The Director's Seminar (Thursdays, 10.30-12, Room 111 Foster Court) is a weekly gathering of graduate students and staff, led by Professor Lisa Jardine. As well as welcoming a dynamic group of visiting speakers from pan-disciplinary fields, we aim to discuss topics of all kinds related to the theory and practice of graduate life. Our goal is to provide graduate students with an additional set of skills to enhance those provided in the graduate skills training sessions. Please click 'read more' to see the sessions for autumn term 2013. All interested postgraduate students are welcome - whether you're from CELL, UCL, or any other university. Please contact either Robyn Adams or Matthew Symonds if you'd like to join in!
- 26 September: Nydia Pineda (QMUL), Competing selenographies in Robert Hooke's Micrographia
- A telescopic observation of the moon in a book about microscopy reflects conflicting ideas about naming and representing the unknown in the Seventeenth-Century. My reading of this image allows a further understanding of lunar images as examples of visual technologies and as rhetorical tools for communicating expertise in shared or competing epistemological programs. These considerations shed further light on the agency of images in early modern scientific books.
- 3 October: Will Tosh (QMUL), "Take all my loves, my love; yea, take them all": the hidden romance of Elizabethan public life
- What stories do we miss when we fillet our public records for matters of state and leave aside the 'personal stuff'? And should we be separating the two at all?.
- 10 October: Sietske Fransen (Warburg Institute), The visual representation of knowledge in seventeenth-century medical practice
- This paper focuses on the dichotomous tables that comprise the manuscript Tabbulae morborum of a medical student from Trinity College, Cambridge, Daniel Foote (1629-1700). This manuscript, in combination with Foote’s personal note books and lists of herbals, gives us the rare opportunity to study the development of knowledge from the reception of a university education to medical practice.
- 17 October: Katherine Hunt (UEA), Church bells and combinatory ideas of change in seventeenth-century England
- In the seventeenth-century English practice of change-ringing, church bells were rung in series of mathematical permutation. This paper analyses the relationship of this system to other combinatorial practices, particularly those to do with language, and examines how the contemporary use of the phrase ‘ringing the changes’ reflected the concepts of variation and exhaustion on which such systems rely.
- 24 October: Adam Parr (UCL), A soldier's perspective on the Art of War: 1767 to 1775
- In 1767 a British lieutenant of marines, John Clarke, published a translation of the fifth-century Latin text by Vegetius on the Art of War. Eight years later, Clarke himself wrote an eye-witness account of the battle of Bunker Hill. These two texts, and the differences between them, reflect the revolutionary changes that took place in the world, Britain and warfare at this moment.
- 31 October: Clare Whitehead (QMUL), 'With a Kingdom's happiness / Doth she privates Lares bless': representing Anna of Denmark on her journey to London
- This paper examinea the rumours that surrounded Anna of Denmark's illness in 1603 and the effect they had on performances given during her journey to London that year.
- 14 November: Gillian Pink (Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford), Spaces of annotation. Voltaire's marginalia
- An examination of Voltaire’s practices as a writer of marginalia, with particular emphasis on the use of space and the annotated volume as a material object.
- 21 November: To be confirmed.
- 28 November: James Everest (UCL), Thomas Hobbes's Optical Instruments
- Famous as a political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes was also a natural philosopher, much of whose early work is devoted to the study of optics. A number of scholars have discussed various aspects of his theories about light and vision, but this paper foregrounds his practical experience with a range of optical instruments, hitherto almost completely ignored.
- 5 December: Emma Pauncefort (UCL), Whetting or suppressing the appetite for English customs?: ‘Englishness’, food, drink and feasting in Misson's 1698 Mémoires
- This paper examines how the French Huguenot refugee Henri Misson crafts the alphabetical entries in his 1698 Mémoires et Observations faites par un voyageur. As a case study, it considers how those entries concerning food, drink and feasting are manipulated to challenge long-entrenched stereotypes of the uncivilised and barbaric English whilst exhorting the readers – Englishmen and Frenchmen alike – to re-examine their approach to cultural difference.
- 12 December: Helen Graham-Matheson (UCL), 'Land ... is the only thing that lasts': The three wives of William Parr and one small piece of land in Essex
- Through a vignette of the landholdings of Anne Bourchier, Elisabeth Cobham and Helena von Snakenbourg, the three wives of William Parr, marquess of Northampton, this paper explores women's legal rights to property and landholdings across the mid-sixteenth century. I present the case of a small manor holding from the ancestral earldom of Essex as it passed through three women, across 45 years and appeared in legal transactions variously as a dowery, inheritance, forfeit, an enfeoffment, and an exchange.