-Please let us know about upcoming events in Early Modern Studies in your department –
November 10, 2026 | 4: 30 pm | Elvehjem Building, L150
Dr. Farshid Emami (Associate Professor of Islamic Art History and Director of Graduate Studies at Rice University):
Reconstructing Forms, Reimagining Senses: The Glass-Clad Palaces of Early Modern Iran
Gombar/Duychak Lecture – Department of Art History – UW–Madison
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November 18, 2026 @ 7:30 pm CDT – 9:00 pm
CDT Hamel Music Center, Collins Recital Hall, 740 University Ave.
From Near Obscurity to Iconic Works: Bach’s Cello Suites – German, Nordic, and Slavic+ – UW–Madison
A Focus on the Humanities Lecture and Performance with Edward Klorman with Matthew Zalkind.
The six suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach—once dismissed as mere curiosities—are now revered as iconic works. They are performed worldwide by cellists of all ages, and they are moreover prominently used in pop culture such as film and television as well as in expressions of humanitarian advocacy. In this special Focus on the Humanities talk, Edward Klorman illustrates how and why Bach conceptualized this highly innovative music and tells the unlikely story of how the Cello Suites went from near obscurity to becoming the celebrated works that define the sound of the instrument. Matthew Zalkind performs selections from the Cello Suites, showing how Bach created rich harmonies and counterpoint using a single instrument.
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2026 Fall Semester — Past Events
September 29 | 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Papermaking on Library Mall with Robert Possehl
Holding History is hosting our annual Papermaking on Library Mall event on Tuesday, September 29, 2026. This hands-on public humanities event welcomes passersby to think about a writing technology that has changed the world while making paper by hand.
Come join local artist and collaborative arts specialist Robert Possehl to learn how to make paper! Participants will create handmade paper using pulp made from recycled rags, local plants (from Possehl’s family farm in Portage), and water from Lake Mendota. After the event, Possehl plans to curate a collaborative art exhibit from participant-made paper.
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October 9 | 3:00-5:00 pm – Van Hise 1312 (Madsen Room)
CEMS affiliates get-together and exchange current research and teaching.
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October 15–17 | Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
Conference: Cervantes, escritor alegre; regocijo de las musas
A conference exploring Cervantes’s use of alegría as a space where invention, irony, and play redefine the very conditions of human life.
Organized by Mercedes Alcalá Galán et al.
Speakers will include Steven Hutchinson, Chris Livanos, Elizabeth Bearden
Full program here: Newberry Library | Cervantes, escritor alegre; regocijo de las musas
In Cervantes, alegría is a vital, generous, and hopeful lightness—never frivolous, always profound—that opens spaces of lucidity, conviviality, and shared humanity. It may be evoked through notions such as regocijo, gozo, júbilo, deleite, dicha, contento, ventura, buen ánimo, optimismo: forms of creative, philosophical, and affective energy that ease suffering while affirming community, freedom, and imagination. Beyond humor, Cervantine alegría can be understood as a revolutionary stance, a force at once ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual. It is alegría as ethos, poetics, and community: a lucid, profound, and humane disposition that resists despair and sustains a shared horizon of conviviality.
In Cervantes, this alegría emerges as the capacity to live, create, and think together, as well as a gesture of freedom that unsettles tragedy, violence, and rigid hierarchies. Cervantine alegría is thus both individual and communal: a space where invention, irony, and play redefine the very conditions of human life.
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October 16 | 9-12 CDT: FISIER online seminar
Le droit a-t-il connu une Renaissance en Europe ?
Did Law have a Renaissance in Europe?
Luisa Brunori (École normale supérieure – PSL): Did Law have a Renaissance in Spain? [in English] / Le droit a-t-il connu une Renaissance en Espagne ?
The Spanish experience strongly suggests that law did have a Renaissance in Europe, but not as a simple rupture with the medieval legal tradition. In sixteenth-century Spain, the Renaissance was rather a process of transformation and renewal within continuity. The Spanish experience therefore complicates the traditional opposition between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ law. The Renaissance did not simply abandon scholasticism in favour of humanism, nor did Spanish legal thought merely preserve medieval categories unchanged. Rather, it reconstructed the inherited legal tradition in response to a new intellectual, social and economic environment. The history of Spanish law in the sixteenth century thus suggests that the legal Renaissance was fundamentally a reconfiguration of medieval legal knowledge: a process in which continuity provided the conceptual foundations for substantial transformation.
Tom Hamilton (Durham University): Did Law have a Renaissance in France? [in English] / Le droit a-t-il connu une Renaissance en France ?
This intervention draws on my ongoing research into the legal culture of sixteenth-century France. It contributes three related points for our collective discussion. First, the inheritance of Roman law and the tools of legal humanism shaped the professional disposition of magistrates and informed their legal practice. Second, the period conventionally identified as ‘Renaissance France’ is characterised by a greater degree of continuity across the sixteenth century than previous histories have allowed, despite the outbreak of civil war in 1562; as a result we might rebut critical misrepresentations of premodern legal practice that attempt to excuse the shortcomings of justice in the present. And third, these points become clear through an approach that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative approaches to both printed and manuscript evidence.
Répondants || Respondents:
Kathy H. Eden (Columbia University)
Xavier Prévost (Université de Bordeaux)
Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews)
Organisé par || Organised by
Centre Montaigne, Université de Bordeaux
Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University
Le séminaire est réservé aux membres des sociétés, centres, instituts et laboratoires de recherche qui font partie de la FISIER. Pour toute information, veuillez contacter fisier.info@gmail.com
The seminar is reserved for the members of the societies, research groups, labs and institutions that are associated with FISIER.
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October 29 | 3-7 pm | Helen C. White Hall 7191
Staged reading of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy
Bridget Anderson from ITS is happy to welcome auditors who either want to weigh in with their observations and comments on the performance or simply sit back and listen to a live reading of an early modern play. Syd Curran from ITS will also be sharing some dramaturgical context before we start reading.
What: a staged reading of The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Readers are undergraduates of Madison Community College and UW-Madison. This early modern play is the subject of Bridget Anderson’s dissertation research for the third chapter of her dissertation, “Little Eyases: Theatre By and About Children on the Early English Page and Stage,” which explores theatre and performance by children in England in the mid-seventeenth century.
When: Thursday October 29th, 3-7pm. Context and introduction at 3, reading commences at 3:30, reading wraps up around 6:30 with an intermission break, and short discussion to follow with light refreshments.
Where: Helen C. White Hall, conference room 7191.
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November 6 | 3:00-5:00 pm – Van Hise 1312 (Madsen Room)
New Faculty Affiliate Lecture by Matthew Johnson (German, Nordic and Slavic+)
Glikl’s Melancholia: Gender, Affect, and the Afterlives of Early Modern Yiddish Literature
This talk will offer a brief introduction to early modern or “old” Yiddish literature, with a focus on the work of Glikl bas Judah Leib, who, between 1691-1719, wrote a series of complex and enduring texts about the personal, social, and ethical problems that both animated and unsettled her life. The talk will center on a close and contextual reading of Glikl’s claim that her writings’ “sole purpose […] was to stave off melancholy thoughts in the evenings and long nights” and trace how later translators, scholars/editors, and critics have thought about and refigured how she wrote about and through her melancholic inwardness.
Matt Johnson is Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at UW-Madison. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and subsequently taught at Lund University and Ohio State University. His research centers on the dynamic relationship between Yiddish- and German-language literature and culture from the early modern period to the twentieth century.
Co-sponsored by GNS+ and CJS
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