Past events

View all previous Early Modern Exchanges events here. Events are sorted in reverse chronological order.

2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010

2019

6 December 2019: Re-Imagining Cleopatra/Postcolonial Shakespeare
6 November 2019: Lessons from the Golden Age: The Dutch Republic and the Future of Conflict in a Warming Climate
23 October 2019: The Spanish Comedias: The Intersecting Identities of Queens / Problematic Status in Dutch Republic
22 October 2019: Re-animating the Hispano-Philippine Ivory
6-8 June 2019: Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives
20 March 2019: Joachim du Bellay’s Roman Poetry / Teachers' salaries in Verona (1407-1515)
13 March 2019: ‘The very verge of his confine’: Cicero, Shakespeare and Attitudes to Old Age
6 March 2019: The early editions of Paradise Lost
27 February 2019: Post-medieval Latin verse in English manuscript sources, c.1550-1700: initial findings
20 February 2019: Ovid's Heroides & Early Modern Literary Tradition / Division of Linguistic Labour in Communal Italy
25 January 2019: Digital Launch Event: The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe

2018

20 November 2018: Birdsongs and Sonnets: Listening to Renaissance Lyric
14 November 2018: al-Ġazālī's Medieval Arabic Philosophy / Art, Architecture and Light Beams in Late-Medieval Italy
31 October 2018: Poetry and Usury: Symbolic Economies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
17 October 2018: Performance and revelry in Rubens's St George and the Dragon
17 September 2018: The virtuosa singer in the academies of early modern Italy
28 June 2018: Archiving the Academies of Early Modern Italy: Critical methodologies and digital tools
4-8 June 2018: Magic, Milton and Medieval Dog Love! The UCL Festival of Culture 2018
30 May 2018: Being Black in Tudor England/Being English in Mughal India
25 May 2018: 'Trust Me' - A Symposium on the Language of Medical Expertise and Imposture in English, 1400-1900
23 May 2018: “Thou look’st pale”: Narrating Physical Responses on the Early Modern Stage
9 May 2018: Fire Assay and Cupellation / Wit, Waterworks and Wanderlust
25 April 2018: Power in Iceland / Perfection and Colonialism
20 April 2018: The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy’s Pre-eminent City, 1500-1700
16 April 2018: UCL IAS Lies: Lying in Early Modern English Culture
15 February 2018: Early Modern Studies Virtual Open Day
6 February 2018: Paper and pizza / Ink and drink: Considering an MA in Early Modern Studies?
31 January 2018: Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia
31 January 2018: Goldoni, the Masons, and the Mysteries

2017

7 December 2017: Fake News
6 December 2017: Alchemy and Education
29 November 2017: Neo-Latin and History of the Book
23 November 2017: The Early Modern Wound
20 November 2017: Binding the frontier: networking of émigrés in Habsburg Hungary & Kingdom of Naples 16-18th century
1 November 2017: Debt and doorways in Renaissance comedy
26 October 2017: Early Modern Insects
25 October 2017: Popular Literacies and the First Historians of the First Crusade
18 October 2017: Representing ‘Reality’ in European Travel Narratives of the Safavid Empire
20 September 2017: European Perspectives on the English Reformation - Workshop
5-10 June 2017: Gold, Shakespeare, Plague, Monsters and Written Treasures: The UCL Festival of Culture
17 May 2017: Madame de Stael
23 March 2017: Early Modern Studies Virtual Open Day
21 March 2017: Paper and pizza / Ink and drink: Considering an MA at UCL?
15 March 2017: Recycling Books
8 March 2017: Reflecting on Dante's Aristotelianism / The Renaissance revival of Menippean satire
1 March 2017: Self-Narrative and Self-Description
23 February 2017: Migrant crises, past and present

2016

8 December 2016: Spatial margins and social marginality in fifteenth-century London / Rewriting Modernity
30 November 2016: Ariosto and the Cantimpanca
23 November 2016: MREMS 2016 - 17 Seminar 1
13 October 2016: Launch event for The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe
1 October 2016: Mary I (1516-1558). A Conference in her 500th Anniversary Year
9 June 2016: The Physiology of Youth and The Vagueness of Vagrancy
7 June 2016: A discussion about the future of the early modern and adjacent moments at UCL
3 May 2016: Specimens of Poetesses
24 March 2016: Seeing Bacon
23 March 2016: Oratory and Rhetoric
2 March 2016: Love and Law
2 March 2016: Revolution, Biopolitics and Roguery
25 February 2016: Clothing, Natural Knowledge and Parasitic Discourse
20 January 2016: Rabelais

2015

17 December 2015:‘ Popular Piety and Medieval Religious Revivals: The Bianchi of 1399’
25 November 2015: ‘A new comodye in englysh in maner of an enterlude’: La Celestina in circulation between the Hispanic book market and the Tudor Stage
19 November 2015: 'What's in a purse? 'Purse hoards' and classification in medieval numismatics
11 September 2015: Samuel Daniel, Poet and Historian
20 May 2015: Pregnancy and False Pregnancy
6 May 2015: Epic! Between Ancient and Early Modern Empires
19 March 2015: French Social Identity in 16th and 17th Century Travel Narratives
19 February 2015: Cardinal Oliviero Carafa's 1472 Naval Expedition against the Turks
18 February 2015: Fictional Embassies
5 February 2015: Early Modern Women Translators: A Re-evaluation of Their Creative and Political Agency

2014

5 December 2014: Travel and Writing in the Global Renaissance: Revisiting the Peregrination of Fernão Mendes Pinto
23 October 2014: Marsilio Ficino and the Mirror of the Soul
3 June 2014: The Many Faces of Cleopatra
9 May 2014: Revisiting Ivan Fedorov’s Legacy in Early Modern Europe
7 May 2014: Polemical Possessions
28 April 2014: Big History
26 March 2014: Shakespeare's Hamlet for Children
21 March 2014: Two Lamentable Tragedies
19 March 2014: Shakespeare and Venice
12 March 2014: Greek Tragedy's Renaissance Inflections
11 March 2014: Demonic Possession
12 February 2014: Historical Geography and the Early Modern

2013

11 December 2013: Borderlands: From the California Missions to Manila Ivories. Ana Ruiz Guiterrez (University of Granada), Manila Ivories and Transnational Exchanges. Miguel Sorroche Cuerva (University of Granada), Building Frontiers in the Californian Missions. **These talks will be in Spanish**
4 December 2013: Literary Geographies and Roaming Relics. Jaime Goodrich (Wayne State University), Mapping the Literary Geography of Early Modern English Benedictine Convents. James Kelly (Durham), Roaming Relics: English Women Religious and Identity Formation in Counter-Reformation Europe
24 November 2013: Iphigenia at Aulis: A Special Performance. A special performance of Lady Jane Lumley's 1555 translation of the Euripides play.
13 November 2013: Moving: Pathways, Transport and Place. A workshop on early modern travel writing, historical geography and environmental criticism with a view to exploring how Digital Humanities, in particular the visualisation of data and the interactive mapping of historical information can be employed to produce new ways of seeing the early modern world.
23 October 2013: Donne's Conversions III. This seminar will directly address the question of early modern religious conversion, particularly as it pertains to Donne’s sermons.
16 October 2013: Crying Out in Pain: Understanding Physical Suffering in the Early Modern Period. Guido Giglioni (The Warburg Institute), Raw imagination and Mental Pain in Elijah Montalto’s Archipathologia (1614). Mary Ann Lund (University of Leicester), “The Pain's Nothing”: Relative Perceptions of Pain in Early Modern Literature.
10 September 2013: Dennis Flynn, Donne's Enclosures: the etiquette of privacy and secrecy in his correspondence
29 May 2013: Gabriel Harvey's Reading. Matthew Symonds (UCL, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters), Matching up the Margins: Across Gabriel Harvey's Books; Chris Stamatakis (UCL, English), How Gabriel Harvey Read His Castiglione.
16 May 2013: Staging Daniel's Cleopatra. Professor Helen Hackett in conversation with one of the directors of the world premiere of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra, Yasmin Arshad, as well as two of the actors from the show.
24 April 2013: *Special Guest Lecture* Stephen Pender (University of Windsor, Ontario), Heat and Moisture, Rhetoric and Spiritus
21 March 2013: Good Friday, 1613–2013: John Donne’s ‘Riding Westward’ at 400. Daniel Starza Smith (UCL), The intelligence that moves: “Goodfriday” in context; Katherine Rundell (All Souls, Oxford), I am carried towards the West: rethinking Donne’s critical history.
20 March 2013: Social, Intellectual and Political Networks and Exchanges across the Italian Peninsula (1500-1700). Simone Testa (British Library), Networks and Exchanges in Italy 1525-1700. Lorenza Gianfrancesco (Royal Holloway), Academies and cultural exchange in early modern Spanish Naples: from intellectual debates to propaganda.
3 March 2013: Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra. Our Jacobean-style production will shed light on female participation in drama in Shakespeare's time, and on early modern ideas of female heroism.
6 February 2013: Early Modern Women and Drama. This seminar will introduce the performance of Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra to take place on 3rd March (see above).
24 January 2013: Special Lecture: Nigel Smith (Princeton), Literature, Politics and the Dutch Republic

2012

In addition to our own seminars detailed below we were delighted to be associated with Reevaluating the Literary Coterie, 1550-1825: A series of seminars organised by Will Bowers and Hannah Crumme.

6 December 2012: Special Lecture: Karen Hearn (Honorary Research Professor, UCL), 'Representing Pregnancy in Elizabethan & Jacobean Portraits'
28 November 2012: Catholic Archives and Collections
24 October 2012: Shakespeare: Staging the World
10 October 2012: Erica Fudge (Strathclyde), The Animal Face of Early Modern England
2 May 2012: Theory and the Medieval Animal. Karl Steel (Brooklyn College), On Worms; Bob Mills (KCL), On Animals
21 March 2012: Catholic Aesthetics. Peter Davidson (Aberdeen), Rubens's design for the 1635 'Arch of the Mint' and the Virgin of the Andes?; Lilla Grindlay (University College London), ‘“Some out of vanity will call her the Queene of heauen”: polemical representations of the Virgin Mary in early modern religious discourse’
29 February 2012: Borderlands. Sizen Yiacoup (Liverpool University), Chivalrous Moors: Warfare and Cultural Hybridity in the Castilian Frontier Ballads; Claire Norton (St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill), Blurred Boundaries: the Mediterranean World as a Site of Interaction and Integration
1 February 2012: War and the French Sixteenth Century. Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, Oxford), Battle-scarred stories: Rabelais and/in Scots translation; Andrea Frisch (Maryland), The French Wars of Religion and the Boundaries of Tragedy
18 January 2012: Early Modern Theories of the Soul. Richard Serjeantson,(Cambridge), The soul and the human sciences before the Enlightenment; Guido Giglioni (Warburg), Bacon on the Soul

2011

16 November 2011: Women and the Early Modern Sermon. Guest Lecture with Jeanne Shami (University of Regina)
2 November 2011: Careers in the Early Modern. Lucy Worsley (Historic Royal Palaces) and Laura Massey (Rare Books Seller, Peter Harrington Books).
5 October 2011: Portraiture and Dolls Houses. Maria Loh (UCL, Art History)
8 June 2011: Francis Bacon in International Collaboration. Alan Stewart (Columbia)
9 March 2011: England and Spain. Alexander Samson (UCL, Spanish), Translating the Reign of Philip and Mary; John Ardila (Edinburgh), The English Reception of Don Quixote in the Performing Arts; Catherine Scheybeler (KCL), Jorge Juan y Santacilia's mission to London: An example of naval espionage in the eighteenth century
9 February 2011: English Catholics, European Contexts. Caroline Bowden (QMUL, History), Islands of Englishness? The English convents as centres of cultural production in seventeenth-century Flanders; Helen Hackett (UCL, English), The international perspectives of English Catholics: the Aston family in Spain and elsewhere;l Alison Shell (UCL, English), English Catholic Womanhood in Richard Verstegan's 'Odes';
19 January 2011: Travel and the Idea of Europe. Wendy Bracewell (UCL, SSEES), Double vision: writing back from Europe's eastern margins; Daniel Andersson (Wolfson College, Oxford), Of books, measurement and coloured shoes: the humanist Orientalism of a Renaissance traveller; Anthony Payne (UCL), Hakluyt, America and the Ancients: a New World or an Old?

2010

15 December 2010: History of the Book. William Sherman (York, English), Mapping the World of Knowledge: Hernando Colon and the Biblioteca Colombina; Henry Woudhuysen (UCL, English), Buying Continental Books in late 16th- and 17th-century England
8 December 2010: Renaissance Virtues: Privation and Manipulation. Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, History), Machiavelli and the Manipulation of Virtue; Angus Gowland (UCL, History), European Melancholy; Jeremy Robbins (Edinburgh, Spanish), The Place of Virtue in Baltasar Gracián's Aphorism
20 October 2010: France and England: Medieval to Early Modern. Jane Gilbert (UCL, French), French sans frontières? Translation and Translatio in the 15th Century; Ardis Butterfield (UCL, English), 'Our self-stranger Nation': England, France and period boundaries; Paul Davis (UCL, English), Rochester's French
11 May 2010: First Guest Talk: From Bacon to Hobbes: Samuel Sorbiere and the Intellectual Origins of late seventeenth-century French Libertinism. Professor Richard Hodgson, University of British Columbia
29 April 2010: Centre Launch Event: Shakespeare and the Inquisition. Professor Brian Cummings, Sussex University