The organisers of the below conference have given the GHS the following details to pass on to our members for what is set to be an exciting event!

April 19-20, 2023
UCL and Oxford University

War was a pervasive part of early modern life. People experienced war as agents of conflict, impotent witnesses of its destructive forces, and as victims of its economic, social, and material consequences. Such events of conflict and emergency have been approached primarily through text, which has tended to focus historical narratives on the physical destruction wrought on the early modern world. But what if we were to see states of war and emergency also as periods of creation, in which new object types, new collections, new modes of commemorating, visualizing, and material thinking were produced?

This two-part event seeks to bring together scholars from all fields whose research can re-evaluate the relationship between war and material culture. It will explore how processes of destruction could establish new spaces in which material production and consumption might take root. As well as thinking about creation, the conference will consider how war reconfigured the trajectories of existing objects as their biographies became entangled with unfolding events.

Events begin with a keynote lecture from Sigrun Haude (University of Cincinnati), author of Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War (2021), on 19 th April at UCL in London. She will be speaking on ‘The Thirty Years’ War: Up Close and Material’. Registration details can be found here. The conference on 20 th April will take place in Oxford, details of which can be found here.

For more information about events please contact [email protected]