The Graduate Early Modern Student Society at University of Wisconsin-Madison will be hosting its second annual symposium, titled “(Mis)appropriating the Past: The Uses and Abuses of History.” The deadline to submit abstracts is Friday, February 16, 2018, and the symposium itself will take place on Friday, April 27, 2018 at the Pyle Center. Abstracts of 250 words or less can be submitted in PDF format to Alice Coulter Main at amain2@wisc.edu.
Cultural producers have represented and dissected history in painting, political treatises, theatre, novels, film, and more. Some have approached it with exacting empirical rigor, while others have mythologized or even purposefully misconstrued it. What motivations and assumptions underpin early modern and contemporary portrayals of the past? What polemical and intellectual work do imaginaries of the past perform in the present? How are depictions of the past imbricated in ongoing social, sexual, racial, artistic, and economic concerns?
The Graduate Early Modern Student Society at UW-Madison invites papers exploring these questions to be presented at its second annual symposium.