FEEGI’s biennial conference (Empire and Identity in the Early Modern World) is now only a couple of weeks away. From their website:

The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) aims to encourage scholarship and collaboration across the boundaries of national histories and disciplinary frameworks.

Members come to FEEGI from a wide range of fields, interests, and perspectives. Some members study Europe, others European colonies overseas. Some focus on European expansion, while others work on powerful kingdoms and empires or small scale societies around the globe with which Europeans had different kinds of interactions. We focus on the colonist and the colonized, on the conqueror and the conquered. We specialize in different oceanic basins and land masses. Some of us adopt a global perspective while others pursue microhistory. Some live within nations whose histories are deeply entangled with the issues central to FEEGI’s intellectual scope. But, together, we look at places and people touched directly and indirectly, benignly or catastrophically, by the process of enhanced global interaction that commenced in the fourteenth century.

FEEGI holds a biennial conference in even-numbered years. The first meeting in 1996 established a practice that continues to the present: panels at FEEGI meetings are organized thematically, rather than geographically or by nation, to encourage comparative thinking across large amounts of space and time. By custom all sessions have been plenary, thus privileging the collective and collegial interaction which is at the heart of FEEGI’s enterprise, and offering the possibility of making theoretical connections outside the limits of a conference session.

The conference program has been published too:

On Friday, registration and all panels and breaks will be in the Leavey Program Room in Leavey Center, Georgetown University. The evening reception is in the historic Riggs Library.

8:30am–9:00am—Registration

9:00am—Welcome from the President of FEEGI

Kris Lane, College of William and Mary

People in Motion
9:15am–10:45am—Session One

Chair: Kris Lane, College of William and Mary and President of FEEGI
Mary Jane Maxwell, Western Kentucky University—“Journeys of Faith and Fortune: Christian Merchants in the Dar al-Islam”
Richard Bond, Virginia Wesleyan College—“‘Most Villainously Detaining’: English and Spanish Captives in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic”
Jeff Fortin, State University of New York at Oneonta—“African-American Imperialism: Creating the Black Atlantic World, 1795–1817”

10:45am–11:15am—Coffee Break

Imperial Strategies
11:15am–12:30pm—Session Two

Chair: Carla Gardina Pestana, Miami University
Mark Meuwese, University of Winnipeg—“Underestimating the Natives: Revisiting the Dutch West India Company’s Failure to Capture the Portuguese Empire in the Southern Atlantic, 1623–1626”
Lauren Benton, New York University—“Island Chains: Penal Colonies and Imperial Sovereignty, 1780-1840”

12:30pm–2:30pm—Lunch

Lunch independently—a list of local restaurants will be provided.

Transforming Local Identities
2:30pm–4:00pm—Session Three

Chair: Willem Klooster, Clark University
Sebastian Marc Barreveld, Stanford University—“‘Can Leopards lose their spots?’ The education of Ambonese children in the United Provinces, 1621–1629”
Zoltán Biedermann, Center for Overseas History, Lisbon—“Manipulating Identities: Princely Conversions in Early Colonial Sri Lanka (1500–1650)”
Poppy Fry, Saint Anselm College—“The ‘Fingo Emancipation’ of 1835 and the Development of Cape Liberalism”

4:00pm–4:30pm—Coffee Break

Framing Empire
4:30pm–6:00pm—Session Four

Chair: Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University—“‘England is Like this a Cold Northern Country’: Natural History, Climate, and the Idea of Regions in the British Empire”
Giancarlo L. Casale, University of Minnesota—“Empires of the Mind in Tunuslu Hajji Ahmed’s World Map”

6:15pm–7:15pm—Reception

Riggs Library, Georgetown University

Saturday, 23 February 2008

On Saturday, our base is the Intercultural Center (ICC), home of the GU History Department. For lunch, we return to the Leavey Program Room. For the banquet, we head to Adams-Morgan.

8:30am–9:00am—Registration

History Department, ICC 600

Trades and Traders
9:00am–10:30am—Session Five

Chair: Marcy Norton, George Washington University
Location: ICC 103
Peter Mark, Wesleyan University and Jose da Silva Horta, Universidade de Lisboa—“New Christian and Jewish Weapons Traders in 17th-century West Africa: From Lisbon to Amsterdam to Marrakesh to Senegal”
George Bryan Souza, University of Texas at San Antonio—“Sri Lankan Cinnamon, the Mahabadda, the Portuguese and the Company: Commerce and Communal Relations, c. 1590–c. 1690”
Henriette de Bruyn Kops, Georgetown University—“Seaborne Imperialists or Tightfisted Opportunists? Conflicting Images of the Dutch in the 17th Century”

10:30am–11:00am—Coffee Break (ICC 600)

Views of Empire
11:00am–12:30pm—Session Six

Chair: Philip J. Stern, American University
Location: ICC 103
Eleanor Hughes, Yale Center for British Art—“Classical Orient, Romantic Orient: 18th-Century British Visual Culture and the Levant”
Phyllis Hunter, University of North Carolina Greensboro—“From Massachusetts to Madras:  Renegotiating Identity in the First British Empire”
Amélia Polónia, University of Porto—“Global and Local Interactions in the Portuguese Overseas Empire: Networks and Cooperation Patterns in the Construction of Social Identities of Seafaring Communities”

12:30pm–2:00pm—Business Meeting and Lunch

Leavey Program Room, Leavey Center.
All FEEGI members are welcome.
On the Agenda: Elections and other discussion of FEEGI business.
Sandwiches and drinks will be provided.

Commodities and Objects
2:00pm–3:30pm—Session Seven

Chair: David Hancock, University of Michigan
Location: ICC 103
Elizabeth Sutton, University of Iowa—“Natural History and Ethnography: Classifying Animals, Plants, and Africans in Early Modern Dutch Travel Accounts”
Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College—“From Imperial to National Commodity: How Coffee’s Identity Was Repackaged”
Christina Folke Ax, University of Copenhagen—“Objects of Empire and the Construction of Identity in 18th-century Colonial Iceland”

3:30pm–4:00pm—Coffee Break (ICC 600)

Conflict on the Margins
4:00pm–5:30pm—Session Eight

Chair: Linda Rupert, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Location: ICC 103
Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University—“Yucatan and Belize: A New History of a Forgotten Frontier”
John Savage, Lehigh University—“Sacred Science in Slave Society: ‘Poison’ and Identity in Martinique”
Allan Dwyer, Memorial University of Newfoundland—“‘The most outrageous Set of People’:  British Imperial Identity and the Newfoundland Irish Threat, 1740–1800”

Banquet and Keynote Address
6:30pm–8:30pm

Kris Lane, President of FEEGI, College of William and Mary:

“Everybody Must Get Stoned:
Rock Medicine in the Early Modern World”