September 17, 2024
Jonathan Conant (Brown University)
Chapter Four: "Barbarians"
October 22, 2024
Tara Nummedal (Brown University)
"The Männel is a Root: Familiar Bodies in Early Modern Saxony”
November 20, 2024
The 45th William F. Church Lecture by Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State University)
"Amerasia: Early Modern Imaginative Geography, 1492–1700"
December 3, 2024
Alexandra Cook (Yale University)
"The Proof of Experience: A Capeverdean Illusionist before the Lisbon Inquisition, 1690"
February 25, 2025
Tamar Golinsky (Brown University, Ph.D. Candidate)
"Colouring 'Outside the Lines'"
March 18, 2025
Julia Balakrishnan (Brown University, Ph.D. Candidate)
"Gold, Lace, and Body Parts: The Beguinage and Its Patrons"
April 22, 2025
Walter Simons (Dartmouth College)
"Are Humans Good? Swesteren, 'Lollards', and the Heresy of the Free Spirit (Germany and the Low Countries, c. 1290–c. 1375)"
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Amanda Valdes Sanchez (Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, Brown University), TBA
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Hussein Fancy (Associate Professor, Yale University), Chapter Two: “The Impostor State” of the project titled “The Impostor Sea: The Medieval Mediterranean beyond Encounter.”
Tuesday, March , 2024
Benjamin Hein (Assistant Professor, History Department, Brown University), "Rethinking the Kompaniewirtschaft Contract Regiments and Industrialization in the Eighteenth Century."
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Elizabeth Nielsen (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University), "Stories from the Archive."
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Amanda Madden (George Mason University), “The Diary of Polissena Pioppi: A Microhistory of Networks in Sixteenth-Century Modena.”
Thursday, November 16th, 2023
The 44th William F. Church Lecture by Jennifer Morgan (NYU), “On Race and Reinscription: Writing Enslaved Women into the Early Modern Archive.”
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Tiraana Bains (Assistant Professor, History Department, Brown University), “Company, Parliament, and Mughal: Constituting Imperial Governance.”
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Dillon Webster (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University), "Conquered Lands, Strengthened Hands."
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Neil Safier (Brown University), “Translating the Plantationocene from the Prerevolutionary Caribbean to Colonial Brazil.”
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Stacey Murrell (Brown University), “Extra-Legitimate Mothering: Feminine Inheritance and Intergenerational Practice in Islamic and Christian Iberia, c.900-1300 CE.”
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Matthew Kadane (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), “Mind-Forged Manicules, or, What was “Enlightenment”?
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Yekai (Kyle) Zhang (grad student, History, Brown University), “The Representation and Social Memory of the 1641 Irish Rebellion in Protestant England, c. 1642-1689.”
Thursday, November 3, 2022
43rd William Church Lecture, John Jeffries Martin (Duke University), “From the Apocalypse to the Idea of Progress in Early Modern Europe.”
In the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, Europeans expressed their hopes for the future within an apocalyptic, even millenarian frame. But in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century a new language of hope emerged as the Idea of Progress took hold. This presentation explores this transition with attention both to the emergence of secular values and to shifting notions of Divine Providence in the early modern world.
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Elias Muhanna (Brown University), “The Unlettered Prophet.”
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Andrew Romig (NYU Gallatin), “The Wrong Kind of Flattery: Critique and Praise in Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici.”
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University), “Multispecies Migrations in the Fifteenth-Century Atlantic: Empire, Slavery and Capitalism in the Global Commons.”
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Anne E. Lester (John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Professor of Medieval History, Johns Hopkins University), “Authority in the Aftermath: Power, Memory, and the Narrative Capacity of Things.”
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Jonathan Conant (Associate Professor of History and Classics, Brown University), “Fragments of a Narrative: Combat Trauma in the Early Medieval West.”
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Sarah Christensen (PhD student in History, Brown University), “Remembering Enslaved Mothers in the Medieval Icelandic Laxdæla saga.”
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
The 42nd William F. Church Memorial Lecture, Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University) and Meredith Martin (New York Univesity), “Remembering Mediterranean Slavery in Early Modern France.”
The transnational movement to confront the legacies of Atlantic slavery has seen statues topple, memorials rise and exhibitions open across the globe. For the most part, however, the phenomenon of early modern galley slavery – and, in particular, enslaved Muslim oarsmen on France’s Mediterranean galleys – has escaped contemporary reckoning. This lecture explores the traces of two thousand esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks) purchased to row on King Louis XIV’s vessels while considering some of the factors shaping their depiction in monuments and museum displays. Ship design, naval weapons, medals, paintings, and prints depicting Ottoman and Moroccan subjects helped proclaim royal supremacy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What are the stakes of remembering these individuals today?
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Zhang Yekai (History, grad. student), "Ballads, Poems and the Political Culture of the Second and Third Dutch Wars in Britain, c. 1664-1674."
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Hannah Marcus (Harvard University), “Cassandra Fedele and the Spectacle of Old Age in Early Modern Venice.”
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Charles Carroll (frm. grad student, History), “‘To Know the Ordinances of the Heavens’: Preaching Manliness at the University of Paris.”
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Mayer Juni (grad student, History), “The Politics of Biography: Inquisition, Empire, and Identification in the Spanish Atlantic (1570-1610).”
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Amy Remensnyder (History), “The Restless Sea: Storm Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.a. 1000-c.a. 1700.”
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Marina Rustow (Princeton University), “Petitions from Medieval Egypt and the Problem of Premodern Rights.”
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
The 41st William F. Church Memorial Lecture, John McNeill (Georgetown University), “Revisiting Mosquito Empires in the time of COVID-19.”
In this lecture, environmental historian J.R. McNeill will revisit arguments he made a decade ago in his book, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, which dealt with the extraordinary virulence and historical consequences of epidemics in the Caribbean, ca. 1650-1900. Looking back at his study from the vantage point of the pandemic year 2020 will also permit him to reflect on the importance of disease history in the contemporary world.
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Shahzad Bashir (Middle East Studies, History, Religious Studies), “Globalizing the Middle Ages: The Market in Poetry in the Persian World.”
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Leland Grigoli, “Monastic Technologies of Authority: Cistercian Diplomatic Praxis, Crusade, and the Colonization of the Midi.”
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
The 40th William F. Church Memorial Lecture, Nick Wilding (Georgia State University), “False Impressions: A History of Print Forgery.”
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Sabrina Minuzzi, “«Merchandise for Profit» and «Merchandise for Honor» Artisans of Secrets and their contribution to Early Modern Italian pharmacopoeia.”
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Kajun Chen (East Asian Studies), “Imperial Models: Design and Technology in State-Controlled Porcelain Manufacture in Early Modern China.”
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Kristen Block (University of Tennessee but currently a fellow at the JCB), “Contagious Insensibility: The Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the Enlightenment in the French Antilles.”
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Tara Nummedal (History), “Sound and Vision: The Alchemical Epistemology of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens.”