Der Lehrstuhl weist auf die vom University College London und der University of Oxford veranstaltete Tagung zum Thema "The Material Culture of War and Emergency in the Early Modern World" hin. Die Tagung, die am 20.4.2023 am Mansfield College in Oxford stattfindet, wird am 19.4.2023 von Sigrun Haude (Walter C. Langsam Professor of European History) mit einer Keynote zum Thema "The Thirty Years War: Up Close and Material" am University College London eröffnet.

Zum Konzept der Tagung:

"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 eco nomic, 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? While material culture studies has been recognised elsewhere as an important window into the everyday, emotional and interior lives of historical actors, the absence of object-based studies of early modern war is a notable omission.
This two-part event seeks to bring together scholars from all fields whose research can re-evaluate the way we view the relationships between conflict and the object world in the early modern period and help 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. We are particularly interested in research that moves beyond the more traditional objects of crisis and warfare, such as arms and plunder, and expands the notion of what an object of war might be, looking particularly at the everyday artifacts whose meaning came to be shaped by events of conflict. The overall purpose of discussion is to focus on how the material approach might bring new insight to the experience of early modern warfare: How were individuals’ experiences of conflict shaped by their material interactions? How did they navigate the extremes of warfare, both during and after conflict, through objects? In what ways did objects’ proximity to and intimacy with conflict determine the value placed upon them by contemporaries? How did encounters with destruction shape the afterlife of objects of war? In addition to this focus on martial conflict, consideration of states of emergency more generally – events of destruction by fire, flood, or other natural disaster, or confessional, political, and social upheaval – can also shed light on the broader discussion and we thus encourage their inclusion."

Das Programm und Details zu den Anmeldungsmodalitäten zu Keynote und Tagung finden Sie hier: Veranstaltung auf der UCL-Homepage