CfP: Making Stories in the Early Modern World

1–3 November 2019 Toronto, Canada

The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium and York University are celebrating the careers and scholarship of Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen. Over the past three decades, their ground-breaking studies, both joint and individual, on the social and cultural life of early modern Italy have shaped how scholars think about interpersonal and political interactions, honour and shame, gender, community, space and orality in the pre-modern world.

In particular, they have attended to stories – the tales early modern individuals lived and told, how they told them and why, as well how scholars access, reconstruct and find meaning in them. Drawing on historical and cognate disciplines, their work has led scholars to reckon with the tangled processes that shaped culture, social experience, subjectivity, and action.

This conference will explore both early modern stories and story-telling and the many ways that scholars have reconstructed and told that past. Papers may reflect perspectives ranging from the individual to the institutional, or comment on the state of current scholarship and new directions of inquiry. We welcome contributions from all disciplines and geographic areas and from comparative perspectives, that focus on the early modern world broadly defined (1350–1700), as well as contributions reflecting on methodological and theoretical issues.

Proposals should include:

  1. the title of the presentation and a 150-word abstract;
  2. one-page CV containg contact information for the presenter.

Proposals should be emailed in Word format to both conference organizers:

John Christopoulos: john.christopoulos@ubc.ca John Hunt: john.hunt@uvu.edu

Deadline for submission: 15 December 2018