Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and Graduate Early Modern Student Society.
Early modern people were preoccupied with mixture at all scales. Controlled experiments in alchemy, botany, and animal husbandry attempted to mitigate concerns about the production of genetic difference and disability. Likewise, ideas from natural philosophy were also used to explore and police the nature of cross-class, queer, interracial, or interfaith relations within larger political bodies. At the level of early modern geopolitics, twin anxieties over foreign influence and geographical transplantation haunted European thought. Renaissance art, too, was a mixture of medieval cult images and the newly commodified art object, while early modern plays were figured as hybrids—or as monsters. The symposium will be hybrid digital & in-person (full schedule forthcoming).
Keynote Speaker: Lindsey Row-Heyveld is Associate Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She is the author of Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave, 2018). She has published research on early modern disability and performance in Early Theater, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Allegorica, as well as the collections Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013), Object Oriented Environs (2016), and Performing Disability in Early Modern England (2020).
The 7th Annual Graduate Early Modern Student Society (GEMSS) Symposium, entitled “Renaissance Hybridity” will be held on Friday, April 26, 2024. The GEMSS Symposium will entail a day of presentation and roundtable events in which students from departments across campus—and from other campuses—will be given the opportunity to present their research and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary audience of their colleagues.