Seminar Programmes for the Current Academic Year

Term card forthcoming.

Convenors: Margaret Bent (All Souls) and Joseph W. Mason (University of Cambridge)

Dates: Thursdays, Weeks 2, 5, and 8

Time: 5 p.m.

Location: The seminars are all held via Zoom. If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have any questions, please send an email to Joe Mason at all.souls.music.seminars@gmail.com. For more information, and to subscribe to our mailing list and YouTube channel, please visit https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/all-souls-seminars-medieval-and-renaissance-music. 

Week 2: 22 October 2026, 5 p.m.–7 p.m. BST

Presenter: David Catalunya (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Title: Divine Harmony in Bronze Pipes: The Bethlehem Organ as a Practical Source for Pythagorean Theory  

Discussants: Andrew Hicks (Cornell University) and Hans Fidom (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)

The organ inspired a surge of fascination across medieval Europe as both a technological marvel and as a symbol of divine harmony. Yet despite the instrument’s entry into Latin Christian liturgy in the 10th century, the earliest surviving organ pipes in Europe date from the 15th century. The Terra Sancta Museum in Jerusalem preserves the remains of an 11th-century church organ, brought to Palestine by the Crusaders and discovered during archaeological excavations at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This seminar situates the Bethlehem organ within the broader intellectual transformations of the 10th to 12th centuries, when the instrument emerged as a privileged site for interaction between Pythagorean cosmology and artisanal knowledge. A group of theoretical treatises from the late 10th and 11th centuries, known as the mensura fistularum tradition, articulated principles for constructing organ pipes according to Pythagorean harmonic proportions. These texts have often been dismissed as abstract idealisations detached from practice, belonging to the speculative realm of musical theory rather than to the workshop. The measurements of the Bethlehem pipes, however, correspond to the mathematical models described in these treatises with millimetric precision. This compels a reassessment of the relationship between theory and practice in the High Middle Ages, raising new questions about how such texts were read, applied, and transmitted. 

Week 5: 12 November 2026, 5 p.m.–7 p.m. GMT

Presenter: Davitt Moroney (University of California, Berkeley)

Title: Precursive canons, 1450–1600: Notation, Renotation, and Function

Discussants: Denis Collins (University of Queensland) and Patrick Macey (Eastman School of Music)

Given the many important aspects of Bonnie Blackburn’s research, it is easy to overlook her efforts to draw attention to a category of canon that she termed ‘precursor canon’. This curious contrapuntal phenomenon, which flourished from about 1450 to about 1600, comprises works where, counterintuitively, the notated canonic part does not start first. Instead, the unnotated derived voice, must start (subversively showing up the misleading limitations of later terminology such as duxand comes).

My presentation will explore the following points. (1) The characteristics of this phenomenon. (2) The probable causes of notational precursivity and how they draw our attention to the more significant phenomenon of structural precursivity. (3) Pieces where the notation was subsequently altered, obscuring the structural precursivity. (4) Pieces where vestiges of an earlier notation suggest that someone (composer? copyist? printer?) renotated the music, despite no source surviving with the original notation. (5) Canonic structures, notably by Willaert and his followers, that contain canons with two distinct solutions: one where the derived voice follows the notated one, in the expected manner, and the other where the derived voice must be resolved precursively. This double feature, canon duplex, exploits the juxtaposition of the two different solutions for a single canonic line, displayed across two contrasting settings of hymn verses, two partes of a motet, or two different realizations of a canonic chanson.

Week 8: 3 December 2026, 5 p.m.–7 p.m. GMT

Presenter: Karen Cook (University of Hartford)

Title: The Paris-Avignon-Northern Italy information highway: new witnesses to the transmission of late medieval theoretical material

Discussants: Jason Stoessel (University of New England) and Solomon Guhl-Miller

Gathering 16 of Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS. 5-2-25 is riddled with connections to a host of late medieval treatises. It provides yet another instance of the contiguous copying of versions of the Ars contrapuncti and the Libellus cantus mensurabilis (both attributed to Jean des Murs) and the anonymous Tractatus figurarum. While certainly Northern Italian, the gathering is uniquely tied to Avignon via its copy of Johannes Pipardi’s De arte cantus, and thus to Paris given that treatise’s ties to the Berkeley manuscript (1375). In this talk, I focus on two anonymous works in the gathering. First, a two-sentence paragraph contains uncommon vocabulary connected to the Berkeley manuscript, the treatise De semibrevibus caudatis housed in Paris, and the Avignonese theorist Pierre Taillandier. Secondly, the anonymous “Ad evidentiam tam mensurabilis quam inmensurabilis musice” is interestingly and unusually concordant, on the one hand, with the Introductio musice secundum Johannes de Garlandia and Volentibus introduce, and on the other hand to the much later Breviloquium musicale by Bonaventura da Brescia, the anonymous Quaestiones et solutiones, the Crawford anonymous, and works by the later theorists Heinrich Saess and Domingo Marcos Durán. I thus demonstrate that both works reveal further evidence for the transmission of music theories from France, more specifically Paris through Avignon, to Northern Italy, where they connect to later trends in the Veneto. 

Convenors: Ted Tregear and Michal Zechariah

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 6, and 8

Time: 5.15 p.m.

Location: Hawkins Room, Merton College

This year, our text will be George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. We’ll be spreading this over all three terms, with three meetings per term, and three books of the Iliad per meeting. 

Week 2: 20 October

Chapman's translation of the Iliad, Books 1-3

Week 6: 17 November

Chapman's translation of the Iliad, Books 4-6

Week 8: 1 December

Chapman's translation of the Iliad, Books 7-9

Renowned worldwide for The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and his other masterpieces of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026) was one of the most inspiring historians of our time. This special reading group offers a unique opportunity to critically engage with his scholarship, constantly inspired by original historical questions, carefully tested analytical categories, as well as civic engagement.

The Carlo Ginzburg Reading Group consists of four meetings: two in Michaelmas Term 2026 and two in Hilary Term 2027. During these sessions, we will discuss a selection of Ginzburg's most representative and thought-provoking writings from the early 1960s onwards, ranging from his earliest to his most recent works. After an initial session on his seminal works on microhistory, we will examine the lesser known yet equally illuminating contribution of Ginzburg's studies of witchcraft to comparative and global history. We will then move on to his impassioned reflections on the foundations of historical knowledge and conclude with a session on the intersection between Ginzburg's initial interest in popular culture and his subsequent engagement with the potential applications and limitations of European records in investigating cultural processes worldwide.

The group will meet on the following Wednesdays in the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Woodstock Road, Oxford. 

28 Oct, 12:30-14: Microhistory

25 Nov, 12:30-14: On a Different Scale 

3 Feb, 12:30-14: Evidence, Distance 

3 Mar, 12:30-14: High & Low, Inside Out

See Oxford Events for more details about location. 

If you are interested in joining, please write to Filippo de Vivo (filippo.devivo@history.ox.ac.uk) and/or Giuseppe Marcocci (giuseppe.marcocci@history.ox.ac.uk).

Convenors:  Angus Bowie (Queen’s), Dirk Meyer (Queen’s), Clément Salah (Queen’s), Matthew Shaw (Queen’s), Lesley Smith (HMC)

Week 2: 21 October, 11 a.m.–12.30 p.m.

Mamtimyn Sunuodula, Head of East Asian Materials, Bodleian Libraries

Chinese Special Collections Masterclass

Location: Horton Room, Weston Library (NB: No bags, food or drink allowed;  please leave in lobby lockers) 

Week 8: 4 December, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.

Joseph Schacht at Oxford, Eighty Years On:  Rethinking a Scholarly Legacy

Workshop organised by Clément Salah (JRF in Manuscript and Text Cultures, The Queen’s College) and Fitzroy Morrissey (Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Law, AMES/Pembroke College)

Location: Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford

Convenors: Freya Abbas and Christopher Chang

Location: Schwarzman 10.424

Join us to discuss the works of the Moravian philosopher and pedagogue John Amos Comenius (1592–1670). No prior knowledge of Comenius is required.

Mailing list: bit.ly/4hw137s

Week 3: 30 October, 5–6.30 p.m.

Introduction to Comenius

Week 6: 18 November, 5.15 p.m.

Joint discussion on polymathy with the Interdisciplinary Early Modern Graduate Workshop (IEMGW)

Term card forthcoming.

Convenors: Ian Archer, Alexandra Gajda, Steven Gunn, and Lucy Wooding

Dates: Thursdays, every week

Time: 5 p.m.

Location: Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College; online on Teams (please email ian.archer@history.ox.ac.uk)

Week 1: 15 October 

Prof. Lucy Wooding (Lincoln College) — ‘“Sinceritie in these daies was sure borne to be sad”: Religion, Dissimulation and Elizabethan Drama’

Jeffrey Knapp, ‘Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England’, Representations 44 (1993), 29-59; Kilian Schindler, Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama: The Limits of Toleration (2023), Introduction

Week 2: 22 October 

Rev Dr Brian Mac Cuarta (Campion Hall) – ‘Irish wheat for London’s food crisis, 1630-1631’

Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy 1577-1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 30 (1980), 1-22; Norman Gras, The evolution of the English corn market from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (Cambridge MA, 1915), 77-86; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Harvest crises in early seventeenth-century Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, 11 (1984), 5-18; Buchanan Sharp, Famine and scarcity in late medieval and early modern England: the regulation of grain marketing, 1256-1631 (Cambridge, 2016), 215-35

Week 3: 29 October 

Prof Brendan Kane (University of Connecticut) – ‘Paradox and periodization: The curious case of gavelkind’

Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the conquest of Ireland: a study in legal imperialism (Cambridge, 1985), ch.4; William Sprigg, A Modest Plea for an Equal Common-Wealth Against Monarchy (London, 1659), 58-75.

Week 4: 5 November 

Dr Hannah Dawson (King’s College London) – ‘Feminism and Republicanism’

Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (1998).

Week 5: 12 November 

Dr Martin Ingram (Brasenose College) – ‘Regulating Sex in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’

Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 6; Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 5; Martin Ingram, Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600 (Cambridge, 2017), ch. 11.

Week 6: 19 November 

Prof. Neil Murphy (University of Northumbria) – ‘Henry VIII’s Wars and English Spying in the 1540s’

Stephen Alford, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 2012); Amy Blakeway, ‘Spies and Intelligence in Scotland, c.1530-1550’, in Sara Butler and K.J. Kesselring (eds.), Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain (Leiden, 2018), 83-104; Neil Murphy, ‘Spies, Informers and Thomas Howard’s Defence of England’s Northern Frontier in 1523’, Historical Research 93 (2020), 252-72.

Week 7: 26 November 

Dr Patrick McGhee (Christ Church) – ‘Navigators, Pilgrims, and “Heathens”: History, Humanity, and Inheritance in the British Atlantic World, c. 1580-1626’

David Harris Sacks, ‘The Certain and Full Discovery of the World: Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot’, in Robert Fox (ed.), Thomas Harriot: Science and Discovery in the English Renaissance (London, 2022), 11-49; Matthew Dimmock, ‘Faith, Form and Faction: Samuel Purchas’s “Purchas His Pilgrimage” (1613)’, Renaissance Studies, 28 (2014), 262-78.

Week 8: 3 December 

Dr Grant Tapsell (Lady Margaret Hall) ‘Editing Archbishop Sancroft's Letters: A Quick Fix in Sixteen Easy Years’

Patrick Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft (2006), ch. 8; R.A.P.J. Beddard, 'William Sancroft', ODNB; Grant Tapsell, 'A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Later Stuarts', in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (2013), ch. 11

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Ceola Daly

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8

Time: 5.15 p.m.

Location: Schwarzman 10.424

Please email the convenors to be added to the Grad Forum mailing list.

Week 2: 20 October

Kathryn Hempstead (Merton) – ‘Digital Transcriptions of Early Modern Texts: Questions of Ethics and Pragmatics’

Week 4: 3 November

Akrivi Ventouras (St Hilda’s) – ‘Andrewes and Recognition’

Beatrice Cox O'Brien (St Antony’s) – 'Manuscript Matrix: Mapping a Late Seventeenth Century Miscellany Network’

Week 6: 17 November

Daisy Tozer (Balliol) – ‘Reading for Malcontent in the Verse Satire of John Marston’

Bodil Hvass Kjems (University of Copenhagen) – ‘Feminism in Early Modern Scandinavia: Renegotiating Female Learning and Agency in Petrus Hedengrahn's Mulieres Philosophantes (1699)’

Week 8: 1 December

Speakers TBD

Convenors: Wes Williams, Marie Raulier, and Luke O'Sullivan

Dates: Thursdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7

Time: 12.30–2 p.m. (except Week 3: see below)

Week 1: 15 October (Maison Française d'Oxford, Salon) 

Introductory session: all welcome.

Week 3: 29 October, 12.15–1.45 p.m. (St John's, New Seminar Room)

Katherine Stratton (Lincoln College, Oxford) –  'Reading and Riding the Natural World: Horsemanship, Education and the Ecologies of Early Modern Learning Spaces.' 

Please note the earlier time and location change.

Week 5: 12 November (Maison Française d'Oxford, Auditorium)

Olivier Guerrier (Toulouse II — Jean-Jaurès) – 'Chasse et Lettres dans la Première modernité.'

Week 7: 26 November (Maison Française d'Oxford, Salon) 

Olivier Séguin-Brault (Magdalen College, Oxford) – 'Rabelais σχολιαστής : la folie des mots.'

Convenors: Filippo de Vivo (St Edmund Hall); Leah Clark (Kellogg); Jane Crawshaw Stevens (Brookes); Zoe Farrell (St Edmund Hall); Federica Gigante (History of Science Museum); Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter); Emanuela Vai (Worcester).

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7

Time: 4.30–6.15 p.m.

Location: Old Dining Hall, St Edmund Hall

Website: https://italianhistory.site.ox.ac.uk/home

Week 1: 13 October 

Filippo de Vivo (Oxford) — 'Possible friends: The Ottoman Empire in Venetian Knowledge Practices'

Week 3: 27 October 

Katia Occhi (Trento) — 'An environmental history of the “timber frontier” in the early modern period: sources, methods, problems'

Week 5: 10 November 

Achille Marotta (Oxford) — 'From documents to artefacts: Genoese converts in Tunis and their material corpus'

Week 7: 24 November 

Anne Dunlop (Melbourne and Merton) — 'Marco Polo and all that: Italian art and Mongol Asia'

Convenors: Lorna Hutson, Ted Tregear, Bart Van Es, and Gill Woods

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7

Time: 5.15–7.15 p.m.

Location: TS Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College (except Week 5: see below)

Refreshments served. All welcome.

Week 1: 13 October

Meet the Faculty with Profs Peter McCullough, Emma Smith and Bart Van Es 

Week 3: 27 October

Prof Nicholas McDowell (University of Exeter) – '"Bare ruin'd quires": Milton, the Book Trade, and Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare (1640)'

Week 5: 10 November (Muir Room, Merton College)

Prof Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) – 'Racial Futurity: Labour, Property, and Heritability in Early Modern England'

Week 7: 24 November

Prof Pascale Aebischer (University of Exeter) – '"Meed for meed, death for a deadly deed": prefiguring Measure for Measure in Titus Andronicus”

Convenors: Filippo de Vivo, Catherine Jenkinson, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Giora Sternberg

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8

Time: 2–3.30 p.m.

Location: Rector’s Drawing Room, Exeter College

Week 2: 20 October

Mary Laven (Cambridge) – 'The Renaissance on the Beach: Spatial and Material Encounters on la spiaggia romana in the Sixteenth Century'

Chair: Filippo de Vivo

Week 4: 3 November

Avi Lifschitz (Oxford) – 'Holding a Monarch to Account: Frederick II's Writings in the Public Sphere'

Chair: Giora Sternberg

Week 6: 17 November

Rebekah Clements (Autonomous University of Barcelona and ICREA) – 'The Imjin War (1592-1598) and Early Modern East Asia'

Chair: Giuseppe Marcocci

Week 8: 1 December

Eli Bernstein (Oxford) – 'Re-thinking Renaissance Humanism'

Chair: Catherine Jenkinson

Convenors: Ros Ballaster, Lucy Powell, Henry Power, and David Taylor

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8

Time: 5.30–7 p.m. (except Week 4: see below)

Location: Schwarzman 10.019 (except Week 8: see below)

Week 2: 20 October

Emily Senior (Cambridge) – 'Colonial Ecologies of the Book'

Week 4: 3 November, 12.30–2 p.m.

Timothy Michael (Oxford) – 'The Lost Lucan: A New Augustan Epic'

Week 6: 17 November

Markman Ellis (Queen Mary) – 'Sancho's Library: Books and Reading in the Letters of Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)'

Week 8: 1 December (Schwarzman 00.079)

Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph) – 'On Occasion, Phillis: Wheatley and the Affordances of Epistolarity'

Convenors: Tom Wynn and Avi Lifschitz

An interdisciplinary research seminar supported by the Faculty of History, the Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Voltaire Foundation.

Further information: www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk 

Week 1: 14 October, 5 p.m. (Sophia Sheppard Room, Magdalen College)

Mark-Georg Dehrmann (Humboldt University, Berlin), Barry Murnane (Oxford) and Stefanie Stockhorst (Potsdam)

Practices of knowledge production in 18th-century Europe

Discussion of the book Crafts and Knowledge in the 18th Century (2026)

Week 3: 29 October, 5 p.m. (Clarendon Institute, Walton Street)

Shmuel Feiner (Bar-Ilan University) – The emotional experience of Jewish secularisation

Joint session with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies. Followed by a drinks reception

Week 5: 11 November, 5 p.m. (Summer Common Room, Magdalen College)

Stéphane Van Damme (Maison Française d’Oxford) – Materialist New York? French late Enlightenment in the early American republic

Week 6: 19 November, 5 p.m. (Magdalen College Auditorium)

Karen Stolley (Emory University) – Saber/conocer: ways of knowing in the Hispanic Enlightenment

Annual Besterman Lecture of the Voltaire Foundation. Followed by a drinks reception.

Week 7: 25 November, 5 p.m. (Summer Common Room, Magdalen College)

Maria Floruțău (Cambridge and Uppsala) – Beyond the metropolis: Enlightenment learned societies in Batavia, Calcutta, and Manila

Convenors: Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa and Toma-Jin Morikawa-Fouquet

Our seminar series centers on global, connected, transnational, and comparative intellectual history. We hope to create conversations between researchers at all career stages and across a wide range of specializations—from the early modern circulation of knowledge to modern debates over race, gender, and anti-imperialism. All are welcome, and no expertise in the particular regions, periods, or approaches the speaker specializes in is required. To be added to the mailing list, please contact the seminar conveners

Week 2: 20 October, 5–6.30 p.m. (Hovendon Room, All Souls College)

Professor Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (University of Amsterdam) – 'Consider the Mantis: IKaggen, Means of Subsistence, and Misunderstanding Across the Cape Colonial Frontier'

Week 3: 27 October, 5–6.30 p.m. (Hovendon Room, All Souls College)

Dr. Sarah Dunstan (University of Glasgow) – 'Dismantling the Intellectual Equipment of Mankind? Scientific Authority, Bandung, and the Problem of Race'

Week 4: 5 November, 9.30 a.m.–5.30 p.m. (Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies) and 6 November, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. (Maison Française d'Oxford)

Across Anti-Imperial Metropolises: Nonstate Approaches to Modern Japan-France History (Two-day International Conference)

Registration required: https://ojhw.site.ox.ac.uk/events/across-anti-imperial-metropolises-international-conference

Week 6: 17 November, 5–6.30 p.m. (Hovendon Room, All Souls College)

Professor Sophie Smith and Dr. Alice Baldock – Workshop on Gender and Global Intellectual History

The workshop is open to all; graduate students and other early-career researchers of all specializations are particularly encouraged to attend. Please complete the registration form in advance.

We will begin with two short talks given by the speakers, which will introduce the assigned readings, followed by a period of open discussion where participants can respond to questions raised by the talks and readings and share connections to their own research. The assigned readings are:

1. Alice Baldock, “Body (of) Knowledge: Women, the Body, and Dance in Postwar Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 81, no. 2 (2022): 365–79.
2. Sophie Smith, “Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part One: Rethinking the ‘Origins’ of US Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 3 (2024): 425–54; “Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part Two: Activists, Academics, and the Future,” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 4 (2024): 633–79.
3. Mrinalini Sinha, "A Global Perspective on Gender: What's South Asia Got to Do With It?", in South Asian Feminisms, eds. Loomba and Ritty (Duke University Press, 2012), 356-74; “Universal Rights and the Specters of Indian Feminism, Part II: An Interview with Mrinalini Sinha,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, September 23, 2026.

Week 8: 1 December, 5–6.30 p.m. (Hovendon Room, All Souls College)

Professor Rosario López (University of Málaga) – 'J. G. A. Pocock and the Politics of Going Global'

Week 8: 2 December, 4.30–6.30 p.m. (Rector's Drawing Room, Exeter College)

Professor Kapil Raj (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) – 'Bringing the Elephant into the Room: Garcia de Orta's Colóquios dos simples e drogas… da Índia (1563) as Knowledge on the Move'

Joint session with the Iberian History Seminar.

Week 8: 3 December, 5–6.30 p.m. (Schwarzman 20.402)

Professor Kapil Raj (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) – Early-Career Workshop

Registration required. Registration will open one month in advance.

Joint session with the Iberian History Seminar.

Convenors: H. Smith (St. Hilda’s); K. Navickas (Worcester); P. Gauci (Lincoln)

Dates: Tuesdays, every week

Time: 4.15 p.m.

Location: Beckington Room, Lincoln College or online via Teams (contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk for the link to join the meeting online)

Tea and coffee will be available from 4 p.m. All research students working in this period are encouraged to attend; anyone else interested is very welcome.

For information about the seminar, and news of forthcoming events, visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oxford-seminar-in-mainly-British-History-1680-1850/123050627891042  We would be happy to post notices of interest to our group – contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk

Week 1: 13 October

Introductory Party (in-person event only)

Week 2: 20 October

Conor Muller (Balliol) – 'With or Without the King's Leave: Mobile Labour, International Migration Controls and the British State c. 1800'

Week 3: 27 October

Victoria Perry (Donald Insall Architects) – 'History, Community and Heritage Regeneration in Georgetown, Guyana'

Week 4: 3 November

Katrina Navickas (Worcester) – 'Latchmere Allotments, Battersea: The Long History of Popular Resistance, Enclosure and the Poor Laws in a Radical Locale'

Week 5: 10 November

David Nash (Jesus) – 'Serious Female Criminality: A Rethinking of the Historiography'

Week 6: 17 November

Brendan Tam (Warwick) – 'Claiming Friendship: The Language of Political Friendship in the late Hanoverian period, 1760-1830s'

Week 7: 24 November

Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster) – 'The Settlement of the Poor in England c. 1660–1780: Law and Social Change'

Week 8: 1 December

Estella Chen (Queens) – '"Unruly" Spectators? Regulating and Policing the Courtroom Audience in English Criminal Trials, c. 1780-1850'

Date: 18 November, Week 6

Time: 12.30–2 p.m.

Location: Schwarzman 10.424

A sandwich lunch will be provided. All are welcome.

'How to . . . smell, hear, touch and taste the past'

The first of the CEMS cross-disciplinary 'How to . . .?' seminars will be led by Professor Leah Clark (Kellogg) on ‘Sensory Methodologies: Piloting a Sensory Toolkit’.

We will be workshopping a sensory artefact toolkit. The toolkit is a work in progress, but it allows us to explore different methodologies on how to tackle historical artefacts. Please come along with an early modern 'artefact' to toolkit ('artefact' can be any historical object of inquiry (an object, a text, a space, an ephemeral experience)). The best kind of objects are those that raise methodological problems, things that don’t have archival evidence for them, or require an alternative approach to the traditional ways of doing historical research. It’s quite a creative exercise, so definitely bring a sense of flexibility and willingness to push the boundaries of historical research! This toolkit was developed by a team of interdisciplinary scholars as part of the Sensory Subjectivities project.

Please send a PowerPoint slide of your historical artefact by Friday, Week 3 (30 October) to the CEMS research coordinator, Clémence Smith (clemence.smith@oriel.ox.ac.uk) (or of course if you have the original/facsimile, please bring that along!).

Recommended readings:

• Larissa Brewer-García and Cécile Fromont, 'From Hell to Hell: Central Africans and Catholic Visual Catechesis in the Early Modern Atlantic Slave Trade', Art History 46, 5 (2023): 946-77.
• Aaron M. Hyman and Barbara E. Mundy, 'The Colonial Archive and Its Fictions', Colonial Latin American Review 32, 3 (2023): 312-44. 

Convenors: Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College), Daniel O’Driscoll (Jesus College),  Glyn Redworth (Exeter College), Joana Neves Teixeira (Lincoln College), and Cecilia Tarruell (Wadham College)

Dates: Wednesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8

Time: 4.30–6.30 p.m.

Location: Rector's Drawing Room, Exeter College

For more information, please check https://iberianhistory.site.ox.ac.uk/upcoming-talks, follow us on @iberiahistoryox.bsky.social, or email iberian@history.ox.ac.uk

Week 2: 21 October

Max Deardorff (University of Florida) – 'The Forgotten Role of Oared Vessels in the Construction of the Sixteenth Century Spanish Overseas Empires'

Inaugural talk of the 2026-27 academic year

Week 4: 4 November

Bruno A. Martinho (CHAM, Nova University, Lisbon / National Palace of Sintra) – 'Sensory Iberia: The Consumption of Chinese Porcelain in Early Modern Iberian Court Culture'

Joint session with the Court Studies Seminar.

Week 6: 18 November

Julia McClure (University of Glasgow/ Koch Centre, Oxford) – 'The Tlaxcala Codex: Bridging Indigenous Knowledge and Colonial Transformations'

Week 8: 2 December

Kapil Raj (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) – 'Bringing the Elephant into the Room: Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas… da Índia (1563) as Knowledge on the Move'

Joint session with the Global Intellectual History Seminar.

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Kathryn Hempstead

Dates: Wednesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8

Time: 5.15 p.m.

Location: Schwarzman 10.424

A friendly and collaborative space for graduate students working on the early modern period across Faculties.

Please email the convenors to be added to the IEMGW mailing list.

Week 2: 21 October

Welcome Event

New and returning graduates are warmly invited to our first event of the academic year. We will be sharing advice on relevant libraries and resources for new students and providing information about our subsequent meetings. 

Week 4: 4 November

Printing Workshop  

Keen to learn about how early modern books were printed? Come along to the Bibliographical Press in the Schola Musicae, Old Bodleian Library! Guided by the Bodleian’s expert printer, Richard Lawrence, participants will have the opportunity to do some typesetting and printing.  

Week 6: 18 November 

Comenius and Polymathy

Join us for a crossover session with the Comenius reading group. Discussion will focus on John Amos Comenius, the early modern Czech philosopher and pedagogue. Suggestions for reading will be circulated prior to the meeting via our mailing list. 

Week 8: 2 December 

Thesis Workshop 

An opportunity for participants to share their current research projects, brainstorm ideas, and plan for the year ahead. Participants are welcome to bring questions and issues they’re having to the group to discuss and seek advice. 

Term card forthcoming.