Join the John Hay Library and the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World for Performing Objects and the Objects of Performance in the Global Early Modern: A Virtual Interdisciplinary Symposium, taking place over two sessions on June 14 and 15, 2021 from 9 a.m. – 12:20 p.m. Professor Holly Shaffer of Brown’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture will moderate.
Visit the Performing Objects and the Objects of Performance website for more information.
Symposium
Symposium participants will convene to bring forward new or under-explored theories of performance in the study of the global early modern, with a focus on performance in relation to objects of historical analysis. These objects may be archival materials, the individuals or collectivities that produced these materials, or conceptual and abstract knowledge-objects.
Papers by invited scholars will be published on the Performing Objects and Objects of Performance website in advance. Each of the two symposium sessions will be divided between discussion of the papers and presentations by participants on relevant objects digitized from the John Hay Library’s collections.
Panelists
- Claire M. L. Bourne (Penn State)
- Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden University)
- Matthew Melvin-Koushki (University of South Carolina)
- Anthony Ossa-Richardson (UCL)
- Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University)
Discussion topics
- How can performance, as a theoretical rubric, illuminate the interaction within and among such categories of object, as well as between object and subject — both historical subjects and historian subjects?
- How do objects represent, enact, or mediate performance? In what ways can one object surrogate or perform as another?
- How do objects circulate performances across distances of space and time?
Kenneth Molloy, John Hay Library/Center for the Study of the Early Modern World Fellow
The symposium is the culmination of a fellowship project by Kenneth Molloy, PhD Candidate in the Department of Theater Arts & Performance Studies, the fourth John Hay Library/Center for the Study of the Early Modern World Fellow. Kenneth’s fellowship was conducted with support from Holly Snyder, Curator of American Historical Collections, Lincoln and Hay Collections, and History of Science at the John Hay Library.