The Early Modern Colloquium at the University of Michigan

invites abstracts for papers for their graduate conference

Violence in the Early Modern Period

at the

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 15-16 February 2013

with conference keynotes by

Professors Melissa Sanchez (English, University of Pennsylvania) and Mitchell Merback (History of Art, Johns Hopkins University)

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the instances, effects, and functions of violence throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. How we understand violence effectively informs how we understand other far-reaching phenomena in the period—e.g., colonization; performances of ability, class, gender, race, and sex; public entertainment; religious reformation(s); social discipline; and urbanization. Recent scholarship has evinced a renewed interest particularly in the dynamics between violence and power, and this conference will therefore focus on a variety of related questions. When and where did violence serve the interests of hegemonic power? When and where did it thwart the interests of hegemonic power? How did violence shape identities, collectives, cultures? By whom or by what was violence practiced and endured? And at what cost?

Please submit 250-300 word proposals for 20-minute papers to John Paul Hampstead (jphampst@umich.edu) or Amrita Dhar (amritad@umich.edu) by 30 December 30 2012. The Early Modern Colloquium is a graduate interdisciplinary group at the University of Michigan, and will give priority to abstracts submitted by graduate students.