2023 Conference - Matters and Materials of Life, 1660-1820

Matters and Materials of Life, 1660-1820
Conference website
As we face fundamental shifts in our own understandings of climate, politics, selfhood, and communication, what resources can eighteenth-century treatments of bios provide? How was life conceptualized, investigated, lived, and represented in the long eighteenth century? Whose lives mattered, and whose lives were undervalued or misunderstood? What materials were assembled to foster, protect, dissect, terminate, immortalize, and theorize these lives? What did the discovery or invention of new materials in the long eighteenth century contribute to the ways questions of life were framed or represented? Conversely, in what ways did the conceptualization of life contribute to the discovery or invention of these materials? How were forms of life and ways of thinking shaped by materialism as a philosophical program and how, in turn, did they contribute to reshaping it? We purposely cast a wide net, welcoming papers from across the disciplines that investigate the period’s various ideas of health, care, work, power, violence, pleasure, society, and the environment.