'Paper Princes' is excited to announce the project's upcoming international conference

The   Politics   of   Paper   in   the   early   modern   world
9-10 JUNE 2016,  Groningen,  The  Netherlands

Even in today's digital age, paper is so ubiquitous that we often overlook it. But at the dawn of the 'modern' era, paper was a brand-new (communications) technology that fundamentally influenced politics and political practices in myriad ways.

This two-day conference brings together scholars and paper experts working across a range of disciplines and geographic areas who are interested in the ways in which paper supported, shaped, or otherwise influenced practices of politics and political communications in the period ca.1250-ca.1850. It aims to sketch a more integral picture of the ways in which paper permitted early modern politics and political communications to unfold. To do so, it traces paper's 'life-cycle' across four themes: paper as circulating commodity and material artifact; paper in the emergence of epistolary cultures, the post, and news; paper as tool of governance, information-management, and diplomacy; and paper in the archives and archival practices. The conference also seeks to foster dialogue with colleagues studying societies where paper was present longer.

The program has been posted!
You can register to attend at politicsofpaper.wix.com/politicsofpaper or by emailing infoATgcb.nl.
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For the latest updates visit the Conference website, at
http://politicsofpaper.wix.com/politicsofpaper
or the conference Facebook page, at
https://www.facebook.com/Politics-of-Paper-1682012498751210/

Please share the program or this poster with any interested colleagues, friends, or students!

Confirmed Keynote Speakers include:

Plenary Address:

Lothar Müller, Feuillton-Editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung; Honorarprofessor, Institut für deutsche Literatur, Humboldt-Universität, Germany. Author of Weisse Magie. Die Epoche des Papiers (2012); transl. White Magic. The Age of Paper (2014/15).

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Theme I Keynote: Paper as Manufacture, Trade Commodity and Circulating Material Artifact

Jonathan M. Bloom, Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art, Boston College, USA; Hamad Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair in Islamic Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA. Author of Paper before Print: the History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic Lands (2001).

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Theme II Keynote: Paper in the Emergence of Epistolary Cultures, Postal Services, and the News

Andrew Pettegree, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews, UK; Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. Author of The Invention of News (2014); Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (2015).

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Theme III Keynote: Paper as a Tool of Governance, Diplomacy, and Political Information Management

Jacob Soll, Professor of History and Accounting, University of Southern California-Dornsife, USA. Author of The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (2009/11); The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014); The Enlightenment Library and the Quest for Universal Knowledge (forthcoming).

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Theme IV: Paper in the Archives and in Early Modern Archival Practices

Roundtable on paper in the archives and in archival practices with:

• Eric Ketelaar is Professor Emeritus of Archivistics at the University of Amsterdam. As a honorary fellow of his former department he continues his research which is concerned mainly with the social and cultural contexts of records creation and use. Educated as a lawyer and legal historian, he was Secretary of the Archives Council, Director of the Dutch State School of Archivists, Deputy General State Archivist and State Archivist in the province of Groningen. From 1989-1997 he was General State Archivist (National Archivist) of The Netherlands. From 1992-2002 he held the chair of archivistics in the Department of History at Leiden.

• Diego Navarro Bonilla  is Associate Professor of Archival Science in the Grade of Information and Documentation (UC3M). He teaches: History of Institutions, Paleography, Records Management, Calligraphy, History of Secret Information. He has also been director of the Master on Intelligence Analysis (UC3M) and received a National Defense Award (Historical Research) Ministry of Defense, Spain (2003) with the work entitled Archives of Espionage: information, reason of State and intelligence structures under the Spanish Monarchy (XVI-XVIIth Centuries).
  

• Hilde de Weerdt is Professor of Chinese History at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies.  Her research focuses on the question of how social networks shaped Chinese politics. Her interests in intellectual and political history, information technologies, social networks, and digital research methods have also led to her involvement in several comparative and digital humanities projects including “Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective” (funded by the European Research Council, 2012-17) and “DID-ACTE: Digging into Data: Automating Chinese Text Extraction” (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Joint Information Systems Committee, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014-2016). Her most recent book, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), takes a fresh look at the question of how the ideal of the unified territorial state took hold in Chinese society.
  

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For questions regarding the conference, please email the conference organisers at
politicsofpaperATgmail.com