Northumbria CfP: Arts of Water management, 1500-1800
At a time of environmental crisis, studying histories of the manipulation of natural resources has never been more important. While our ancestors used different terms to talk of such matters, they engaged with (or stridently disengaged from) the same questions. This symposium, which has been generously supported by the Institute of Humanities at Northumbria University, aims to draw together expertise from across disciplines to engage with managed and mechanical water systems in the period 1500-1800. Our focus for this multidisciplinary symposium is on how humans have sought to make water work for them—for not only practical but also artistic purposes. While water’s centrality to life has long made it a rich source for metaphor and symbolism, Thomas Willard notes that the period between 1500 and 1800 ‘saw a breakthrough in the understanding of water: what it was and how it blended with other substances to form waters of great variety’ (‘Testing the Waters’ in Classen, ed., 2015). En