University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Seventeenth and
Eighteenth-Century Studies Center and Clark Library

A Series of Clark Conferences on -Space and „Self“ in Early ModernCulture-
2007-2008

Prof. David Warren Sabean (History) and Prof. Malina Stefanovska (French)

Subjectivity is embedded in space, which serves to define, shape, and
represent it. Every culture has its own articulation between natural and
social places or between material and representational ones. In Europe in
the early modern period, places as diverse as the court, the cabinet of
curiosities, or the prayer room were crucial for forming and representing
individual identities. A year-long series of conferences will be dedicated
to five key places in Western Europe and the Mediterranean between the
late sixteenth and the late eighteenth century. We invite scholars in
literature, philosophy, history (including art, music and intellectual
history) and other disciplines who will reflect on the cultural
differences and historical evolution of space, both as material foundation
and as representation of human exchanges, relationships, hierarchies,
values, and subjectivities.

1. CIRCLES OF SOCIABILITY (October 26-27, 2007):
study of the material place of sociability in court treatises, novels,
theater, or salon discussions of appropriate behavior. Relationship
between the practices that sociability fosters (reciprocity, exchange,
hierarchy, circulation, répartie, wit, flattery, or aggression) and
individual identity. Symbolic underpinnings of the -circle- figure in
ritualized societies such as the Freemasons, or in emerging notions of the
-public sphere,- or the-social contract- etc.

2. SITES OF EXTERIORITY (November 30 - December 1, 2007) :
connection between the development of travel and maps, the birth of
landscape in early modern art, and a new way of situating oneself in the
world. Relations of baroque, classical, or English gardens to the spatial
organization of the self or to notions such as the sublime or the
infinite, personal perspective, point of view, etc. Gardens and landscape
as remodeled imaginary or exotic lands, cosmological representations, or
places of self exploration and self discipline, or, conversely, of an
encounter with the Other.

3. THE -INNER SELF- (February 22-23, 2008) :
interiority inrepresentations of the self and its relationship to
otherness. Spatial metaphors for discussing the mind, the soul, or
rhetorical memory, images of interiority or, conversely, of physical
nature contrasted to an inner abode, in fiction, medical or religious
writings, and philosophy. Connections between space and meditation, or
between concealment, truth or lying, crucial for conceptualizing subjectivity.

4. SPACES OF SACRALITY (March 14-15, 2008):
interrelatedness between the spatial configurations of religious sites and
conceptions of authority, sacrality and the individual. Places of cult,
religious retreats, convents, pilgrimage routes and sites, sacralization
of Absolutist or Republican political space, battles over the private
confessional, combining sociability and religious retreat,
reconfigurations of church interiors. Mystical experience and withdrawal
to spaces for meditation, practices of self construction in which older
ways of marking the sacred are adapted to mark off the emerging -secular-
cultural forms.

5. FAMILY AND WORK SPACE: (April 25-25, 2008)
influence of new gender relations, or family and kinship structures, on
the configuration the house. Spatial configurations of places for
meditation or reading, or of a laboratory, a cabinet of curiosities, a
university hall. Drawing or blurring of boundaries between masters and
servants, men and women, adults and children, neighbors and family, nature
and culture. Understanding the self in relation to material objects of
culture, the temporal ordering of the day, the shared or gendered use of
spaces in the workshop, the hayfield, the counting house, or the parlor.
Role of space in enabling or inhibiting interaction among family members,
friends, or professional associates.

Scholars interested in presenting a paper should send an abstract to David
Sabean: dsabeanhistory.ucla.edu.

David Warren Sabean
Distinguished Professor of European History
Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History
Dept. of History
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Phone: 310 825 3173
Fax: 310 206 9630
Home phone: 310 474 7994
email: dsabeanhistory.ucla.edu