麻豆AV

is organizing a public panel on听The Long Eighteenth Century's Public Spheres,听辞苍听Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 6 p.m.听in听Leacock 232, 麻豆AV, 855 Sherbrooke West.

The event is free and open to the public.

Five 麻豆AV professors (,听,听,听, and听) will discuss historical formulations of the public sphere from the perspectives of their respective disciplines.
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Public Visibility versus Public Representativeness: The Life and Times of a Distinction - Arash Abizadeh (Political Theory)

The mid-seventeenth century saw the emergence in Europe of a distinction between two senses of publicity: visibility versus representativeness. This distinction played a key role in the rise of practices of religious toleration. It has also recently come under attack in Quebec public discourse.

听(MPhil Oxford, PhD Harvard) is associate professor of political theory at 麻豆AV. His research focusses on democratic theory and questions of identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; immigration and border control; the relation between the passions, rhetoric, discourse, and politics; and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. He is currently completing a book on Hobbes's ethics, titled听Hobbes and the Two Dimensions of Normativity.
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Experimental Publics - Matthew Hunter (Art History)

In听Leviathan and the Air-Pump听(1985), historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer articulate an account of the public formed by experimental philosophers in seventeenth-century England that has been widely influential in histories of scientific knowledge, art, and early modern culture. Interweaving a configuration of politics with its epistemic commitments, this model of the public was also menaced from within by the experimental movement鈥檚 leading figures. In this talk, I consider how attention to the architecture of those shadowy counter-models compels us to think again about the place of visual images and experimental artifacts in public science.听

听is Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at 麻豆AV. His research focuses on art and architecture of the long eighteenth century, with special attention to intersections among art, science, and technology. His publications include听Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London听(University of Chicago Press, 2013),The Clever Object听(Wiley, 2013; coedited with Francesco Lucchini), and听Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Science and Art听(Springer, 2010; coedited with Roman Frigg). An editor of听Grey Room, Hunter is currently writing a book on Joshua Reynolds鈥檚 experimental chemistry and the longer history of temporally evolving chemical objects in the British Enlightenment.
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Interacting with Print - Andrew Piper听(Language, Literature and Culture)

This project aims to reorient our thinking about publics as stable spherical contexts and see them instead in more ecological and interactive terms. Our goal is to understand the ways in which individuals interacted with print media in the long eighteenth century, print interacted with other media during this period, and how these practices generated new social groupings. Our central question becomes something like: how does a particular configuration of different media become associated with historically specific practices to produce new kinds of social communities?

Andrew Piper听is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of German and European Literature and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at 麻豆AV. He is a former Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellow and is currently the director of .txtLAB, a digital humanities laboratory at 麻豆AV. His work focuses on the intersection of literature and technologies of reading from the eighteenth century to the present and follows three main lines of inquiry:

鈥� the history of networks and literary topologies;
鈥⑻齪ractices of textual circulation and transtextuality;
鈥⑻齦iterary quantity (the nexus of image, letter, and number).

His most recent book,听Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times听(Chicago, 2012),听addresses current debates about the future of reading through a study of the long history of our embodied interactions with books.
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Vermeer鈥檚 Public Sphere - Angela Vanhaelan (Art History)

The visual culture of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic conveys the impression that the Dutch were obsessed with every minute aspect of home life. Paintings of women in domestic interiors proliferated, as artists like Johannes Vermeer turned middle-class domesticity into a new subject for art. Such imagery was unprecedented and there were no analogous visual traditions in the rest of Europe. While Vermeer鈥檚 peaceful paintings of the home seem far removed鈥攅ven protected鈥攆rom the realm of politics and public life, in this presentation, I reassess the obsessive picturing of private life by examining its potential to craft new notions of the public sphere.

is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at 麻豆AV. She is the author of听The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic听(Penn State University Press, 2012), and听Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City听(2003). She has co-edited (with Joseph Ward) the volume听Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe. Performance, Geography, Privacy听(2012); and recently co-edited (with Bronwen Wilson) a special issue of the journal听Art History. Vanhaelen has published articles in journals such as听Art Bulletin,听Oxford Art Journal,听Art History, and听RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics.
She was a co-investigator in the international, multi-disciplinary research collaboration, 鈥淢aking Publics in Early Modern Europe鈥� from 2005 to 2010.
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The Public Life of Scamels - Paul Yachnin (English)

In Shakespeare鈥檚 early 17th-century play,听The听Tempest, Caliban says to Stephano, 鈥淚'll bring thee to clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee young scamels from the rock.鈥� No one knows what scamels are. In the 18thcentury, scamels became a matter of public concern, their nature a subject for robust, learned, and good-humoured debate. The making public of Caliban鈥檚 scamels is exemplary of both the emergence of a distinctively literary public in the 18th听century and also the growth of an enhanced public life for ordinary people that finds many of its origins in Shakespeare鈥檚 playhouse.

Paul Yachnin听is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies and former Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at 麻豆AV. He directed the Making Publics (MaPs) project (2005-10) and now directs the Early Modern Conversions project. Among his publications are the books,听Stage-Wrights听and听The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England听(with Anthony Dawson) editions of听Richard II听(with Dawson) andThe Tempest; and six edited books, including听Making Publics in Early Modern Europe听(with Bronwen Wilson) andForms of Association听(with Marlene Eberhart) His book-in-progress,听Making Publics in Shakespeare鈥檚 Playhouse, is under contract with University of Edinburgh Press. His ideas and the ideas of his MaPs colleagues about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, 鈥淭he Origins of the Modern Public.鈥� Bronwen Wilson and he are editing one of the Early Modern Conversions volumes, provisionally titled, 鈥淐onversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body.鈥� A recent area of interest is higher education practice and policy, with publications in听Policy Options听and听University Affairs听and projects involving more than 25 Canadian universities.