The event will further GEMSS organization’s goals of creating a community of Early Modern graduate students and faculty scholars on campus. The GEMSS Symposium will entail a day of presentation and workshop 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. We are offering four paper panels and a keynote lecture by Professor Jessica Keating from Carleton College.
Keynote speaker: Professor Jessica Keating, Department of Art and Art History, Carleton College
Professor Jessica Keating‘s teaching and scholarship focus on the art of early modern Europe and the intertwined histories of collecting; technology; cultural contact and exchange; and empire and sovereignty. Professor Keating’s publications include a monograph entitled Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire and the Early Modern World (Penn State University Press, 2018), in which she discusses how clockwork automata—which were both tools for timekeeping and visual objects tied to temporal movements—served as a means for the specific political ends. Her scholarship also exemplifies the recent academic trend that situates European artworks within a broader global context. Her keynote presentation will instruct GEMSS members and other attendees on the issues of time and temporalities in early modern European society from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines art, politics, and history of science.
The talk and the symposium will be free and open to all those interested in early modernity, including undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, and members of the public.
Symposium Schedule
8:50-9:00 am: Opening remarks (Nayoung Kim)
- Sean Nowlan (PhD Student, History): “Paying for Violence, Fiscal-Military Relations in the North American British Colonies”
- Subha Prasad Sanyal (Research Scholar, English, Jadavpur University): “Monarchic Sovereignty and the Legal Precedent for Genocide” *virtual presentation
- Christina Torres Cawdery (PhD Student, English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa): ““Valor Becomes Thee Well”: Portrayals of Inherited Nobility in Cymbeline”
- Claire Kilgore (PhD Candidate, Art History): “Of Toad Babies and Holy Families: Hybrid Audiences and Sacred/Secular Narratives of Birth in Medieval/Early Modern Germanic Iconographies of Bodily Reproduction”
- Dehlia Mitchell-Gray (PhD Student, Art History): “Painted Silk as Fashionable Material in Late Imperial China”
- Chi-Lynn Lin (PhD Candidate, Art History): “Transition of the Silk Road in Early Modern Period: Islamic Textiles at the Palace Museum”
1:30-3:00 pm Keynote lecture: Jessica Keating, “Inventing Inventories, Picturing Pictures: Daniel Fröschl at the Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II” *L150, Elvehjem Building
- What is the precise relationship between early modern collecting and early modern sovereignty? This is the question at the heart “Inventing Inventories, Picturing Pictures,” which takes up the largest and arguably the most famous early modern princely collection, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer in Prague. Art historians have long considered Rudolf’s Kunstkammer to be a quintessentially “political” and aggrandizing representation of the Emperor and the Holy Roman Empire’s mastery of nature. However, close examination Daniel Fröschl’s 1607-1611 Inventory of the Kunstkammer, reveals that it is only by way representations of the collection, not the collection itself, that allowed the emperor to appear as if he had dominion over the collection and by extension the world.
- Syd E. Curran (PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies): ““Author and Actor”: The Semiotics of Performance in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy”
- Grace Quast (PhD Student, English, Brown University): “Taking Stories In Hand: Dilatory Authorial Participation in Orlando Furioso”
- Bridget Anderson (PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies): “A Bastard to the Time: Little Arthur, Casting Children, and Adjusting Age in King John”
- Irina Znamirowski (MA student, English, University of Toronto): ““To Prove a Villain”: Temporality and Fictionality in Richard II)” *virtual presentation