Three Workshops at the Universities of York and Cambridge in 2009 Funded by the AHRC

Aims of the Workshops

Organised by Melissa Calaresu of the University of Cambridge and Helen Hills of the University of York, the Workshops have four overarching and inter-related aims:

• to draw together Neapolitanists from across UK, USA and Europe, for whom no institutional focus yet exists, in order to facilitate lively intellectual and interdisciplinary interaction.
• to critically examine the principal historiographical currents that have operated and that continue to operate within scholarship on Naples, particularly in relation to visual and literary representations of Naples from c.1500 to the present
• to encourage the rethinking of Neapolitan history across chronological and disciplinary divides; to resist reinscribing Neapolitan cultural history into the familiar and over-worn paradigms of modernity and nationhood (the failure of the south), the Grand Tour (as seen from northern Europe, especially aristocratic Britain), periodization that serves to draw an apparently unbridgeable gulf between 'the early modern' and the nineteenth century.
• to generate discussion and academic papers to form the basis for a special issue of an academic journal devoted to Neapolitan cultural history.

2009 Workshops

Exoticizing Vesuvius? The historical and intellectual formation of Neapolitan historiography
12 January 2009, University of Cambridge

Topography and Piety: Naples Afflicted
3 April 2009, University of York

Objects of Collecting in Naples and Naples as Object of Collecting
18 September 2009, University of Cambridge

Acknowledgements

In addition to the generous financial support of the AHRC, we are pleased to acknowledge the assistance of the University of Cambridge Trevelyan Fund and CRASSH and of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York.