Early Modern Global History Seminar Series
Early Modern Global History Seminar Series
sponsored by the Georgetown Institute for Global History
Department of History, Georgetown University
The seminars will meet on the Georgetown campus in ICC 662, on Fridays from 4-5:30, followed by a social hour (unless otherwise advertised). Our normal practice is the discussion of pre-circulated papers. All students, faculty, and independent scholars are invited to attend. Please contact Prof. Alison Games for more information or if you wish to be added to the seminar’s email list.
Please note that the Early Modern Global History Seminar Series is on hold as of 2020.
2019-2020
Trevor Jackson (October 4) – “Professionalizing Impunity in European Finance: From the Failures of 1709 to the Crisis of 1720”
Kate Steir (December 6) – “‘The Present Great Scarcity Off Provisions’: Famine and Unrest in Jamaica in the 1760s”
Jack B. Bouchard (January 24) – “From Madeira to Terra Nova: The Mental Geography of Islands in the Sixteenth-Century Northwest Atlantic”
Karin Amundsen (February 21) – “‘The nurseries of mynes and mineralls’: Mining and the Development of Plantations in New England, 1628-1676”
Andrew Dial (March 20) – “Sacred Corporation: The Society of Jesus and Financial Liability in the Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic” – To Be Held in ICC 462
2018-2019
September 21 – Simon Newman (University of Glasgow and 2018-2019 Mowat-Mellon Fellow, Folger Shakespeare Library). “Truth or Fiction? How to tell the story of slavery in eighteenth-century Britain”
October 19 – Chelsea Berry (Ph.D. Candidate, Georgetown University and 2018-2019 Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies). “Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Greater Caribbean, 1680-1850”
December 7 – Jennifer Wells (George Washington University). “Coercion and the State: The Old World Origins of New World Servitude and Slave Laws”
Will take place in ICC 462.
February 8 – Susanah Shaw Romney (NYU). “Making Yourself at Home on the Wild Coast: Dutch Visitors and Voyagers in Guayana, 1623 – 1658”
March 15 – Danna Agmon (Virginia Tech). “Archival Gaps and Non-Existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India”
April 26 – Maria Cecilia Ulrickson (Morgan State University). “Seeking Liberty after the Haitian Revolution: Santo Domingo, 1809 – 1821”
2017-2018
September 29
Greg Afinogenov, Assistant Professor of History, Georgetown University.
“Languages of Hegemony on the Eighteenth-Century Kazakh Steepe”
November 17
Ashleigh Corwin, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Georgetown University.
“Drawing Confessional Lines: Blasphemy in Reformation France.”
January 19 5 pm-6:30 pm (updated date and time from 1/23/18)
Faisal Husain, PhD candidate, Department of History, Georgetown University.
“The Waves That Roar: The Ottoman Gunboat in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, 1546-1780.” Co-sponsored by Environmental History and MENA workshops.
February 23
Garry G. Sparks, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, George Mason University.
“Books and/as Idols: Discourse of Affectivity in Early Colonial Missionary and Mesoamerican Writings.”
April 13
Pier Larson, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University.
“On Family and Race in France’s Early ModernIndian Ocean Empire.” Co-sponsored with African History workshop
(Monday) April 23
Sonam Kachru, University of Virginia (UVA).
TBD
2016-2017
September 23
Erin Rowe, Johns Hopkins
“Black Confraternities Rome, and Canonization Processes in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic”
October 21
James Allegro
“Washington Irving is Not to Blame: The Shape of the Earth in Early Modern Thought, 1493-1571”
December 2
Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
“Mystic, 1637, with a Note on Genocide”
January 27
Jordan Smith, Department of History, Georgetown University “ ‘A Whetstone to Sharpen the Ingenuity of Other Men:’ Expertise, Mobility, and Cooperation in the Transatlantic Rum Complex”
February 24
Amanda Herbert, Folger Shakespeare Library “Distempered: Spa Cures and Climatic Degeneration in the British Atlantic World”
March 17
Deborah Hamer, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the College of William and Mary “Soldiers, Sailors, and the Popular Cultures of Dutch Trading Companies in the Seventeenth Century”
2015-2016
September 4
Robert I. Frost
Burnett Fletcher Chair in History, University of Aberdeen
“On Unions: the Polish-Lithuanian Union (1385 –1795) and Composite States in Early Modern Europe”
This event is a talk co-sponsored by the Russian History Seminar.
September 18
A conversation with Ada Ferrer, Professor of History, at New York University, about her new book, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge 2014).
This event is sponsored by Cuba and the United States in Historical Perspective Seminar.
October 9
Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy
Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and Professor of History, University of Virginia
“The British Empire and the Outbreak of the American Revolution”
November 20
Suze Zijlstra
Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Georgetown University
“Settling Suriname: the Anglo-Dutch Foundations of a Caribbean Plantation Colony, 1651-1682”
January 13, ICC 450, 16:30-18:00
Tamar Herzog
Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Harvard University
“Did European Law Turn American? Territory, Property and Rights in an Atlantic World”
Please register via Suze Zijlstra. This lecture is the concluding activity of a workshop on the Dutch Atlantic.
January 29
Dagomar Degroot
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Climate Change and the Dutch Wars of Independence, 1564-1648”
February 26
Travis Glasson
Department of History, Temple University
“‘A Liege Subject of Those States’: Henry Cruger and Divided Loyalties in the Revolutionary Atlantic”
March 18
Ananya Chakravarti
Department of History, Georgetown University
“The Life and Times of ‘Gabriel’: Slavery in Late Sixteenth-Century Western India”
April 15, ICC 450
Kathryn de Luna
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Applying Methodologies of Early African History to Atlantic History”
2014-2015
October 24
Jessica Krug
Department of History, George Washington University
“Fugitive Modernities, Spirit Biographies and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Reputation: Angola and the Americas in the Seventeenth Century”
November 21
Jonathan Ray
Department of Theology, Georgetown University
“Between the Fantastic and the Familiar: Jews in the Sixteenth-Century Imagination”
December 5
April Shelford
Department of History, American University
“Creating a Public: The Periodicals of 1760s Saint Domingue”
January 30
Surekha Davies
Department of History, Western Connecticut State University, and Kislak Fellow, Kluge Center, Library of Congress
“Spit-roasts or Barbecues? Mapping Brazilian Cannibals”
February 27
John W. O’Malley
University Professor and Department of Theology, Georgetown University
“Art, Controversy, and the Jesuits: The Imago primi saeculi, 1640”
March 20
Jason Sharples
Department of History, Catholic University
“The World That Fear Made: Imagination and Power in Early American Slave Conspiracies”
April 10
T. H. Breen
William Smith Mason Professor of History Emeritus, Northwestern University
“The Dog that Did not Bite: Reflections on Law and Disorder during the American War for Independence”
2013-2014
November 5
Simon Ditchfield
University of York, UK
“Global Circulation of the Sacred in the Making of a World Religion”
2012-2013
September 28
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J.
Departments of History & East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University
“Dissonant Voices: Jesuit Debates on Race, Religion, and Reason of State in Sixteenth-Century Asia”
October 26
Michael Hill
Doctoral Candidate
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Adaptation to Hot Climates in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic World”
November 16
Elena Schneider
NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and Visiting Asst Professor, Department of History, College of William and Mary
“Cuba Between Empires in the Eighteenth Century”
December 14
Jessica Simmon Hower
Doctoral Candidate, Georgetown University
“‘Ungracious Dogholes: Henry VIII and the Development of the British Empire in Tournai, Ireland, and Newfoundland, 1513-1542”
January 11
Owen Stanwood
Department of History, Boston College
“Huguenot Refugees & the Promise of New Worlds”
2011-2012
September 23
Simon Newman
Department of History, University of Glasgow
“ ‘A spirit of liberty: Slave labor in Gold Coast castles and forts”
October 21
Daniel Livesay
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary
“Heirs’ Breadth: Jamaica’s 1761 Inheritance Cap and Mixed-Race Families on Both Sides of the Atlantic”
November 18
Dominique Deslandres
Department of History, University of Montreal
“The French Quest for People: Some Hypothesis Regarding French Expansion in America during the 16th-18th Centuries”
January 27
Judith Tucker
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Crossing Borders: An Eighteenth Century Exile from Algiers in Colonial Virginia”
Edward Kolla
Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Qatar
“Early Modern Origins of the Alien Tort Statute”
February 17
Karin Wulf
Departments of History and American Studies, College of William and Mary
“The Origins of Early Republic Genealogical Vogue”
2010-2011
October 1
Molly Warsh
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary, and Department of History, Texas A and M
“Regulating an Imperial Commodity: Pearls’ Shifting Economic and Symbolic Utility in Seventeenth-Century Britain”
November 12
Danny Noorlander
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Planting Christ’s Kingdom in Stony Ground: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, 1623-1645”
December 3
Jonathan Eacott
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary, and Department of History, University of California, Riverside
“Fashioning a Global Empire: The English Calico Debates, India, and the Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1730”
January 28
Sam White
Department of History, Oberlin College
“Little Ice Age Climate and Crisis”
March 4
Marjoleine Kars
Department of History, University of Maryland Baltimore County
“Blood on the River: The 1763 Slave Rebellion in Dutch Guyana”
April 1
Ryan Jones
Department of History, Appalachian State University
“Enlightenment Russia Encounters the Pacific”
2009-2010
September 18
Jordan Sand
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Property in Two Fire Regimes: Edo-Tokyo in the Seventeenth through Twentieth Centuries”
October 16
Jennifer Anderson
Department of History, Stony Brook University
“The Quest for Mahogany & the Globalization of the Tropical Timber Trade in the 18th Century”
November 13
Shona Johnston
Doctoral Candidate and Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, Department of History, Georgetown University
“ ‘All the Popes Trinkets’: Catholic Artifacts and Religious Practice in the English Atlantic World”
January 22
Zara Anishanslin
Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University
“Transatlantic Industry, Idleness and Protest: Weaving and Wearing Silk in the Age of Homespun”
February 26
Marcy Norton
Department of History, George Washington University
“A New Approach to Human-Animal Relationships: Modes of Interaction”
March 26
Justin Pope
Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, George Washington University
“The ‘Hand of Popery’: Exploring British Colonial Fears of an alliance between Catholics and Slaves, 1729-1743”
April 30
Philip J. Stern
Department of History, Duke University
“ ‘Planting and Peopling Your Colony’: The Global and the Local in an Early Modern Company-State”
2008-2009
September 26
Trevor Burnard
Department of History, University of Warwick and 2008-2009 Fellow, the National Humanities Center
“Tropical Transformations: Jamaica and Saint Domingue and the Global Repercussions of the Seven Years’ War”
October 31
David Armitage
Department of History, Harvard University
“Civil War from Rome to Iraq: A History in Ideas”
January 23
Allyson Poska
Department of History, University of Mary Washington
“Coming to America: Spanish Peasants and the Colonization of the Rio de la Plata”
February 27
Joyce Chaplin
Department of History, Harvard University
“Earthsick: The Circumnavigator’s Malady”
April 17
Jim Millward
Department of History, Georgetown University
“Early Modern Globalization and the Guitar”