Mobility and Early Modernity: Religion, Science, and Commerce in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Day 1)

—a conference organized by Sebouh D. Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles; Matthew Kadane, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; and Naomi Taback, Temple University

In Honor of Margaret Jacobco-sponsored by UCLA Department of HistoryMobility and all that it entailed does not figure as an analytical category in the prodigious body of scholarship created by Margaret Jacob, though it is certainly implied in much of her work from her earliest explorations of the unexpected connections between Newtonianism and Protestant theology, to her pioneering work in the transnational history of science, radical Enlightenment, freemasonry, and industry, much of it based on British, French, Belgian and Dutch sources, and finally in her more recent study of cosmopolitanism, Strangers Nowhere in the World.

The conference brings together scholars working on novel forms of knowledge and identity forged during the early modern age at the confluence of increasing mobility both in Europe and the larger world beyond. The speakers have worked with some of these insights presaged in Jacob’s scholarship but developed them in their own distinctive fashion to help shape religious, cultural, commercial, and transnational history in the twenty-first century. Rather than looking to celebrate past accomplishments, the conference aims to take stock of present trends in scholarship and suggest new paths for the future.

Image
Job Adriaensz. Berckheijde
The Old Exchange of Amsterdam
Haarlem, circa 1670
Wikimedia.org

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Speakers
Sebouh D. Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles
Guillaume Calafat, Institute for Advanced Study
Vincenzo Ferrone, University of Turin
Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
Matthew Kadane, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Jesse Sadler, Independent Scholar
Catherine Secretan, Centre national de la recherche scientifique
Jacob Soll, University of Southern California
Naomi Taback, Temple University
Francesca Trivellato, Yale University

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9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration

10:00 a.m.
Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles
Welcome

Matthew Kadane, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Opening Remarks 

10:30 a.m.
Mobilities and Across Water and Land
Moderator: Deborah Elizabeth Harkness, University of Southern California 

Sebouh D. Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles
“Reverendissimi in Christo Patris: Letters of Recommendation, Networks, and Mobility in the Life of Thomas Vanandets‘i, an Armenian Printer in Amsterdam, 1677–1707″

11:15 a.m.
Matthew Kadane, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
“Mobility and the Path to the Enlightenment”           

12:00 p.m.
Coffee Break 

12:15 p.m.
Guillaume Calafat, Institute for Advanced Study
“A Mediterranean Radical Experience? Henry Robinson (1604–1664) and Early Modern Mediterranean Toleration”

1:00 p.m.
Lunch

2:15 p.m.
Cosmopolitans and Urban Spaces
Moderator: David Brafman, Getty Research Institute 

Francesca Trivellato, Yale University
“‘The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category’: Reading Margaret Jacob as an Economic Historian”

3:00 p.m.
Jesse Sadler, Independent Scholar
“The Economics and Emotions of Mobility among Early Modern Netherlandish Merchants”

3:45 p.m.
Coffee Break

4:00 p.m.
Catherine Secretan, Centre national de la recherche scientifique
“Utrecht as a 17^th-Century European Intellectual Carrefour: Back and Forth Exchanges between Arminianism and Puritanism”

4:45 p.m.
Reception

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After booking Day 1 below please remember to also book your spot for Day 2.