Renaissance Hybridity
Graduate Early Modern Student Society
Seventh Annual Symposium

Friday, April 26, 2024
UW–Madison Memorial Library Special Collections & Hybrid over Zoom
Keynote Speaker: TBA

Call for Papers
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Early modern people were preoccupied with mixture at all scales. Controlled experiments in alchemy, botany, and animal husbandry attempted to mitigate concerns about the production of genetic difference and disability. Likewise, ideas from natural philosophy were also used to explore and police the nature of cross-class, queer, interracial, or interfaith relations within larger political bodies. At the level of early modern geopolitics, twin anxieties over foreign influence and geographical transplantation haunted European thought. Renaissance art, too, was a mixture of medieval cult images and the newly commodified art object, while early modern plays were figured as hybrids—or as monsters.

The Graduate Early Modern Student Society (GEMSS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison invites papers exploring these issues to be presented at its seventh annual symposium. We seek to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among graduate students interested in early modernity, especially scholars working with odd objects and mulling over multiple methods. Possible areas of study include:

• Art and Art History
• Critical Race Theory
• History
• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Performance Studies
• Disability studies and biopolitics
• Science and Technology Studies
• Literature
• Political Theory
• Trans* studies and Queer theory
• Religious Studies
• Book history

We are also soliciting volunteers for a special roundtable conversation on political activism, labour, organizing, or department organizing as an early modernist.

The symposium will be hybrid digital & in-person. We welcome submissions by scholars from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and fellow universities. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide travel funding for panelists. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes and must be in English. Please email abstracts of 300 words or fewer, along with your name, academic department, whether you will present in-person or over Zoom, and a brief biographical statement in PDF format to Miranda Alksnis (alksnis@wisc.edu). The submission deadline is Wednesday, January 31, 2024.

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