New Directions

Core Program 2014–15
Explorations, Encounters, and the Circulation of Knowledge, 1600–1830

Conference 1: New Directions

—organized by Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside, and Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles

The circulation of knowledge, objects, and people has attracted scholarly attention in recent years from a variety of disciplines. Explorations, Encounters, and the Circulation of Knowledge, 1600–1830 is a series of three conferences that draw on several strands of this scholarship to examine how knowledge was shaped by long-distance voyages and encounters in the global seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The first conference considers the new directions emerging in studies of exploration and encounters from roughly 1600 to 1830. Exploration history has been transformed in the last decades of the twentieth century by a welcome turn to postcolonial and feminist critiques of the grand narratives of discovery and progress that had characterized the field in the past. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, indigenous perspectives of such encounters are no longer presented as a counter history to that of mobile Europeans who initiated a “fatal impact” into a static, local culture. Instead, practices of indigenous people are often central to symmetrical approaches that consider ambiguities, uncertain outcomes, and contingencies in these encounters. Session 1 will bring together scholars conducting innovative work on how diverse voyages and voyagers, indigenous and European, mutually constituted (not without conflict) knowledge and aesthetic practices across cultural lines.

Speakers:
Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
John Gascoigne, University of New South Wales
Noah Heringman, University of Missouri
Donna Landry, University of Kent (UK)
Christopher Parsons, Northeastern University
Nigel Rigby, National Maritime Museum (UK)
Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
Michael Wintroub, UC Berkeley

Program

Friday, November 14

9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration

10:00 a.m.
Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
Welcome

Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles and
Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside
Opening Remarks

Session 1
Chair: Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside

Michael Wintroub, University of California, Berkeley
“Metrologies of Contact on an Early Voyage to Sumatra”

John Gascoigne, University of New South Wales
“Sound and Cross-Cultural Communication: European Explorers and the Peoples of the Pacific in the Long Eighteenth Century”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/mqjjzcbzz1khkacutckdt3t3sxwnea4z

Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
“Domains of Entanglement: Episodes from Indigenous London”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/sxvmjhv78koaep4j8u9i8lt4wayfyxwz

12:30 p.m.
Lunch

2:00 p.m.

Session 2
Chair: Patrick Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles

Nigel Rigby, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK
“Cook, Museums, and the History of Exploration”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/x7xjvtnf4vwaquqx0e5maztkmfn2sgw5

Noah Heringman, University of Missouri
“Primitive Rocks and Primitive Customs: Geological and Human Time in Pacific Voyage Narratives”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/77ceeoraup243l2xxr1s8vxq6fx3iy85

Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
“Flows and Frictions: Nahua Knowledge and the Limits of Circulation in the Early Modern Atlantic”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/ilzjooayhblj9gme4pa3304isohs8n6e

4:30 p.m.
Reception

Saturday, November 15

9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration

10:00 a.m.

Session 3
Chair: Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles

Donna Landry, University of Kent
“Horizons of Enlightenment: Journeying with an Ottoman Dervish and Two English Explorers”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/mc2mgte3tlkm5jd07fpijolluz1izx5z

Christopher M. Parsons, Northeastern University
“The Discovery of a Not-So-New World in French North America”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/xqqbi7jxdjtx0375s1ji88yvlqqk76t0

Roundtable Discussion

12:30 p.m.
Program concludes