Over the course of the coming academic year the University of Aberdeen's Centre for Early Modern Studies will host a Sawyer Seminar - a series of conferences and workshops funded annually by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation of New York. The University of Aberdeen, along with Oxford is the first British University to host the one of these prestigious seminars, which have previously been held only at America's leading research universities.
The theme of Aberdeen's Sawyer Seminar is Citizens within Subjects: Political Rights and Participation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. The purpose of this series will be to bring eminent scholars from around the world to the University in order to address contemporary political problems from an historical perspective. The Series begins this weekend (November 28-29) with a lecture and colloquium devoted to the issue of governance and participation. Future topics include public discourse and communication (17 January 2004); the relationship between citizenship and class, nationality, and gender (13 March 2004); and the problem of rights and resistance (15 May 2004).
Seminar organisers Dr Cathy Shrank and Dr Phil Withington, said:'Citizens within Subjects provides an excellent opportunity to bring recent and exciting work on citizenship in early modern Europe to the attention of a wider audience. Dealing with politics and participation beyond the level of monarchs, courts and nobility, the series offers one way of making professional historical scholarship once again relevant to contemporary issues and debates in a period of devolution, European unification, and globalisation.'
Professor Howard Hotson, Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, added: 'The outstanding selection of internationally renowned scholars coming to Aberdeen for this series is a clear indication both of the importance of this approach and of the prospects of the Seminar achieving its ambitious objectives.'
