Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

The CFP for the next Project conference, Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700, to be held at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford from 5-7 September 2011, has now been released. Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary, University of London) and Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University). The conference will explore prospects for an analytical geography of the concrete spatial features both underpinning national and international networks of learned correspondence and nurturing the intellectual traditions exchanged through those networks. It will examine the material conditions structuring epistolary communication, the geographical features conditioning local, regional, and national intellectual traditions, and the ideas generated when international networks brought these localized traditions into contact. At the centre of the conference will be a comparison of how the radically different physical, political, and confessional geographies of England and the Holy Roman Empire structured intellectual activity in manners radically different and hitherto unappreciated, and how the wars and reformations of the seventeenth century cross-fertilized these traditions in highly significant ways. The deadline for abstracts is 1 April 2011. For the full CFP, please visit the conference microsite.