How do material conditions shape how and what we know about the natural world? This event brings together scholars working in the history of science and literature and science to consider these questions, attending to the disciplinary alliances and differences such approaches yield. In particular, we will think about the embodied practices, prescriptive and descriptive, that give form to natural philosophy in the early modern period. These practices may be expressed through bodies (human and otherwise), technologies, texts, or other structures altogether. We will address, too, the knowledges that such practices may permit and foreclose.

Please register (obligatory) by emailing r.powell@uva.nl by 1 June 2026

Programme 

Monday, 15 June 2026 (Day 1)

9:15-9:30                  Welcome

9:30-11:15                Panel 1         

Valentine Delrue (University of Gent), “Organic Hygroscopes: Vegetable and Human Substances as Instruments of Atmospheric Knowledge,1650–1800”

Heather Keenleyside (University of Chicago), “The Natural History of Ideas: Locke, Lovejoy, Literature”

Ros Powell (University of Amsterdam), “Do Not Try This at Home: Self-Experimentation and the Role of Risk”

11:15-11:45              Break

11:45-12:45             Panel 2

Feike Dietz (University of Amsterdam), “Fingertips as Eyes: How Visually Impaired Female Authors Challenge Sight-Dominated Knowledge Practices”

Zoe Copeman (University of Maryland), “Humoral Iconography and Aristotelian-Galenic Semiology”

13:00-14:00              Lunch @ NIAS

14:00-15:30             Panel 3

Mona Narain (Texas Christian University), “Nature’s Decayed: Marine Embodiments in Charlotte Smith and Phillis Wheatley Peters”

Leonie Hannan (Queen’s University Belfast), “‘A grand promoter of fermentation’: Air and the Embodied Knowledge of the Brewery and Distillery in Eighteenth-Century Britain”

Alejandro Mylonas-Leegstra (Sewanee, the University of the South), “Embodying Knowledge: Pilot’s Experience in Tome Cano’s Maritime Text”

15:30-15:45             Break

15:45-16:45             Group discussion of common readings

1. Jane Barker, “A Farewell to Poetry, with a Long Digression on Anatomy,” Poetical Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes & With Several New Translations, In Two Parts. London: Benjamin Crayle, 1688.  99-106. 

1. Edmund King, “An Account of the Experiment of Transfusion, Practised upon a Man in London,” Philosophical Transactions 2 (1666-67): 557-59.

Tuesday, 16 June 2026 (Day 2)

9:15-9:30                  Welcome, Day 2

9:30-11:15                Panel 4

Marieke Hendriksen (Huygens Institute), “Gibbing, Comfiting and Pickling: Embodied Knowledge Practices in Early Modern Dutch Food Preservation”

Jess Dunmore (University of Cambridge), “The ‘Art of Fire’: Igneous Ingeny and Sparks of Wit in George Starkey’s Alchemical Writings”

Tita Chico (University of Maryland, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies), “Engines”

11:15-11:45              Break

11:45-12:45             Panel 5

Beth Stewart (University of Sussex), “Askēsis, Textual Reexperience, and Hypersensibility in Frances Burney’s Evelina”

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen (Huygens Institute), “Embodied Practices in Early Modern Microscopy”

13:00-14:00              Lunch @ NIAS

14:00-15:30             Panel 6

James Wood (University of East Anglia), “Gray’s Beetle”

Ruth Mack (University at Buffalo, The State University of New York), “Craft Realism”

Vivian Zuluaga Papp (New York City College of Technology, City University of New York), “Matters of Fact, Objects of Wonder”

15:30-15:45             Break

15:45-16:45             Discussion: Future Work & Potential Collaborations

Drinks reception to follow