Call for Papers
Reconstructing Histories, 1550-1850
Group for Early Modern Cultura1 Studies
February 22-25, 2007
Chicago, Illinois
Submission Deadline Extended to October 10, 2006

The 14th Annual Conference for the Group for Early Modern Cultural
Studies (GEMCS) will be held from February 22-25, 2007, in Chicago at
the Palmer House Hilton (hotel rates: $115.00 per night, single or
double.) The theme for this year's conference is Reconstructing
Histories, 1550-1850 and is intended to foster discussions about the
ways in which perceptions of literary, cultural, social, and economic
history have changed during the last decades. We invite papers,
panels, discussion groups, and workshops that examine both early
modern engagements with the making and unmaking of these histories
and those that explore our contemporary understandings of our
disciplinary narratives. In defining these historical and
metacritical questions broadly, GEMCS provides a forum for innovative
inquiries into all aspects of early modern culture and we encourage
proposals on all aspects of early modern cultural studies.

GEMCS grew out of a need for a truly interdisciplinary organization
that spans the early modern period and provides a forum for scholars
to explore how our understandings of class race, gender, the body,
sexuality, science, trade, colonialism, and nationalism continue to
be reshaped by ongoing work in critical and cultural theory. The
rubric "cultural studies" encompasses a variety of disciplinary
fields--among them literature, history, art history, political
science, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and
philosophy--and it allows for a variety of approaches: feminist,
materialist, multiculturalist, gay, lesbian, and queer. GEMCS
defines the early modern period broadly to include the Renaissance,
the eighteenth century, and the early nineteenth century, and we
remain committed to fostering critical dialogues across traditional
boundaries of historical specialization and sociopolitical
geography. We are particularly interested in expanding dialogues
about the relationships between European national and linguistic
cultures and their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

We invite proposals in the following areas for the 2007 conference,
but, as always, encourage papers, panels, and discussions on other
topics dealing with the period between roughly 1550 and 1850:

* Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres
* Nation and National Identity
* Transcultural Exchanges within Europe and Beyond
* Comparative Imperialisms
* Locke and Materialism
* European Sciences and Indigenous Forms of Knowledge
* Trade, Colonialism, and Gender
* Women Writers and the Problem of Genre
* Beyond the "New Formalism"
* Manuscript and Print in the Early Modern Period
* Multidisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Studies
* Biocultures
* Technology and the Body
* The Problems of Periodicity: Rethinking the "Early Modern"
* Rethinking Character, Rethinking Genre
* Teaching Early Modern Cultural Studies
* The Nature of the Object
* Animals and their Companion Species
* Transatlantic Exchanges
* Things and their Destinies

Panel organizers should reserve half an hour to forty-five minutes
for discussions so please ask each speaker to limit his or her
presentation to no more than fifteen minutes. Please send abstracts
for complete panels (approx. 500 words) or individual papers (approx.
250 words) to ecti_at_uiuc.edu using the subject line "Group for Early
Modern Cultural Studies." Abstracts should include academic addresses
for all panel participants and their e-mail addresses. The deadline
for abstracts for individual papers, roundtables (six to eight
participants), and paper sessions (three to five participants) has
been extended to October 10, 2006. We have begun this year a policy
of rolling acceptances, so you will hear within three weeks whether
your proposal has been accepted. Scholars participating in this
year's conference include Kim Hall, Maureen Quilligan, Bryan
Reynolds, Bruce Boehrer, Laura Brown, Robert Markley, Thomas DiPiero,
James Thompson, Donna Landry, Lennard Davis, Devoney Looser, Tita
Chico, Rajani Sudan, Helen Thompson, Wolfram Schmidgen, and Lisa
Freeman, among many others.

Updates and hotel information are being posted on the GEMCS website:
http://english.fsu.edu/gemcs. The registration fee for the annual
conference includes membership in the Group for Early Modern Cultural
Studies and a year's subscription to the Journal for Early Modern
Cultural Studies published by Indiana University Press. For
information about the journal, see http://iupjournals.org/jemcs.

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Received on Thu Oct 05 2006 - 01:17:06 EDT