UWM Distinguished Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (History and Women’s Gender Studies) chaired another successful international, multidisciplinary conference, Attending to Early Modern Women 2018: Action and Agency. The conference takes place every three years with a different focus, and this year it was held June 14-17 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education.

Professor Wiesner Hanks arranged for the Attending to Early Modern Women conference to come to UWM nine years ago. The first conference, inspired by the move from Maryland to Milwaukee, addressed issues and ideas posed by the question “where?” (Remapping Routes and Spaces, 2012), and the second conference asked “when?” (It’s About Time, 2015). This past conference asked “how?” and the answer for scholars, teachers, and their subjects is the same: action and agency. this conference addressed these themes, raising such questions as: How do we understand the sites and modes of gendered confrontations in the early modern period? What collectivities were possible, then and now, and how and why do they form and fade? How do women imagine choice, and what role does choice or the illusion of choice play in their lives? How can our work as scholars and teachers of a distant period become action?

The conference retained its innovative format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote dialogue, augmented by a keynote lecture, and a plenary panel on each of the four conference topics: confrontation, collectivity, choice, and pedagogy.

Organizing Committee

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Chair
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Krista Grensavitch
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Deirdre Keenan
Carroll University

Gwynne Kennedy
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Diana Robin
Newberry Library

Tanya Tiffany
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Jennifer Welsh
Lindenwood University