Elections Before Democracy

Date
Friday, October 21, 2016, 3:30 pmSaturday, October 22, 2016, 1:30 pm
Location
211 Dickinson Hall
Audience
Public

Details

Event Description

Organized by Professor Yair Mintzker, “Elections Before Democracy”, a symposium taking place on October 21-22, 2016, will investigate the practices of voting and elections before the age of popular sovereignty. The symposium will include six related papers which will focus on elective monarchies, elective bodies (e.g, parliaments), and elections on the community level.


Conference Schedule

Friday, October 21, 2016

3:30-3:45 p.m.: Opening Remarks (Yair Mintzker, Princeton University).

3:45-5:30 p.m.: Panel I: Communal Elections

Christopher Friedrichs, University of British Columbia: Finding or Choosing? Urban Elections in Early Modern Europe

Johannes Dillinger, University of Mainz/Oxford Brookes University: Rural Elections and the Political Representation of the Peasantry in the Holy Roman Empire

5:30-6:30 p.m.: Reception

Saturday, October 22, 2016

8:30-9:00 a.m.: Breakfast

9:00-10:45 a.m.: Panel II: Royal and Papal Elections

Molly Lester, Princeton University: Unconventional Succession: Royal Election in Early Medieval Iberia

Margaret Meserve, University of Notre Dame: Secrets of the Conclave: Papal Elections in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

10:45-11:00 a.m.: Coffee break

11:00 a.m.-12:45 p.m.: Panel III: Elections and Voting in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Tim Harris, Brown University: Elections Before Democracy in 17th Century England
 
Stanley Katz, Princeton University: Voting before democracy in America

12:45 p.m.: Final discussion followed by lunch


Conference Participants:

Johannes Dillinger is professor of early modern history in Oxford (Brookes). Dillinger studied history, Catholic theology and education at Tübingen Univeristy and the University of East Anglia (Norwich). Dillinger received the prestigious Emmy Noether and Heisenberg grants from the German Research Foundation. He worked as a guest lecturer or visiting research fellow at Georgetown University, Stanford University, the German Historical Institute Washington, Nehru University New Delhi, Trier University and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He received an honorary professorship from Johannes Gutenberg University. Dillinger's main research interests include constitutional history, the history of the peasantry, the theory of alternate history, witchcraft, magic and early modern treasure hunts.

Christopher R. Friedrichs is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, where he has taught since receiving his PhD in history from Princeton in 1973.  He is a specialist in the social and political history of European cities in the early modern era.  His publications include Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen, 1580-1720 (1979),  The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (1995), Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe (2000), and A Jewish Youth in Dresden: The Diary of Louis Lesser, 1833-1837 (2011).  He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, a visiting professor at the University of Augsburg, and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton.

Tim Harris received his BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University and was a Fellow of Emmanuel College from 1983 before moving to Brown University in 1986. He teaches a wide range of courses in the political, religious, intellectual, social and cultural history of early modern England, Scotland and Ireland. A social historian of politics, he has written about the interface of high and low politics, popular protest movements, ideology and propaganda, party politics, popular culture, and the politics of religious dissent during Britain's Age of Revolutions. He edits the book series Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History for Boydell Press and is on the editorial board of the journal History of European Ideas.

Molly Lester studies late antique and early medieval Europe, with a focus on the history of Christianity. She is interested in debates about religious orthodoxy, Christian interpretations of the relationship between religious practice and belief, and early medieval compilation and implementation of canon law. Her dissertation, "The Word as Lived: The Practice of Orthodoxy in Visigothic Iberia, 540-700," traces attempts to define and actualize Christian orthodoxy throughout the shifting religious landscape of sixth- and seventh-century Visigothic Iberia. Using diverse sources such as church councils, theological and pastoral texts, and liturgy, she explores Visigothic Christian anxieties about worship and moral living, first in the face of rival 'heretical' groups and later in debates over divergent practice within the 'orthodox' community. Emphasizing that practice was regarded as a dynamic part of being a religious individual, she considers how people attempted to use religious practice to organize and govern their communities according to their ideas of religious orthodoxy. Molly received a B.A. in History and Anthropology, with a minor in Latin American literature, from the University of Florida in 2010.

Margaret Meserve  studies the Italian Renaissance, especially the histories of printing and book production; history writing, diplomacy, and travel; and the city of Rome and the Papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She is currently working on a book, The News Cycle in Renaissance Rome, that explores the circulation of news, information, propaganda, and disinformation in Rome in the first decades after the arrival of print (ca 1470-1527). Her previous book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard, 2008), surveyed how fifteenth-century historians and political commentators tried to explain the rise and fall of Islamic empires, especially that of the Ottoman Turks. The book won the American Historical Association's 2008 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize and the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Prize for 2009. Meserve has also published articles on anti-Turkish polemics in the Renaissance; European reports on Inner Asia in the centuries after Marco Polo; and the printing of crusade propaganda and news reports from the Orient in the first decades after Gutenberg. Two volumes of her translation of the crusading Pope Pius II's autobiographical Commentaries have been published in the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Meserve has won fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, American Academy in Rome, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. At Notre Dame she teaches courses on the Italian Renaissance, Early Modern Rome, Italian social history, and the history of the book.

Stanley N. Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education in the United States. Mr. Katz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1955 with a major in English History and Literature. He received his M.A. from Harvard in American History in 1959 and his Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1961. He attended Harvard Law School in 1969-70. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is the Editor in Chief of the recently published Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, and the Editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court. He also writes about higher education policy, and publishes a blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Mr. Katz is a leading expert on American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, Mr. Katz has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History and as Vice President of the Research Division of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library and numerous other institutions. He also currently serves as Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. Katz is a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society; a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians; and a Corresponding Member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He received the annual Fellows Award from Phi Beta Kappa in June, 2010. He has honorary degrees from several universities. Katz is director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.


 

Co-Sponsored by:

Department of German and Departments of Politics

Chair:

Yair Mintzker

Contact
Jennifer D Loessy
Area of Interest
Political History