Benjamin Schmidt (History)

Juliet Shields (English)

Geoffrey Turnovsky (French & Italian)

Since its inception at the UW, the Early Modern Research Group (Emerge) has provided a cross disciplinary forum for exploring a wide ranges of issues from the period 1500-1850, covering a broad set of geographical focus points from Asia to Europe to the Americas. This scope is reflected in the lecture series around the theme of Modernity which we have been able to organize for 2008 2009 with generous funding from the Simpson Center, as well as from the Center for West European Studies and the departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, and South Asian Studies. A very exciting line-up of five speakers from US and Canadian universities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia will be coming to campus throughout the academic year to share their current research with early modern scholars on campus. These visitors will be addressing a wide array of topics including poetry in Early Modern Spain and Latin America, Italian Renaissance art, Spanish Science in the eighteenth century, pre Revolutionary French cultural politics, and contacts between England and Asia in the sixteenth century.

Along with their formal talks, speakers will be interacting informally with colleagues and graduate students at lunches and other events on campus. Indeed, our goal is to use these events as much as possible to build the local community of early modern scholars. In this goal, we have also instituted a works-in-progress series in order to encourage faculty and graduate students at the UW to participate actively in the intellectual project of this year’s series, namely to consider the overarching questions: what is modernity? In early November, we discussed a chapter from the manuscript of a colleague in French on Renaissance poetic visions of the French nation. Another colleague will in the winter be sharing with us his on-going work on love poetry and sexuality at the 16th-century Ottoman court.

 

	Daniel Rosenberg
	Cartographies of Time

Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009 - 4:00 PM

Communications 202

Is history linear? In at least one sense, undoubtedly: the convention of representing historical chronologies in the form of straight, measured "timelines" is so ubiquitous and intuitive that it rarely rates a mention. Yet, like the conventions of modern historical narrative, the conventions of modern historical graphics are hardly more than two centuries old. This paper explores the history of the timeline and related graphic forms in the context of the development of print media in the early modern period. It argues that the development of the linear graphic is symptomatic of both the patterns and the paradoxes of the modern historical imagination. Daniel Rosenberg is Associate Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. His work focuses on the study of history in the Enlightenment. With Susan Harding, he is co-editor of Histories of the Future (2006); and with Anthony Grafton, co-author of Cartographies of Time (forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press). This lecture is part of the Media in the Early Modern Age lecture series presented by EMERGE. It is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Center for West European Studies.