Upcoming events
WEBINAR
Other Things: Materiality and the Empire, 1600-1850
Join us for a two-day Zoom webinar that examines the importance of matter in colonial encounters and to European self-understanding in 1600-1850. The webinar is open to everyone, no registration required.
The ‘material turn’ has brought materiality and the history of things under increased scholarly scrutiny. Growing emphasis is being placed on the ways in which the material world around us – the nature, our built environment, the things we own – shapes our identity and conditions the possibilities of our agency.
Similarly, historians have increasingly emphasised the extent to which Europe – its identity, material culture, and financial success – was made through its colonial subjugation of overseas Others.
This webinar workshop brings together a stellar interdisciplinary lineup of established scholars and early career researchers to investigate how matter fundamentally changed and shaped the European colonizing project while getting changed and shaped itself in the process. European imperial identities, culture, science, economy, ecology, and society all revolved around defining, moulding and (ab)using matter in its different forms, but matter also produced, limited and redefined the parametres of European ways of thinking, acting, and being.
The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Amanda Vickery (Queen Mary, University of London), whose books include Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009) and Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (2006).
Schedule and more information: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/otherthings/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2746943498874662/
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Past events
‘Captain Cook, Colonial Theft and British Museums: The Gweagal Artefacts’
1 May 2019, 2-5pm
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus
Rodney Kelly on why the Gweagal shield and spears stolen from his ancestors by Cook and his crew should be returned
Sarah Keenan on the legal status of these artefacts and why the British Museum changed the label
Rosalind Carr on Enlightenment collecting, 18thC museums and ongoing colonial violence
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Colonial Spaces, Colonial Power Network at ISECS 2019
16 July 2019
Stream of panels
PANEL 1: WHITE MASCULINITY AND COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS
PANEL 2: IMPERIAL IDENTITIES AND AFTERLIVES
PANEL 3: PERFORMING WHITENESS IN COLONIAL SPACES: A TRANSOCEANIC ANALYSIS
PANEL 4: ANTICOLONIAL METHODS AND DECOLONISING PRACTICE
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Symposium ‘Representations of “Europeanness” in the Long Eighteenth Century’
17-18 May 2018
Queen Mary University of London
Colonial Spaces, Colonial Power: European Empires in the Long Eighteenth Century 