4–6 September 2025 | University of Tokyo (Hongo Campus)

The University of Tokyo will be hosting an international conference, Providence, Propaganda, and Profit in the Early Modern English World, on 4–6 September 2025. Should you wish to present a paper of 20 minutes at the conference, please submit your proposal by 15 July 2025. Limited travel bursaries are available, particularly for postgraduate students and early career researchers.

【CALL FOR PAPERS】

Appeals to providence can restrain unbridled ambition, but the same belief and accompanying rhetoric can also enable political enterprise, economic speculation, and personal advancement. This conference invites historians of religion, politics, and economic culture to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues and to examine how providential ideas and language encouraged, constrained, justified, or even glorified profit-making across the British Isles and the English (and later British) diaspora from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

We aim to explore the notion of "profit" in its broadest sense, whether it be political favour, reputation-building, or financial gain. There is no constraint on the geographical scope, but proposals must address the religious experiences of individuals and communities across the British Isles or in the wider English and British imperial world. We are particularly interested in papers that interrogate established narratives of post-reformation religious politics and economic culture, such as the thesis of England's transformation from reformation to improvement in the long seventeenth century.

Illustrative Themes

• Providence, puritan politics, and the English reformation(s)
• Religious rhetoric in projecting, financial policy, and commercial ventures
• English trade, imperial aspirations, and national identity 
• Theological literacy, popular culture, public opinion, and ideological polarisation
• Hypocrisy, dissimulation, and contested meanings of divine favour 
• English reformations and the culture of trust and distrust
• Interfaith and cross-cultural encounters and English colonial expansion
• Providence, religious manipulation, and narratives of disenchantment
• Providence, English monarchy, and revolutions

Keywords

Providence; Puritanism; Laudianism; Early modern England; English Protestantism; English reformation and post-reformation; Projecting; Improvement; Trust and Distrust; Disenchantment; Moral economy; Religious politics

Submission Guidelines

We welcome proposals of up to 300 words from scholars at all career stages, including postgraduate students and independent researchers who hold a PhD or its equivalent. Please submit your abstract by 15 July via the following form: https://forms.gle/NVvuxmn2Nx1srax57.

If you are submitting a proposal for a three-paper panel (20 minutes per paper), please include a panel abstract of up to 400 words, along with individual paper titles, author names, and abstracts of up to 300 words for each presentation.

We will send out notification of acceptance by 31 July.

【KEYNOTE SPEAKERS】 (in alphabetical order)

• Ann Hughes (Keele University) 
• Shusaku Kanazawa (Kyoto University)
• Keiko Kawawake (Kyoto Prefectural University)
• Peter Lake (Vanderbilt University). 

For more information, please see the conference website. 

Contact Information

Christy Wang, JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Tokyo

Contact Emailpoetsutokyo@gmail.comURLhttps://poetsutokyo.wixsite.com/conference2025/about