arco Annual Symposium

Humanism and Its Economies

The 2009 Marco Symposium, “Humanism and Its Economies,” co-organized by Jane Bellamy, Heather Hirschfeld, and Anthony Welch of the English Department, and sponsored jointly by the Marco Institute, the Humanities Institute, and the Departments of English, History, and Modern Foreign Language and Literature, will take place next March 5-6 in the Hodges Library Auditorium.  This interdisciplinary academic symposium will bring together a group of renowned scholars to explore how a range of “economies” – both material and symbolic – organized the intellectual cultures of northern European humanists.

The participants (in alphabetical order) include:

• Gayle Brunelle (History, California State University, Fullerton)
• Kathy Eden (English, Columbia University)
• Timothy Hampton (French, University of California, Berkeley)
• George Hoffman (French, University of Michigan)
• Blair Hoxby (English, Stanford University)
• Craig Muldrew (Queen's College, Cambridge)
• David Price (Religious Studies, History, Jewish Studies, University of Illinois)
• Jacob Soll (History, Rutgers University, Camden)
• Robert Stillman (English, University of Tennessee)
• Jessica Wolfe (English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina). 

These scholars will play a leading role in the Symposium’s goal to explore how northern European humanism was shaped by a broad range of material and symbolic economies – commercial, intellectual and cultural, psychological and theological.

The goal of the Symposium is, in part, is to find new points of contact between Renaissance high culture and the period’s material economies.  It will explore such questions as:     How was the humanist enterprise in northern Europe shaped by the emergence of capitalism, by shifting relations of debt and credit, by the global expansion of commerce and trade, by local circuits of patronage and gift exchange, or by the nascent market for printed books?  As our speakers pursue these questions, the Symposium will also explore the capacity of the term “economies” – referring broadly to systems of production, distribution, and consumption governed by principles of exchange and return – to address a wider range of early modern thought and activity.  Thus, the participants will also speak to the figurative and metaphoric economies of humanism: forms of exchange between Renaissance Europe and the ancients, for instance; its investment in networks of cultural patronage; its civic and political commitments; its transactions with manuscript and book culture; and its uneasy interactions with the changing confessional landscape.

The Symposium will organize its ten speakers into five two-person panels over two days, and will conclude with a round-table discussion.

Contact Information

Erin Read
Temple Court, Room 208
804 Volunteer Blvd.
Knoxville, TN 37996-4333

Phone: (865) 974-1859
Fax: (865) 974-3915
Email: eread1@utk.edu