News

With new limitations on our ability to convene in person as well as altered workloads and schedules in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have had to adjust our meetings. Some colleagues who planned to share work are no longer able to during this academic year. But we will continue to hold workshops online. We started in March with a successful check-in session to hear how we have been handling the unprecedented changes to academic life. In April and May we will return to the usual format of reading and discussing written work from one or two colleagues (see “Future Events” for more information). If you would like to take be added to our mailing list, please contact mail@earlymodernworkinprogress.org.

Welcome to the first ever Early Modern Work in Progress Newsletter. We thought it would be nice to keep the list updated about what members have been up to over the past year. We’ve also included some announcements about upcoming conferences, workshops, jobs, etc.
Our website has now finally been updated with future events. On December 12 we’ll be discussing texts by Laura Gowing (History, KCL) and Filippo de Vivo (History, Birkbeck). Please look forward to more information about this event by email.
All best,
Allie, Hannah, Róisín, Kat

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Matthew Champion recently received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award for a project on ‘The Sounds of Time, 1300–1600.’ It will run from mid 2020 and includes workshops in the UK and Rome as well as an Australian conference at the conclusion. Watch this space, EMWIPpers! Matthew’s publications this year include: ‘Emotions, Time and Narrative: A Liturgical Frame’, in Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (eds), The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe 1100-1700. Routledge, 2019, 30–42; ‘The History of Temporalities: An Introduction’, Past & Present, 243 (2019): 247–254; ‘A Fuller History of Temporalities’, Past & Present, 243 (2019): 255–266. And, with Miranda Stanyon, ‘Musicalising History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (2019): 79–103.

Martin Christ writes to make us aware of fellowships for 2020–21 on the project “Religion and Urbanity. Reciprocal Formations” at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt. See the attached for more information and distribute to those you think might be interested.

Liesbeth Corens published Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe with OUP in 2019. In July she organised a conference on Modes of Authentication in Early Modern Europe in Hamburg. She is looking forward to a Summer 2020 conference about ‘minority record’, on the archives and libraries and museums of minorities across the ages. “That conference will be followed by a seminar series over the course of next academic year, so I’m keen to get people aware of this!”
Jacquie Glomski is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research network project Baroque Latinity, which runs until February 2021 and consists of a series of workshops and public events. In June she co-organized, along with Robyn Adams (CELL-UCL), the symposium ‘Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives‘, which was held June 6th–8th at UCL. They are planning to publish a selection of papers from the conference. Jacquie also serves as Vice-President of the Society for Neo-Latin Studies (UK & Ireland), which is active in promoting an awareness of the uses of Latin during the Early Modern Period. We welcome as members anyone whose research involves the study of Latin texts.

Kat Hill was put forward as Birkbeck’s candidate for the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award. An article that she first workshopped with EMWIP will soon be published in German History: “Mapping the Memory of Luther: Place and Confessional Identity in the Later Reformation.” Other publications include: ‘Memories from the Margins? Anniversaries, Anabaptists and rethinking Reformations’, Palgrave Communications 5 (2019) [and reprinted in Mennonite Quarterly Review (October, 2019)]; ‘On the road: exile, experience and memory in early modern Anabaptism’, in Remembering the Reformation, ed. Alexandra Walsham (Routledge 2019); ‘God’s Theatre: Global Conceptions of Space in the Early Modern Anabaptist Diaspora’, in Globalising the Protestant Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack and Patrick McGhee (Routledge, 2020).

Hannah Murphy‘s first book has just come out with the University of Pittsburgh Press. A New Order of Medicine; the Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg is available to order here. (In the acknowledgments, she mentions EMWIP by name–the first instance in print if we are not mistaken.) Hannah extends an invitation to the first public engagement event around her project at KCL. “Carnivore” is a mixed-media performance piece responding to the work of the Renaissance Skin project (and, incidentally, choreographed by Hannah’s brother, Luke Murphy). It will take place at 6pm on 13th December 2019 at The Exchange in Bush House. Tickets are free and can be reserved via eventbrite (with promo video). The performance will feature a panel discussion and drinks.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is preparing two articles, one a microhistory of Imperialist soldiers in Hesse, one on early modern military law. “A major article of mine just came out about how we can determine real troop strength (not paper troop strength) for early 17th-century armies. It took four years of work and contains tables that track the real army strength by month for Electoral Saxony for thirty years.” See “Determining Early Modern Army Strength: The Case of Electoral Saxony,” The Journal of Military History 83:4 (October 2019): 1001-20. Abstract and those tables here. Lucian is also looking for a German collaborator for a GHI-funded project on Migrants’ Knowledge. Ideal would be “a German early-career postdoc who is also interested in movement and mobility, either an early modernist or a historian who focuses on war or migration related to war. It might benefit the application if you were more straightforwardly a historian of migration or settlement.” Get in touch if that describes you or someone you know: luciasdan@gmail.com

Allie Stielau recently published “Sixteenth-Century Notklippen as Objects of Warfare? Realia, Representation, Narration,” in Objekte des Krieges: Präsenz & Repräsentation, eds Romana Kaske and Julia Saviello (De Gruyter, 2019). Her first ever exhibition review, of the Rijksmuseum’s Kwab: Dutch Design in the Age of Rembrandt, appears in the current issue of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. She’s chuffed the editors gave her an article’s length to talk about everything from the designer’s flooring choices to the products available in the gift shop (not to mention the quite astonishing seventeenth-century silver). 

Róisín Watson has been appointed Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford for the next three years. She has an article ‘Remembering and forgetting the dead in the burial grounds of Reformation Germany’ due to appear in Remembering the Reformation, ed. Alexandra Walsham et al. (Routledge, 2019). She looks forward to talking more about early modern death at the conference organised by Martin Christ – Early Modern Cultures of Death: Graveyards, Burials and Commemoration in Central Europe, c. 1500–1800 – in Prague next year.

And some further announcements:
Stefan Hanß’s call for participants for a BA-funded masterclass on Microscopic Records: The New Interdisciplinarity of Early Moden Studies, c. 1400–1800 in February 2020 (apps due December 1).

Carla Benzan and Joanne Anderson are organizing a conference on mountainous terrains in art history (June 2020) at the Warburg Institute. See attached for more details. 

Attached please find more information about a one-year post in Medieval / Renaissance Art at UEA [apps due December 2!].

We’re excited to be launching the digital platform for EMWIP in April 2018. We hope to post in this section information about upcoming meetings as well as news about participants’ activities, including publications, conference papers, etc.