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'Europe's Asian Centuries, Trading Eurasia 1600-1830'
Maxine Berg of the University of Warwick has been awarded £1.4 million to explore the impact of the first great global trade shift of luxury goods from Asia to Europe. The prestigious award from the European Research Council (ERC) will fund a group of researchers to use industrial archives, private collections and major museum collections from across the world to investigate trade in the period 1600-1830, a time which stimulated the European Industrial Revolution. The four-year project, entitled "Europe's Asian Centuries, Trading Eurasia 1600-1830", commenced on 1st September 2010.
AHRC Research Network: ‘Global Arts: East Meets West. Creativity and Cultural Interchange in the Early Modern World’
Academics from the centre are involved in a new partnership with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Victoria and Albert Museum, part of the AHRC Research Networks and Workshops (Creativity) Scheme, entitled ‘Global Arts: East Meets West. Creativity and Cultural Interchange in the Early Modern World’. This project explores the impact of east-west cultural interchange on creativity and innovation between the 15th and 19th centuries.
The network organises regular meetings, joining academics and curators from different disciplines together to exchange knowledge, sources and information. The introductory meeting was held at Warwick in January 2007; the second at the Ashmolean Museum in May 2007 focused on how ideas and technologies were invented and travelled along trade routes. Contributors included Craig Clunas, who gave a provocative overview of the theoretical approaches to the material culture of East-West transfer; Shelagh Vainker and Oliver Watson from the Ashmolean, who presented work on Chinese ceramics and cross cultural transfer in Islamic pottery; Ian Glover, who introduced his work on the spread of glass production from the Near East, via South Asia, and from China into northern Vietnam; and Jan Christie, who commented on her work on Javanese temple tax records. There was lively debate and discussion of ways forward. These will be explored at the third meeting in November 2007 at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, where contributors will consider the impact of court cultures on East-West exchange. If you would like to know more about the Network please contact Helen Clifford on museum@swaledale.org
Cities of Enlightenment in Global Context: Clerical Sociability and Civil Conversations
This collaborative project explores the relationships between Enlightenment and metropolitan culture in a global context through the analysis of sociability. It will examine how capital cites attained a degree of cultural and intellectual centrality during the period 1660-1800, and the role played by knowledge in the shaping of the institutional, scientific and cultural infrastructure of the modern metropolis. Through a series of case studies (starting next year with London, Rome, Paris and Mexico City), it will examine the connection between the world of learning and scholars and the emergence of urban identities in this period. It will pay particular attention to the dialogues between clerical and non-clerical groups, and also to the role of international exchange in the changing intellectual function of the metropolis.
Recent scholarship has emphasised the need to reshape the comparative research agenda, and to move away from traditional `Franco-centric’ histories or from those that concentrate on national contexts. In addition, new cultural histories of eighteenth-century capital cities and urban histories of science have paid attention to the spaces of Enlightenment and to different cultures of mobility, opening up perspectives beyond the study of individual travelling scholars.
This project combines and takes forward these new perspectives in two ways: to broaden and test the European comparative framework to its colonial locations; and to challenge, through a consideration of urban sociability, the notion of the Enlightenment as mainly a process of intellectual secularisation.
The project is concerned with the social production of knowledge, and of the transmission of knowledge as ideas, within and across particular urban settings. It combines the methodologies of cultural history (in its concern identify formations, metropolitan culture, practices of mobility and travelling culture, practices of sociability, publishing history, history of readings) and of intellectual history (in its concern with the textual articulation and transmission of ideas that embody claims of validity beyond their local or national settings.
The Warwick-Maison Francaise Programme: Science and European Capitals
http://www.mfo.ac.uk/recherche/module/Histoire/savoiretcapitaleshist.htm
Since the early modern period, the metropolises have become the centre of a new conception of urban identity: the world-city. Focusing on a long period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, this collaborative project examines a theme that has emerged as central in recent studies of modern urban history and the urban history of science: metropolitan scientific culture. From the history of cultural capital in Europe to the analysis of the global-city, this project encourages scholars to think beyond national boundaries and to question the cultural centrality of the metropolis.
By studying the circulation of knowledge in specific urban sites, it is possible to develop a differential, cultural cartography and to measure the unequal distribution of knowledge and of sites of knowledge in the construction of urban Europe in the eighteenth century. By working not merely on one capital city but on the dynamic between metropolises, it is possible to emphasize the role played by knowledge and intellectual networks in the production of metropolitan identity through these local differences, and to reshape the traditional problem of centre and periphery.
An earlier stage of the project explored the interpretation of European capital cities as centres of knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment, in order to investigate connections between the world of learning and the emergence of urban identities in Europe. This contributed to a wider reflection on cultural history of capital cities and intellectual milieus.
This part of the project considers the European capital city as characterized by a new idea of the urban territory; the shaping of a metropolitan society; the centralization of intellectual activity and cultural facilities (theatres, museums, libraries, university, etc). The inventory of equipments (libraries, laboratories, etc.); of intellectual and educational institutions; and other forms of sociability which served as structures to welcome foreigners; also provides a prosopography of scholars by signalling clearly the new distribution of knowledge and of scientists that emerged during the Enlightenment. But this study alone cannot suffice, because it supposes that the criteria of a ‘capital’ were stable between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. To break with this teleological approach which encloses the construction of European capitals in a frozen and finalist perspective, it is useful to extend the methodology with a study of the invention of an intellectual functionality of the modern city. The conversion of knowledge into ‘symbolic capital’, does not result in a simple accumulation of data and of facilities. This project therefore reinterprets the notion of ‘cultural capital’ by giving it a dynamic, conflictual dimension.
Online Plays from the Napoleonic Period
This project is being directed by Katherine Astbury (Department of French Studies).
Final-year students on Katherine Astbury's modules The French Revolution and Revolution and Empire are involved in the process of digitally preserving one of the University’s most significant special collections, the Marandet collection of 18th- and 19th-century plays by selecting the plays to be preserved and then producing original research based on ‘their’ plays. Plays of the period are the cultural form most obviously affected by ideology and public opinion and while the Revolution is now reasonably well covered by available editions of plays, there is currently no readily accessible material on theatre of the Napoleonic period available on-line or in student-friendly editions. In the course of 2006, the library began an ambitious project to digitise the 300 plays in the Marandet collection that cover the period 1789-99. The project to digitise the Napoleonic period aims both to preserve material and to make the collection as a whole much more visible. Unlike the Bibliothèque Nationale’s electronic material, all the plays are fully searchable. This project will place Warwick firmly at the centre of ongoing research into theatre of the Revolution and the First Empire. In addition, it is creating new learning opportunities for Warwick undergraduates by involving them in the process of preserving texts for future generations of researchers. It takes the notion of research-led teaching to a new level as the work is an outcome of a genuine partnership between students, tutors, and library staff.
Website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/french/marandet/
Literary responses to the trauma of the French Revolution
Katherine Astbury currently holds a British Academy small grant and an AHRC Matching Leave award to complete a monograph on Literary responses to the trauma of the French Revolution which reassesses literary production of the revolutionary decade in the light of trauma theory. The French Revolution is generally seen as marking a watershed in literary production and while much has been done on politically-motivated literature where events of the Revolution are represented or transposed, few have explored in detail the large proportion of literary production that appears to have no direct political engagement with the events of the Revolution such as pastoral novels and moral tales. Recent work in the States on Revolutionary theatre has demonstrated the importance of reassessing long-standing assumptions about the cultural production of the Revolution through detailed contextual and textual analysis. This renewed interest in debates about theatrical culture and the Revolution has not yet resulted in major studies exploring fruitfully the continuities between old regime and Revolution in literature, and this monograph will reassess the process of literary production and fill a significant gap in current research on the Revolutionary period because it will focus on a body of texts barely accorded critical attention before.
