, Buffalo State University, SUNY
“’Fantasia’ and the Habit of Invention in Seicento Rome”

Katherine Graham Isard, Columbia University
“Vincenzo Scamozzi, Architectural Commonplaces, and Architectural Ingenuity”

Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University
“Reinventing the (Stepped) Wheel: Invention and New Science around Enlightenment Calculating Machines”

Vera Keller, EMSI Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California
“The Murder of Invention”

Rhodri Lewis, University of Oxford
“Literate Experience? Francis Bacon on Reading, Imagination, and Discovery”

Jessica Ratcliffe, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“’Pretended Good and Profitable’: Vernacular Representations of Projectors and Technological Invention, c. 1630–70”

Sean Roberts, University of Southern California
“Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence”

Daniel Rosenberg, University of Oregon
“Data Before the Fact”

Bruce Smith, University of Southern California
“The Congeniality of Shakespeare’s Genius”

Elly Truitt, Bryn Mawr College
“History and Invention in the Middle Ages”

2010: Image and Devotion in the Early Modern Spanish World
May 7 & 8, 2010

Clara Bargellini, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“The Permanence of the Religious Image in New Spain”

Luis Corteguerra, University of Kansas
“The Sacred Object of Desire”

Thomas Cummins, Harvard University
“The Indulgent Image: Prints in the New York, Production, Circulation, and Innovation”

Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto
“Sacred Journeys and Difficult Middles in the Early Modern Spanish World”

Jeanette Favrot Peterson, University of California, Santa Barbara
“On the Matter of the Sacred”

Tanya Tiffany, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
“Devotion and Desire: Diego Velázquez’s Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and Vision of Saint John the Evangelist

Cordula Van Wyhe, York University

Sherry Velasco, University of Southern California
“Screening Ecstasy: St. Teresa on Film”

Charlene Villasenor-Black, University of California, Los Angeles
“Sacred Art and Censorship: The Breasts and Body of the Virgin Mary”

Alison Weber, University of Virginia
“Images, Miracles, and Living Saints in Early Modern Spain”

Christopher Wilson, Holton-Arms School

2004: The Early Modern Travel Narrative: Production and Consumption 
April 30 & May 1, 2004

Josiah Blackmore, University of Toronto
“The Nautical Metaphoric: Iberian Travel Writing and the Seafaring Mind”

Daniela Bleichmar, Princeton University
“Text and Image in Spanish Scientific Exploration of the Eighteenth Century Americas”

Nicholas Dew, University of Cambridge
“Collecting Travels in Late Seventeenth-Century Paris”

Jordana Dym, Skidmore College
“The Familiar and the Strange: Western Travelers’ Maps of Europe and Asia ca. 1600–1800”

M.D. Eddy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Travel as Field Observation: Scottish Naturalists and the Collection of Chemical Data, 1780–1800”

Michael Fisher, Oberlin College
“From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers”

Mary C. Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Assigning Value to Documents, Objects and Cultures in the Early English Travel Collection”

Anne Good, University of Minnesota
“The Construction of an Authoritative Text: Peter Kolb’s Description of the Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope in the Eighteenth Century”

Nathalie Hester, University of Oregon
“The Art of Telling the Truth: Women’s Travel Writing in 17th-Century France”

Ophie Mintz-Manor, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
“Imagined Journeys – Literature, History and the Production of Travel Narratives in Zacharia Al-Dahri’s Book of Ethics”

Anthony Parr, University of the Western Cape
“John Donne: Travel Writer”

Joan-Pau Rubies, London School of Economics
“Sixteenth Century Travel Accounts and Humanistic Culture: A ‘Blunted Impact?’”

Neil Safier, University of Michigan
“Bookish Learning and the Natural Historic Practice in the Field Libraries of Two Eighteenth Century Portuguese Naturalists”

Jonathan D. Sassi, City University of New York
“Anthony Benezet’s African Library: African Travel Narratives and Revolutionary-era Antislavery”

Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University
“Venturing Heroes: Narrating Violent Commerce in Seventeenth-Century England”

John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California
“Journeys Mostly to the West: Chinese Perspectives on Travel Writing”