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

Applications are invited for fellowships at the ‘Leibniz Graduate School for Cultures of Knowledge in Central European Transnational Contexts’, tenable at the Herder Institute in Marburg from 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2013. The school focuses on knowledge cultures in a central European context, and applicants are invited to define PhD or postdoctoral projects in the following thematic areas: scientific culture and communication from the early modern period to the present (forums, networks, modes of socialization); national and transnational orders of knowledge and intellectual styles; the plurality and transformation of scientific institutions; the influence of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender on scientific exchange; and academic practice in the age of globalization and digital networks. The language of the school is German, and the fellowships are designed primarily for emerging scholars from East Central Europe. The deadline for applications is 31 October 2009; for full details and how to apply, see H-Soz-u-Kult.

Papers are invited for a conference on ‘Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge and Forms’, due to be held at the Royal Society in London on 8-10 July 2010. The conference will explore the dynamic intellectual economies brought into being by wars, revolution, and international exploration, with particular reference to the forms in which ideas circulated; the networks of intelligencers, scribes, printers, publishers, and booksellers through which they moved; and the structures of knowledge which linked particular categories of content to particular material forms. The deadline for the receipt of 300-word abstracts is 7 January 2010; for further details and submission instructions, see the conference website.

The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at QMUL will be hosting a workshop on Thursday 17 September on ‘Digitizing Correspondence’. The event, which is sponsored by JISC, will allow archivists, editors, and researchers to converge on a range of issues relating to the digitization of letter collections in a context of presentations, round table discussions, and breakout groups. For a draft programme and booking information, please see the workshop webpage.

Cultures of Knowledge is delighted to announce a new collaboration with Dr Brynley F. Roberts and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth. The partnership features the letters of Edward Lhwyd, the second Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and a prominent naturalist, archaeologist, and linguist, who corresponded extensively in English, French, Latin, and Welsh with a wide range of natural philosophers and antiquaries. Around 1,500 of his letters are known to survive (most among the holdings of the Bodleian Library), some 1,000 of which have already been indexed and transcribed by Dr Roberts. This valuable resource can now be completed and made accessible to international scholarship by means of an online calendar and, ultimately, a full digital edition. For further details on Edward Lhwyd and how his letters now feature in the Project, please see here.

In 1640s Oxford, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury proposed an ‘Office of Addresse for Communications’. Inspired by Théophraste Renaudot’s Parisian bureau d’adresse, they envisaged a clearing house through which information might be posted, acquired, and exchanged. This section of the site represents an ‘Office of Addresse’ for the digital age. It contains news of all Project developments, and allows participants and collaborators to highlight relevant conferences and publications, post notes and queries, and request assistance. You can receive direct updates via our RSS feed. If you would like to submit an item for consideration, please Contact Us.