(Source: Prisonsconference)
We learned of an international conference on prisons
and incarceration in England between 1500-1850, organized at Keble College
(Oxford):
Welcome! We invite you to join us for this
two-day conference on prisons and incarceration in England, 1500-1850, that is
taking place at Keble College, Oxford, UK on the 15th and 16th of July 2019.
This conference will bring together senior
academics and early career researchers to share their ongoing research into
English imprisonment, discuss recent developments in the field, and set out new
agendas for the history of prisons and imprisonment. This conference is
interdisciplinary–our speakers are historians, literary scholars and
criminologists–, spans a wide chronology, and takes an inclusive view of
imprisonment, including not only criminal custody and incarceration, but also
the imprisonment of debtors and prisoners of war. Our speakers employ a myriad
of approaches in studying imprisonment, and the conference will encompass the
complete range of prisons that existed in this period, beyond the penitentiary,
including lock-ups, roundhouses, compters or counters, gaols, houses of
correction or bridewells and prison hulks. Together, our speakers seek to
explain the role that imprisonment and prisoners played in English society,
economy and political life.
Early scholars of imprisonment focused largely
on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as it was this period,
with the rise of the ‘prison reform’ movement and the development of the
penitentiary, in which they located the origins of the modern prison. This
historiographical focus on the prison as a distinctly modern mode of punishment
has obscured its contingency upon practices, attitudes and ideologies that
had developed over a much longer period. Moreover, it has left largely
unexplored the sheer scale and variety of early imprisonment and its
significance to modern development. By recovering the early modern prison in
all its variants and situating this work alongside new studies on the
prison’s later incarnations, we hope this conference will suggest alternative
frameworks from which to study imprisonment, provide new interpretations of
incarceration, and advance different chronologies for the prison and its
evolution.
This conference is funded by the generosity of
the Past and Present Society and Keble College, Oxford. It is organised by Dr.
Richard Bell (Keble College, Oxford) and Kiran Mehta (Wolfson College, Oxford)
and presented by the Keble Medieval and Renaissance Cluster.
Do get in touch (see below) if you have any
questions.
More information, as well as the list of
speakers, can be found here
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