The symposium “Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World,” part of the project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe and Asia, is intended to extend and expand knowledge of cultural production by and for early modern women – particularly those associated with the courts – on a global scale.

See the full program on the Department of Art & Art History’s website.

While numerous conferences, symposia and resulting publications in the past several decades have addressed women as producers, consumers and subjects of European art during the early modern period (c. 1400-1750), less consideration has been given to women’s roles in the courts – particularly as informed by the steadily increasing cross-cultural interactions (i.e. between Europe and Asia, the Americas, Africa, etc.) that characterized the period. This symposium aims to address this lacuna while de-centering the traditional Euro-centric model of study in the analysis of women’s cultural production, presentation and consumption surrounding courts and empires (institutions associated with ruling power). The goal is to encourage a more equitable view of early modern women’s experiences of and with art globally, across traditionally held national and continental boundaries.

Click here to register for the symposium.