Early Modern Temporalities: Graduate Early Modern Student Society Eighth Annual Symposium
Early Modern Temporalities
Graduate Early Modern Student Society Eighth Annual Symposium
Friday, April 25, 2025
TBD, UW-Madison & Hybrid over Zoom
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jessica Keating (Associate Professor of Art History, Art and Art History, Carleton College)
The field of early modern studies has long grappled with questions of time, including temporality, historicity, chronology, (a)synchronicity, and periodization. The term “early modern” is constantly haunted by the question of how we view this period—is it a lingering afterlife of the Middle Ages or the dawning of modernity? Is the periodization of “early modern” globally applicable across different cultures? The sense of temporality also played an important role in early modern Europe. Renaissance societies established their identities in relation to their pasts and forged aspirational lineages that represented a continuity between themselves and glorious, heroic, and virtuous ancestors. At the same time, they constructed the notion of Others in terms of time, tying geographical and cultural distinctions to the issue of (a)synchronicity of civilization in world history.
The Graduate Early Modern Student Society (GEMSS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison invites papers exploring these issues to be presented at its eighth annual symposium. We seek to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among graduate students interested in early modernity, especially scholars working with odd objects and mulling over multiple methods. Possible areas of study include:
- Art and Art History
- Critical Race Studies
- History
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Performance Studies
- Disability studies and biopolitics
- Science and Technology Studies
- Literature
- Political Theory
- Trans* studies and Queer theory
- Religious Studies
- Book history
The symposium will be hybrid digital and in-person. We welcome submissions by scholars from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and fellow universities. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide travel funding for panelists. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes and must be in English. Please email abstracts of 300 words or fewer, along with your name, academic department, whether you will present in-person or over Zoom, and a brief biographical statement in PDF format to Nayoung Kim (nkim223@wisc.edu). The submission deadline is Friday, January 31, 2025.