The 2016-17 programme of the Low Countries History Seminar Series is now available. Everybody with an interest in Low Countries History is welcome.

The series conveners are: Anne Goldgar (King’s College London), Ben Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL), Joanna Woodall (Courtauld)

Meetings: Fridays at 5:15 pm at the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. All meetings except 4th November and possibly 18th November in Wolfson Room I, in the basement.

Autumn

21 October Bruno Blondé (Antwerp), ‘The straw mattresses of a love triangle: Economic growth, social inequality and early modern consumer changes in the eighteenth-century Low Countries’

4 November Stijn van Rossem (London), ‘Editorial Strategies in the early-modern
Room N304 period: the Verdussen case (Antwerp, 1590-1690)’

18 November David Freeman (Kansas City), ‘A Silver River in a Silver World: Dutch
Room tbc merchants in the South Atlantic, 1640s-1740s’ – joint session with the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World seminar

2 December Nina Lamal (St Andrews), ‘The Low Countries in the news: Italian information networks on the Dutch Revolt’

Low Countries Studies Seminar Schedule 2016-17

Narration and story telling emerges as a new turn in academic discourse. Scholars increasingly question their position as observers or spectators and move towards a more engaged position. Ownership of the narrative is a central focus and concern.

For the 11th ALCS Biennial Conference in 2016 – the centenary year of the Easter Rising in Ireland – we want raise questions around the narrative of change. How is change represented and narrated and how do these narratives change over time? All this in a Low Countries or comparative context and along and across broad cultural, linguistic and historical lines.

Topics may include:
• Narrating change of cultural practices and dissenting voices
• Narration of social change and the imaginative
• Narrating change and changing narrative in literature and the arts
• Changing relationships between text and image in the pictorial arts
• Changing linguistic norms and status of language varieties
• Translation as a process of change and transformation
• Narrating change emerging from studies of lexis, semantics, pragmatics and syntax

We invite both individual contributions (20-minute presentations which will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion) and proposals for fully constituted panels. Panel conveners are invited to suggest a 90-minutes themed panel of three speakers. We specifically invite postgraduate students and a number of full bursaries are available. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its strict connection to the conference theme.

Our keynote speakers are:

• Pamela Pattynama of the University of Amsterdam who is an expert in changing colonial narratives. Her book on the representation of Indonesia and Dutch colonial rule, Bitterzoet Indië, will be the starting point of her paper.
• Adriaan Waiboer, Curator of Northern European Art at the National Gallery of Ireland. He will talk about his current project: ‘Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry’ to be shown at the National Gallery of Ireland and in Paris and Washington in 2017-18.
• David van der Linden, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen,who will introduce, discusss and reflect on the “Signed, Sealed & Undelivered” project, exploring the letters of the Brienne trunk.

Please submit your proposal in the form of a 300-word abstract by 15 March 2016 to our Conference System.

Selected papers will be published in the ALCS Journal: Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies