The University of Warwick and the Newberry Library invite applications for participation in a two-week thematic residential workshop to be held in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick between 9 and 22 July 2006. The workshop will comprise 20-24 core participants, of whom 16 will be advanced doctoral or beginning postdoctoral students. Each participant will be entitled to travel to and from Warwick; and accommodation and full board on campus. Full-time faculty, advanced doctoral students and recent PhDs of the institutions that are members of the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium are eligible to apply. The workshop's core participants will be drawn from institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, to promote the broader programme's goal of assessing training in early modern and Renaissance studies from a comparative perspective.
The Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick provides an interdisciplinary forum for twenty-four faculty members and associated graduate students (drawn from the departments of Art History, Classics, English, French, History, Italian and Theatre Studies) who share research interests in the history and culture of the early modern period. The workshop is funded by a three-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant entitled 'The Spaces of the Past: Renaissance & Early Modern Cultures in Transatlantic Contexts' and intended to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between the institutions associated with the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. The first year of activities sponsored by the grant is focussed on the theme 'Culture, Space and Power: Peopling the Built Environment in Renaissance England, c.1450-1700', and is being co-ordinated by the social historians Professor Steve Hindle and Dr Beat Kümin.
Participants may be drawn from any disciplinary context in which the Renaissance (broadly defined) is studied, but will have interests in relationships between specific forms of social and cultural practice and particular types of built environment in early modern England. The workshop is intended to explore the characteristics and particularities of the built environment in early modern England; the literary and artistic representation of buildings; the development and transmission of particular architectural styles and fashions; the interactions between buildings, institutions, political power and cultural practice; and the potential and limits of spatial theory for the exploration of buildings and their use. Applications are also welcome from scholars who study these themes in comparative, especially European, contexts. The workshop will involve formal seminar papers by Warwick faculty and other invited speakers; workshop discussions led by visiting research fellows; field trips to relevant historical and architectural sites; and the opportunity for participants to present a paper on their own research interests.