Postdoctoral Fellowships at the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies

Postdoctoral fellowship opportunity at the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies:

Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowships
This theme-based resident fellowship program, established with the
support of the Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles and the J. Paul Getty
Trust, is designed to encourage the participation of junior scholars in
the Center's yearlong core programs. The core program for the academic
year 2014–2015 will be:

“Explorations, Encounters, and the Circulation of Knowledge,
1600-1830”
Directed by Adriana Craciun (UC Riverside) and Mary Terrall (UCLA).

The circulation of knowledge, objects, and people has attracted
scholarly attention in recent years from a variety of disciplines.  The
core program for 2014-15 will draw on several strands of this
scholarship to examine how knowledge and culture were shaped by
long-distance voyages and encounters in the global seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.  We are particularly interested in the
possibilities of transcultural analyses that explore how knowledge and
culture were transformed by the entanglements of voyagers and locals, in
Europe and beyond. The program will bring together scholars of the
history of science, art history, literature, anthropology, geography,
maritime history, and material texts to discuss new approaches to these
questions.

Session 1. Explorations and Encounters: New Directions
November 14-15, 2014
This conference considers the new directions emerging in studies of
exploration and encounters from roughly 1600-1830. 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
counterhistory 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.
This conference 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.

Session 2. Geographies of Inscription
Feb. 6-7, 2015
The "geography of the book" has gained prominence in recent years as
the spatialized counterpart to the established field of the history of
the book. This conference places inscriptions printed or handwritten on
paper, bound or unbound, alongside inscriptions on skin, wood, stone,
monuments, metal, instruments, structures, earth and other materials.
Collectively participants will consider how the geography of such
inscriptions can contribute to current studies of 17th and 18th century
empire, trade, exploration, cosmopolitan exchange, scientific
collaboration, translation, and aesthetic collaboration. Through a
geography of inscription we hope to illuminate new contact zones,
including a transdisciplinary zone for creating innovative scholarship.
This will allow us to consider  how diverse agents, instruments, and
materials of inscriptions in turn reveal new insights about writers,
books, printers, publishers and their networks.  Can geographies of
inscription help in the larger efforts to work outside the paradigms of empire and
colonization, center/periphery, and national print culture, which do not
always serve 17th and 18th century studies well? Do they suggest
alternative networks for the circulations of goods, books, people, and
objects in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Session 3. Commerce, Culture, and Natural Knowledge
May 15-16, 2015
Recent work on global trade  in the early modern world has examined the
impact of commercial networks and the objects they exchanged on European
knowledge of nature.  Commercial concerns shaped the collection and
trade in artificial and natural curiosities (in the metropolis and in
the field), the enslavement and transportation of people, as well as the
transplantation of natural resources for exploitation in imperial sites.
This conference will gather scholars working on commerce, science and
material culture in the early modern world, with the specific goal of
addressing issues raised by the circumstances of encounter and exchange,
aiming to complicate this picture by developing some of the symmetries
outlined above.

Full details and application information available on the Postdoc
Fellowship pages of UCLA's Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies:
http://www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/postdoc-sup