Stanford University

History

Digitizing the Grand Tour: A Workshop on the Worlds and Lives of Eighteenth-Century Travelers to Italy (Day 2)

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Image for Grand Tour
Participants: Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Melissa Calaresu, Giorgio Caviglia, Jeffrey Collins, Paul Davis, Thea De Armond, Paula Findlen, Simon Macdonald, Rachel Midura, Grant Parker, Carole Paul, Sophus Reinhert, Catherine Sama, Rosemary Sweet, Elaine Treharne, and Caroline Winterer.

Organized by Giovanna Ceserani at Stanford University, with the generous sponsorship of the Classics Department, and co-sponsorship of the Stanford Humanities Center, the Department of History, The Europe Center, the Division of Cultures, Languages and Literatures, and the Departments of English and Art History.

For more about The Grand Tour Project, go to grandtour.stanford.edu.

Lunch will be provided to those who RSVP by March 1st. (RSVP also accepted by email to dearmond@stanford.edu)

Program

Saturday, March 5th 2016
 
10: 00 am - 10:30 am – Coffee and Pastries
 
10:30 am - 12:30 am
Session III: Sciences of the Grand Tour
Chair: Grant Parker, Stanford
 
10:30 am
Paul Davis, Princeton University
Climate Change and the Grand Tour
 
11:30 am
Sophus Reinhert, Harvard Business School
Mapping the Economic Grand Tour
 
12:30 pm – Lunch
 
1:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Session IV: Professing Arts and Tourism on the Grand Tour
Chair: Elaine Treharne, Stanford
 
1:30 pm
Malcolm Baker, UC Riverside
Sculpture, Sculptors and the Grand Tour: Intersections and Agency
 
2:30 pm
Simon Macdonald, European University Florence
‘Virtù in tale genere’: British equestrian performers in late eighteenth-century Italy
 
3:30 pm – Afternoon Coffee
 
4:00 pm
Carole Paul, UCSB
Ciceroni and Their Clients: Making a Profession of Tourism
 
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Closing Discussion
 
For full program, see attachment below.
Download pdf

Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center

Workshops

Digitizing the Grand Tour: A Workshop on the Worlds and Lives of Eighteenth-Century Travelers to Italy (Day 1)

-

Image for Grand Tour
Participants: Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Melissa Calaresu, Giorgio Caviglia, Jeffrey Collins, Paul Davis, Thea De Armond, Paula Findlen, Simon Macdonald, Rachel Midura, Grant Parker, Carole Paul, Sophus Reinhert, Catherine Sama, Rosemary Sweet, Elaine Treharne, and Caroline Winterer.

Organized by Giovanna Ceserani at Stanford University, with the generous sponsorship of the Classics Department, and co-sponsorship of the Stanford Humanities Center, the Department of History, The Europe Center, the Division of Cultures, Languages and Literatures, and the Departments of English and Art History.

For more about The Grand Tour Project, go to grandtour.stanford.edu.

Lunch will be provided to those who RSVP by March 1st. (RSVP also accepted by email to dearmond@stanford.edu)
 
Program:
 
Friday, March 4th 2016
 
10:00 am – Check-in, Coffee and Pastries
 
10:30 - 11:00 am 
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Giovanna Ceserani
 
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Session I: Circles and Networks of the Grand Tour
Chair: Paula Findlen, Stanford
 
11:00 am 
Catherine Sama, The University of Rhode Island
Going Digital: Mapping Connections Between Rosalba Carriera and British Grand Tourists
 
12:00 pm
Jeffrey Collins, Bard Graduate College, NYC
Counting the Woodcocks: Snapshots from the Tour
 
1:00 pm – Lunch
 
2:00 pm - 5:30 pm 
Session II: Beyond Rome
Chair: Caroline Winterer, Stanford
 
2:00 pm 
Melissa Calaresu, Cambridge University
Life and Death in Naples: The Italian presence in the Grand Tour (Explorer)
 
3:00 pm
Rosemary Sweet, Leicester University
Other cities of the Grand Tour: Turin, Padua and Bologna seen through the Grand Tour Explorer
 
4:00 pm Afternoon Coffee
 
4:30 pm
John Brewer, Caltech
Naples with and without Sir William Hamilton, 1764-1800
 
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Roundtable on the Grand Tour Explorer led by designer Giorgio Caviglia with graduate researchers Thea De Armond and Rachel Midura, Stanford
 
For full program, see attachment below.

 

Download pdf

Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center

Workshops

Permeable Borders: On the Nomos of Modern Aesthetics, A Talk by Bernhard Siegert

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Space reports back these days ― in a brutal way. While we are told that Europe's external borders have stopped to exist, old legal-political concepts loom in the background of the current discussion on the Decline of the West: mare nostrum, mare clausum, res omnium, and the (impossible) Nomos of the Sea.

With the dangerous concept of res omnium an ominous figure is back, too: the pirate, the enemy of mankind, the terrorist in the disguise of the refugee. Linked inseparably to the birth of the concept of the state itself (by means of exclusion), this abysmal figure underwent a number of significant shifts since the enlightenment era, like the sea itself. Already in JF Cooper the pirate became a metasign, designating the readability of signs as such, the recognizability of figures, and the birth of the nation. The lecture therefore pushes forward the thesis (by drawing on art, literature, and media history at the same time) that the media and crisis history of the nomos of the sea underlies the concepts of representation and aesthetics of our modernity. The order of sense making, the order of the recognizable (i. e. aesthetics) and the possibility to discriminate between friend and foe are neither ontologically nor transcendentally "given" in the modern era but dependent on media, and therefore are permanently related to the danger of becoming indiscriminate. Hence, the ultimate metasign is the seascape.

 

Bernhard Siegert is the Gerd Bucerius Professor for the Theory and History of Cultural Techniques at the Department of Media Studies at Bauhaus-University Weimar and Director and Co-Founder of the International College of Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy at Weimar. His books include Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (2015) and Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (1999). He is a leading scholar of German Media Studies.

Hans Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French & Italian at Stanford and TEC affliliate faculty, will be the respondent. 

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, Department of Comparative Literature, and The Europe Center at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

History Corner Building 200, Room 307.

Bernhard Siegert Gerd Bucerius Professor for the Theory and History of Cultural Techniques Speaker Bauhaus-University Weimar

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

112 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-2904
0
Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, Emeritus
Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus
Professor of French and Italian, Emeritus
Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Emeritus
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies, Emeritus
3453-small_gumbrecht.jpg PhD

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus (since 2018) , in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian. During the past two decades, he has received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in seven different countries. While Gumbrecht continues to be a Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the University of Lisbon and became a Presidential Professor at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) in 2020, he continues to work on two long-term book projects at Stanford: "Phenomenology of the Human Voice" and "Provinces -- a Historical Approach."

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Albert Guerard Professor in Literature Respondent
Lectures

The Europe Center February 2016 Newsletter

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Event Recap: Human Rights and Refugees in Europe

 

Panel: Human Rights and Refugees in EuropePictured: Kenneth Scheve, Jenny Martinez, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez, and James Cavallaro.
Amidst the reimposition of border controls in some Schengen states, daily reports of new arrivals to Europe, and the marked rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, the European refugee crisis poses significant challenges to Europe. In her January visit to Stanford, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez discussed the crisis in the context of the global plight of refugees. She noted that with an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide, and an additional estimated 40 million internally displaced persons, we are witnessing the largest population displacement since World War II. Arnold-Fernàndez explained that the rights of refugees and state obligations to refugees are enshrined in international law. In addition to the protections against being returned to an unsafe country of origin ("non-refoulement"), she noted that the Refugee Convention provides refugees with many rights on par with "the most favorable treatment accorded to nationals of a foreign country" and, in some cases, on par with those granted to nationals of the receiving state. These rights include the right of association, access to courts, access to wage-earning and self employment, and the freedom of movement. She explained, however, that states frequently fail to provide many of these rights to refugees, something Arnold-Fernàndez attributes in part to insufficient enforcement. As a result, where refugees are routinely prohibited from participating in the first country of arrival, they are likely to move on to alternative destinations. This, in part, is driving the current influx of refugees to Europe. This reality, according to Arnold-Fernàndez, elucidates at least one method of both assisting refugees and alleviating the flows of refugees to Europe: promoting policy change to ensure that refugee rights are protected and upheld in countries of first arrival. This approach, she explained, is in marked contrast to the predominant approaches to refugee assistance, which include humanitarian aid and development solutions (such as on the job training). While the first is not a long-term solution, the second is only likely to be effective if refugees are first permitted to participate in society.

Following the talk, The Europe Center Director, Kenneth Scheve, led a discussion featuring commentary by Stanford Law professors James Cavallaro and Jenny Martinez. Cavallaro spoke of the need to think more broadly about human migration and the potential deleterious effects of state immigration controls on both human rights and security. Martinez noted the tension between the clarity of the non-refoulement principle and the ambiguity of safe third country principles, and questioned the ability of legal norms to compel states to change policy or reallocate resources. To watch this event in full, please visit our website.

Featured Faculty Research: Cécile Alduy

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center's faculty affiliates. Our featured faculty member this month is Cécile Alduy, who is an Associate Professor of French literature and culture and the Director of the French and Italian Department at Stanford University.

Cécile AlduyCécile earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in France in 2003 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. Her research interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric, the relations between cultural, literary, and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema, and contemporary French literature. Cécile's most recent book, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste [Marine Le Pen taken to her words. Decoding the new national front discourse], co-authored with Stephanie Wahnich, examines the rhetoric used by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and compares it to that of her father and former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Casual observation of far right politics in France suggests that there has been a significant change in the National Front program following the 2011 leadership change to Marine Le Pen from Jean-Marie Le Pen and his 2015 ouster from the party. Marine Le Pen has taken great efforts to distance herself from her father, who infamously and repeatedly characterized gas chambers as "a detail in the history of World War II." The party has also enjoyed increasing electoral support in recent years. Against this backdrop, the book examines two fundamental questions: what is Marine Le Pen actually saying, and why does her speech resonate with French society today? To answer these questions, Alduy and Wahnich have analyzed over 500 speeches given by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. This analysis reveals that there is significant continuity between the political agenda and ideological content of the Le Pens. In contrast with her father's blatantly radical speech, however, the younger Le Pen employs careful phraseology, replete with allusions, ambiguities, and double entendres, in order to "de-demonize" the party and make its platform appear more palatable to a modern French audience. In spite of programmatic continuity, this rhetorical rebranding appears to have facilitated greater electoral support for the National Front. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots has received significant media coverage, including a feature in Le Monde [article in French] and on NPR. In her ongoing research, supported in part by The Europe Center, Cécile is building upon the methodologies devised for Marine Le Pen prise aux mots and examining the development of political discourse of French political parties across the ideological spectrum in the period leading up to the 2017 presidential election. The initial results of this study will be published by Seuil in 2017 in a book preliminarily entitled Les Mots des présidentiables. Sémantique d'une triangulaire annoncée [The words of presidential candidates. Semantics of a three-candidate race]. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Alduy, Cécile, and Stephanie Wahnich. 2015. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage de nouveau discours frontiste. Paris: Seuil.

Featured Graduate Student Research: Camilla Mazzucato

We would like to introduce you to some of the graduate students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured graduate student this month is Camilla Mazzucato (Anthropology). Camilla is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Before beginning her Ph.D. studies at Stanford, Camilla earned a BA and an MA in Archaeology from the University of Bologna and an MSc in GIS and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology from the University College London.

Camilla MazzucatoCamilla is an anthropologist who is interested in using network analysis to examine the social arrangements "mega-sites" - large settlements that originated with small, settled hunter-gatherer communities - during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic periods. In her current research, Camilla is evaluating these social arrangements with new evidence from Çatalhöyük, a dense agglomeration of mudbrick houses occupied for 1,400 years and located in modern-day Turkey. Approximately the size of a town, Çatalhöyük lacks many of the characteristics of a modern town, including specialized areas, communal buildings, and centralized functions. Moreover, the spatial arrangement differs significantly from other PPNB settlements. In summer 2015, Camilla conducted field research, partially funded by The Europe Center, at the site of Çatalhöyük. During her four weeks at the site, she explored ways of modeling the site's networks by collecting data focused on patterns of similarity of material culture features. This data will be used to examine the site's internal organization as well as the arrangements of social relationships therein. In addition, she spent time studying some of the recently-excavated buildings, using architectural features to study ties among entities.

Reminder: The Europe Center will be accepting applications for the Graduate Student Grand Competition March 28, 2016 - April 15, 2016. For more information please visit our website.

The Europe Center Programs: Minor in European Studies

As previously announced, The Europe Center and Stanford Global Studies are offering a minor in Global Studies with a concentration in European Studies. The minor is designed for undergraduate students who have an interdisciplinary interest in the history, culture, politics, societies, and institutions of Europe, past and present. The requirements of the minor include coursework, advanced proficiency in a modern European language, and a capstone experience such as a research paper with a focus on European Studies, completion of an overseas study program in Europe, or completion of an overseas internship in Europe.

This quarter, Christophe Crombez, Consulting Professor at The Europe Center, is offering the minor's core seminar class: Introduction to European Studies. In this survey course, students are introduced to important themes in the study of European politics, economics, and culture. The course begins with a discussion of European identity and culture, focusing on what makes Europe unique and how recent history has shaped this identity. In the second section, students analyze European politics by learning about Europe's predominant political institutions - parliamentary government and proportional representation electoral systems - and examining the effect of these institutions on public policy. The course then turns to the economy and understanding the challenges and opportunities that European economies face today. The fourth section focuses on the European Union, including its history, functioning, and policies. In the final section, the class discusses transatlantic relations.

We invite you to visit our website for more information about the Minor in European Studies.

Visiting Student Researcher: Lina Eriksson

Lina ErikssonThe Europe Center is pleased to introduce to you Lina Eriksson, a Fulbright Scholar who is visiting Stanford University from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Lina holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. She is broadly interested in the politics of natural disasters. In her dissertation, entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics, Lina examines the electoral effects of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun on Swedish parliamentary elections. Part of this research, forthcoming in Electoral Studies, finds that the Swedish Social Democratic Party's poor crisis response to Storm Gudrun resulted in a significant decrease in support for the Social Democratic Party in the affected regions, leading to the largest change in partisan support in Swedish history. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Eriksson, Lina M. 2016. "Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election." Electoral Studies 41(1): 129-142.

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

February 18-19, 2016 
8:00AM - 5:00PM 
Workshop: Heritage Bureaucracies: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives 
Stanford Archaeology Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Please visit our website for more information.

March 28, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Adam Tooze, Columbia University 
NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 24, 2016.

April 25, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torben Iversen, Harvard University 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: April 28-29, 2016 
9:00AM - 5:00PM 
Conference: Networks of European Enlightenment 
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the French Cultural Workshop, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

May 9, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Monica Martinez-Bravo, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), Madrid 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

May 16, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmueller, University of Mannheim 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

European Security Initiative Events

March 3, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Vygaudas Ušackas, European Union Ambassador to Russia 
Russia and the West: Handling the Clash of World Views 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 1, 2016.

March 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University 
Resurrected? The Domestic Determinants of Russia's Conduct Abroad 
Room E008 (Ground Floor Conference Room), Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 9, 2016.

 

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Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia

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Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia is the first attempt to explore how the tumultuous years between 1931 and 1953 have been recreated and renegotiated in cinema. This period saw traumatic conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War, and the Korean War, and pivotal events such as the Rape of Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which left a lasting imprint on East Asia and the world. By bringing together a variety of specialists in the cinemas of East Asia and offering divergent yet complementary perspectives, the book explores how the legacies of war have been reimagined through the lens of film.

This turbulent era opened with the Mukden Incident of 1931, which signaled a new page in Japanese militaristic aggression in East Asia, and culminated with the Korean War (1950–1953), a protracted conflict that broke out in the wake of Japan's post–World War II withdrawal from Korea. Divided Lenses explores how the intervening decades have continued to shape politics and popular culture throughout East Asia and the world. Essays in part I examine historical trends at work in various "national" cinemas, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Those in part 2 focus on specific themes such as comfort women in Chinese film, the Nanjing Massacre, or nationalism, and how they have been depicted or renegotiated in contemporary films. Of particular interest are contributions drawing from other forms of screen culture, such as television and video games.

This book is an outcome of the conference, Divided Lenses: Film and War Memory in Asia, that the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center hosted in December 2008, part of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation research project.

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Scholars Examine Egypt’s Political Landscape on the Eve of the January 25 Revolution’s 5th Anniversary [VIDEO]

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To mark five years since the onset of the January 25 Revolution, five Egypt scholars examined the evolving political landscape in Egypt as part of a panel titled “The Containment of Politics in Egypt,” organized by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD). The panel featured Stanford Historian Joel Beinin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford Lisa Blaydes, ARD Visiting Scholar Amr Hamzawy, Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute on Middle East Policy Nancy Okail, and ARD Associate Director Hesham Sallam. The discussion revolved around a number of key issues, including the recent legislative elections, the cohesion of the ruling coalition, the regime’s responses to various economic challenges, and the impact of state repression on spaces for political contestation and resistance.

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How Japan and South Korea reached the "comfort women" deal

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Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, provides an in-depth analysis of how the agreement on the “comfort women” issue between Japan and South Korea was reached late last year. In Japanese publication Toyo Keizai Online, Sneider writes that – after at least four years of negotiations between the two governments – political leadership in Seoul and Tokyo as well as pressure from the Obama administration can be credited for the breakthrough.

Read the article in English and Japanese.

Earlier in December, David Straub, associate director for the Korea Program, said the agreement is a sign of progress. He said it vindicates the victims and is a positive development for Korea-Japan relations. 

Read his comments in reporting done by Yonhap News and Voice of America.

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South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se (Right) shakes hands with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida (Left) during their meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul Dec. 28, 2015.
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Behind the Comfort Women Agreement

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The breakthrough agreement on the comfort women issue between Japan and South Korea on Dec. 28, 2015, was the culmination of at least four years of negotiations between the two governments. South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed for the agreement; the Obama administration provided persistent pressure while resisting a mediation role. The danger of the agreement falling apart is apparent to officials in Washington and Seoul, and hopefully Tokyo too, writes Sneider.

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Networks of European Enlightenment (Day 2)

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From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.

 

This 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.

 

April 29, 10:00am – 5:30pm

9:30am-10:00am       Breakfast & Coffee

10:00am - 12:00pm   Correspondence & Communication
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Experiencing the 'Communication Process' of the Enlightenment: Three Case Studies”
Charlotta Woolf, “Un ami des philosophes modernes": The Networks of Swedish Ambassador Gustav Philip Creutz in Paris, 1766-1783”
Andrew Kahn, “The Enlightenment Correspondence of Catherine the Great: the Digital Project”

12:00pm – 1:00pm     Lunch

1:00pm - 3:00pm       Science & Technology
Paola Bertucci, “Artisanal Networks: The République des lettres and The Société des arts”
Jessica Riskin, “Lamarckiana” 
Paula Findlen, “Imagining a Community:  The Scientific Networks of Laura Bassi, Emilie du Chatelet, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi” 

3:00pm-3:30pm         Coffee break

3:30pm - 5:30pm       Religious Networks
Thomas Wallnig, “Catholic Early Enlightenment in Central Europe? - Abbot Gottfried Bessel between Order, Church, Court and Booktrade”
Christopher Warren, “Quaker Networks and Quaker Enlightenment”
Claude Willan, “The English Enlightenment Network”

 

For further information, please visit the conference website.

 

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.

Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall

Conferences

Networks of European Enlightenment (Day 1)

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From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.

 

This 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.

 

April 28, 1:00pm – 5:30pm

1:00pm - 3:00pm       Historical Network Theory
Ruth Ahnert & Sebastian Ahnert, “Quantitative Network Analysis and Early Modern Correspondence”
Dan Edelstein, “How to Study Networks Without ‘Edgy’ Data”
Nicole Coleman, “Fibra: A Graph-Drawing Tool for Social Network Analysis”

3:00pm - 3:30pm       Coffee break

3:30pm - 5:30pm       Paris, Capital of Enlightenment
Nicholas Cronk, “The invention of Voltaire's correspondence”
Maria Comsa, “Theatrical Networks in 18th-Century France”
Melanie Conroy & Chloe Edmondson, “French Salons in the Age of Enlightenment”

 

For further information, please visit the conference website.

 

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.


 

Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall

Conferences
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