"World Making: Local and Global Imagining in Early Modern Literature" is a conference organized by PhD candidates in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The conference will include three panels followed by a keynote address delivered by Professor Laurie Shannon (Northwestern).
World Making seeks to spark a conversation about the many ways in which early modern literature imagines, revises, and attempts to control the dimensions of the world. It asks how conceptions of the planet (whether physical, geopolitical, cultural, or climatological) shaped political participation; how early modernity modulated between local structures and global frameworks; and how various textual and literary forms sought to represent the world: even, at times, interrogating anthropocentric perspectives. Our speakers draw on a diverse set of methodologies, including comparative literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism, queer theory, and critical race studies, among other approaches, to ask how literature can help us reimagine our participation in the shared conditions of daily life on Earth.
You will find a full schedule for the conference, including abstracts for all papers to be delivered, on our website: http://www.earlymodernworldmaking.com/
Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and the Graduate Student Advisory Council.
