Early Modernity Beyond the West - Merry Wiesner-Hanks: The Global Early Modern?

Early Modernity Beyond the West continues during the spring quarter: Please join us for a talk by Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks that discusses the very notion of early modernity. In an event co-sponsored with CMEMS and Religous Studies, Professor Wiesner-Hanks addresses the question: The Global Early Modern?

RSVP for the Merry Wiesner-Hanks talk

Prof. Wiesner-Hanks' talk provides a brief overview of the newest thinking on the history of “early modern” as a concept, and then discusses trends in scholarship on this era beyond Europe. It explores ways that historians of areas other than Europe have used, critiqued, nuanced, and amplified understandings of this era and what made it different from what came before and what came after. 

Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwakee. Here's how she describes her work: My research, writing, and teaching have been closely related. I began my career as a historian of early modern Europe, with a research focus on women’s work in Germany. When I moved to UWM, my teaching responsibilities came to include the history of Christianity, and my research interests also increasingly focused on religion, especially issues of gender and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. At the same time, I began to write and publish various types of source books designed for use in the classroom and to teach courses in world history. This took me into geographic areas and time periods far away from early modern Europe, and my research expanded as well, becoming global as well as European. Since 2000, I have worn these two hats, one as a historian of early modern Europe and the other as a world/global historian, with a primary focus on women, gender, and sexuality within these. 

Early Modernity Beyond the West aims to investigate whether and how the concept of early modernity can be extended to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia between the 15th and the 18th centuries. The project brings together professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from Stanford and from other institutions, who work in the early modern field in history, art history, literature, and religion. In this way, the group fosters reflection on the features and issues of early modernity.

Assessing the breadth and relevance of early modernity for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia helps reconsider the concept on a global scale. In turn, defining early modernity as a transnational concept allows for more accurate analyses of each region’s specificities. Hence, the group’s guiding questions are: What are the defining traits of early modernity? What are the specificities of local experiences of early modernity? How do these specificities combine to delineate early modernity as a transnational concept?