2018 GEMSS Symposium, "(Mis)appropriating the Past: The Uses and Abuses of History"
Friday, April 27 2018 at 8:00 AM CDT to
Friday, April 27 2018 at 7:00 PM CDT
Pyle Center
Description
Please join the members of the Graduate Early Modern Student Society (GEMSS, UW-Madison) for the Second Annual GEMSS Graduate Research Symposium, "(Mis)appropriating the Past: The Uses and Abuses of History," on Friday, April 27th, from 8:30am-7pm in the Pyle Center. We are pleased to present a day of panels featuring graduate research on a wide range of early modern topics as discussed by faculty from different departments across campus. Breakfast and lunch will be provided for all attendees and the day will culminate in a keynote presentation on “Spinoza and the Divinity of the Bible” by Dr. Steve Nadler of the UW-Madison Department of Philosophy, followed immediately by a collegial reception with hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar.
The event is free and open to all with sponsorship from the Center for European Studies and the Wisconsin Experience Grant.
More on the Symposium:
Recent events have forcefully reminded us of how immediately present the early modern period remains in contemporary life. Celebrations of the Luther Year, debates about Columbus Day, and big-budget screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have demonstrated the continued salience of early modern experiences and ideas in the twenty-first century. People today still look backwards to the era of Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Cervantes, and the French Revolution both to understand our own society and to make arguments about it.
However, early moderns themselves also turned to the past to make sense of their world. They evoked Ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the Carolingian Empire, and innumerable other historical moments in order to discuss their own society. Both today and then, different observers have had astoundingly diverse ways of talking about the past. Cultural producers have represented and dissected history in painting, political treatises, theatre, novels, film, and more. Some have approached it with exacting empirical rigor, while others have mythologized or even purposefully misconstrued it. What motivations and assumptions underpin early modern and contemporary portrayals of the past? What polemical and intellectual work do imaginaries of the past perform in the present? How are depictions of the past imbricated in ongoing social, sexual, racial, artistic, and economic concerns?
The Graduate Early Modern Student Society (GEMSS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is pleased to explore these themes at its second annual symposium and seeks to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue among graduate students and others interested in early modernity, however defined.