The Hakluyt Society Symposium 2017 brings together travel literature and trading companies by exploring how the various early modern Companies collected, created, curated, protected and utilised material relating to travel and discovery around the world. Set in the historic environment of the University of Kent’s Medway campus, the Hakluyt Society Symposium 2017 will take place on 11-12 September 2017.
Registration is open until 1 September.
Location: Royal Dockyard Church Lecture Theatre, Chatham, ME4 4TE. Please visit our conference website for directions.
11 September 2017
09.30 – 09.40: Welcome and Introduction
09.40 – 11.10: Session 1 – Production of Travel Literature
- Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg (Queen Mary, London), ‘Passages Recollected by Memory’: Remembering the Levant Company in Seventeenth-Century Merchant Life Writing
- Byapti Sur (Leiden University), Pandemonium in Pomp: A Dutch account of Festivals and Festivities in Seventeenth-Century Mughal India
- Dr Liam Haydon (University of Kent), Merchants Making History
11.10 – 11.30: Coffee break
11.30 – 13.00: Session 2 – Uses of Travel Literature
- Prof Michiel van Groesen (Leiden University), From Secrecy to Openness: Dierick Ruiters’ Manuscript Maps and the Birth of the Dutch Atlantic World
- Dr Adrien Delmas (l’Institut français d’Afrique du Sud, Paris), The Forgotten Function of Writing: Travel Literature, International law and the European Share of the World at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century
- Dr Haig Smith (University of Liverpool), “Assemblies of their own Nations”: Perceptions of South Asian Religious Diversity in Seventeenth-Century English East India Company Correspondence
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 15.15: Hakluyt Society Editorial Workshop
- Prof Will Ryan (Hakluyt Society)
- Dr Katherine Parker (Hakluyt Society)
15.15 – 15.30: Coffee break
15.30 – 17.00: Session 3 – Promoting Trading Companies
- Prof Anne Goldgar (King’s College London), Marketing Arctic Knowledge
- Dr Stefan Halikowski Smith (Swansea University), Venice and the Danish East India Company: Reading Nicola Cima’s ‘Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina’ (c. 1707)
- Giorgio Tosco (European University Institute), Travel Writing and the Promotion of Trans-Oceanic Trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the Seventeenth Century
18.00: Keynote Address
- Prof Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University), The East India Company and English Encounters with Islam in Mughal India
19.00: Reception
Conference Dinner
12 September 2017
9.00 – 10.30: Session 4 – Planning Empire through Travel Literature
- John Carrigy (National University of Ireland, Galway), John Dee and Elizabethan Empire: Defining Empire within Contemporary Historiographical Culture
- Marina Bezzi (University College London), Richard Hakluyt and Lancelot Voisin de la Popeliniere: Other-than-European Environments in European Travel Literature Collections
- Alasdair Macfarlane (Durham University), Creating ‘New Caledonia’: Rumour, News and the Company of Scotland
10.30 – 10.50: Coffee break
10.50 – 12.20: Session 5 – Approaches to Non-European Voices
- Prof Margaret Hunt (Uppsala University), Dervish Mehmed Edib’s Pilgrimage to Mecca: Gender and Spirituality in an Eighteenth-Century Islamic Travel Narrative
- Samuel Ellis (University of Leeds), Reading Early English East India Company Travel Narratives in the Himalayas: Difficulties, Limitations and Opportunities
- Renu Elizabeth Abraham (University of Kent), Collectors of History: The Case of John William Wye and the English East India Company
12.20 – 13.20: Lunch
13.20 – Session 6 – 14.50: Materiality of Information
- Dr Djoeke van Netten (University of Amsterdam), Ships on Maps and Maps on Ships
- Dr Souvik Mukherjee (Presidency University, Kolkata), “Unburying” Company History: Reconstructing European Company Narratives through Digital Archives
- Frank Birkenholz (University of Groningen), Paper that Travels: The Materiality of the Dutch East India Company’s Travel Writing, Information Gathering and Knowledge Production
14.50 – 15.10: Coffee break
15.10 – 16.40: Session 7 – Companies and Colonialism
- Prof Nandini Das (University of Liverpool), Thomas Roe’s Companies
- Dr Amrita Sen (Presidency University, Kolkata), Decoding Company Rule: Travel, Taxation and the Bengal Famine of 1770
- Alison Bennett (University College London/British Museum), Exploration, Treaty-Making and Trade: Sources of the Imperial British East Africa Company
16.40 – 17.00: Closing Remarks and End of Conference
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