The John Carter Brown Library invites graduate students and early career scholars to submit proposals for papers to be presented at a three-day conference entitled “Fire and Water: Entangled Histories of Empire and Science in the Early Modern Americas,” to take place on the campus of Brown University from September 21-23, 2017. As part of a four-year series on the four elements as a heuristic window onto early environmental history in the Americas, the Library will host junior and senior scholars for a three-day interrogation of the role of science in the Americas and, in particular, the ongoing dialogue between Iberian and northern European traditions. The aim of the symposium is twofold: in the first instance, it is to assess the last two decades of historiography related to the history of science in the Iberian and Iberoamerican worlds and to plan a bold agenda for the coming decade to consolidate the scholarly and intellectual progress made to date. In the second instance, it is to interrogate how fire and water as material, immaterial, social, cultural, political, and symbolic forces were wielded and tamed by communities throughout the Americas.
The conference will bring together historians, historians of science, art historians, literary scholars and others, at all levels of scholarly engagement. We especially look forward to the participation of doctoral students and early career scholars whose work relates to the history of science in the Americas and who can contribute to a collaborative discussion of the early environmental history of the Americas, particularly with regards to water and fire.
We invite graduate students and early career scholars of relevant topics to submit proposals for papers which will then be presented during a segment of the symposium dedicated to research-in-progress by junior scholars. Please send proposals of 300 words for papers of 15 minutes in length as well as a brief CV to jcb-director@brown.edu by August 1, 2017. For more information about the symposium, visit: https://blogs.brown.edu/fireandwater2017/.
