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 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, 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.

April 29, 10:00am – 5:30pm

9:30am-10:00am       Breakfast & Coffee

10:00am - 12:00pm   Correspondence & Communication
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Experiencing the 'Communication Process' of the Enlightenment: Three Case Studies”
Charlotta Woolf, “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
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
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”

For further information, please visit the conference website.

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.

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 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, 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.

April 28, 1:00pm – 5:30pm

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.

NOTE: Event registration is full. Some seats may be available in case of no shows; please arrive early.

For the first time since it started moving toward "ever closer union" more than a half-century ago, Europe finds itself closer to unraveling than to greater integration. The euro, conceived to cement unity and hitch Germany forever to its European partners, has sown disunity by placing economies and cultures as diverse as the Greek and the German within the same currency. Britain is to hold a referendum this year or next on leaving the European Union. Its outcome is uncertain. At Europe's eastern borders, President Putin is doing what he can to undermine the European idea and create havoc in the no-man's lands between the Union and Russia. Ukraine has paid a preposterous price in blood and treasure for seeking a trade accord with Brussels, a perceived offense to Moscow. Refugees from a war the West has fanned through indecision, and from other conflict zones, converge on the continent; Germany alone took in 1.1 million in 2015. Parisians die in a hale of bullets. Brussels shuts down. Everywhere, instability and anxiety favor nationalist movements.

The miracle of a Europe whole and free is increasingly taken for granted. As miracles go, it's just so 20th-century. America, to a significant degree, has disengaged -- Europe is an old story by now. Is the greatest peace-generating mechanism of recent decades on the verge of coming apart?

Roger Cohen has worked for The New York Times for 25 years as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and now columnist. Prior to that he worked for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. He is the author of four books. The latest, a family memoir entitled The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, was published to wide acclaim by Alfred A. Knopf in January, 2015. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton and his work has been recognized with several awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from Britain’s Next Century Foundation and a prize from the Overseas Press Club of New York. Raised in South Africa and England, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he is a naturalized American.

Monica Martinez-Bravo is an associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, Spain. She received her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2010. Her research interests are in the fields of Political Economy and Economic Development.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.