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Networks of European Enlightenment
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From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.
 
This conference will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.
 
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April 28, 1:00pm – 5:30pm
 
1:00pm - 3:00pm       Historical Network Theory (Chair: Caroline Winterer)
Ruth Ahnert & Sebastian Ahnert, “Quantitative Network Analysis and Early Modern Correspondence”
Dan Edelstein, “How to Study Networks Without ‘Edgy’ Data”
Nicole Coleman, “Fibra: A Graph-Drawing Tool for Social Network Analysis”
 
3:00pm - 3:30pm       Coffee break
 
3:30pm - 5:30pm       Paris, Capital of Enlightenment (Chair: Dan Edelstein)
Nicholas Cronk, “The invention of Voltaire's correspondence”
Maria Comsa, “Theatrical Networks in 18th-Century France”
Melanie Conroy & Chloe Edmondson, “French Salons in the Age of Enlightenment”
 
 
April 29, 10:00am – 5:30pm
 
9:30am-10:00am       Breakfast & Coffee
 
10:00am - 12:00pm   Correspondence & Communication (Chair: Giovanna Ceserani)
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Experiencing the 'Communication Process' of the Enlightenment: A Case Study”
Charlotta Wolff, “Un ami des philosophes modernes": The Networks of Swedish Ambassador Gustav Philip Creutz in Paris, 1766-1783”
Andrew Kahn, “The Enlightenment Correspondence of Catherine the Great: the Digital Project”
 
12:00pm – 1:00pm     Lunch
 
1:00pm - 3:00pm       Science & Technology (Chair: Claude Willan)
Paola Bertucci, “Artisanal Networks: The République des lettres and The Société des arts”
Jessica Riskin, “Lamarckiana” 
Paula Findlen, “Imagining a Community:  The Scientific Networks of Laura Bassi, Emilie du Chatelet, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi” 
 
3:00pm-3:30pm         Coffee break
 
3:30pm - 5:30pm       Religious Networks (Chair: Chloe Edmondson)
Thomas Wallnig, “Catholic Early Enlightenment in Central Europe? - Abbot Gottfried Bessel between Order, Church, Court and Booktrade”
Christopher Warren, “Quaker Networks and Quaker Enlightenment”
Claude Willan, “The English Enlightenment Network”