March 2017 NUI Galway to Host Major International Conference on the Circulation of Reputations, Texts and Ideas from 1500-1800

A major international, multidisciplinary conference entitled, 'Reception, Reputation and Circulation in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800' (RECIRC) will be held at the Moore Institute at NUI Galway from 22-25 March. 

The RECIRC project is researching the impact made by women writers and their works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the conference reaches far wider to embrace cultural production by men and women, from 1500 through to the end of the eighteenth century. Talks will cover diverse topics such as Italian soldiers’ letters during the Dutch revolt, song and musical transmission, the international book trade, translations of French and Spanish poetry and fiction, saints’ reputations, bible-inspired embroidery, and digital approaches to literature and society.

Speaking about the conference, Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan said: “This is a great opportunity to hear about cutting-edge research in a range of fields from Literature, History, Languages, Art History to Digital Humanities, delivered by leading international researchers. The ERC funding has allowed us to bring an unusual mix of top scholars to Galway. We wanted to move beyond the RECIRC project’s remit in order to open up different ways of thinking about the transmission of ideas and reputations during the early modern period. This conference will present new evidence about the circulation of all kinds of materials across Europe and the New World.”

The conference will pose questions ranging from how texts circulated in the early modern world to how digital scholarship can help us understand networks of transmission and influence. It will bring together scholars working on the reception of texts, the reputations of authors and individuals, and the circulation of people and things across the world. Up to 57 speakers will attend the conference, hailing from a range of prestigious universities in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, USA and Ireland.

The conference, generated by the RECIRC project, is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Principal Investigator, Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan, and a team of researchers at the School of Humanities at NUI Galway.

The conference is open to the public. However, pre-registration is essential at: http://recirc.nuigalway.ie/conference2017/ or email recirc.conference@gmail.com.

The RECIRC project will run at the Moore Institute in the Hardiman Research Building at NUI Galway until 2019.

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