Conference announcement (please reply to organisers, not myself!)
Renaissance Old Worlds: English
Encounters from the Levant to the Far East
The British Library
29 June - 1 July 2012
The early modern period saw England
establishing its first colonies in the New World, but its ideas and
expectations about foreign nations, travel and its identity as a political and
economic power on the global stage were influenced largely by its experiences
in other distant but familiar nations. This conference will investigate English
interactions with the ‘old worlds’ of the Middle East, South Asia and the Far
East. It will ask how such cross-encounters may have shaped not only the
literature, art and cultures of England and the host nations, but also a broad
range of intellectual, political, cultural, religious and economic determinants
of England’s relationship with the wider world.
Overarching questions to be
investigated by the conference include:
(1) How did English cultural memories
of the Old World, from art, literature and political events such as conflicts
in the Islamic Mediterranean, influence actual travel encounters?
(2) How did information and expertise
about distant places circulate, and who were the agents of such circulation
(from missionaries, merchants, administrators, and indigenous informants, to
artisans and scholars)?
(3) What form did the information take
(from maps and texts to material artefacts)?
(4) How did religion inflect political
and social negotiations? (How is anxiety about piracy in the Islamic
Mediterranean and North Africa, for instance, connected to anxieties about
conversion between Christianity and Islam?)
(5) What role did trading companies,
both those established by the English and their European trading competitors,
play in determining structures of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters?
Proposals are invited for complete
panels of three or four papers, as well as individual papers on one of the
following themes:
· Interplay between ‘old worlds’ and
‘new’
· Circulation networks
· Visual and material culture (art,
cartography, crafts)
· Trade, diplomacy, piracy
· Gift-exchange
· Religion and conversion
· Translation and transformation
Please send abstracts (250 words for
individual papers and 500 words for complete panels) and a brief biographical
statement (if proposing a panel, one for each participant) to Nandini Das at row@liverpool.ac.uk by 1 March 2012.
Papers should take between 15–20 minutes to present, and panels should last no
longer than 1 hour and 20 minutes.
