This interdisciplinary conference aims to interrogate the state of the field for slavery, and broader practices of unfreedom and trafficking, in the global premodern world. This field has flourished in recent years, yet still remains relatively understudied despite offering fertile ground to discuss the history of slavery, servitude, and exploitation. Premodern Unfreedoms seeks to grapple not only with the larger historical issues of globalizing the practice of unfreedom in the premodern period, but to also forefront the human stories at its core.
Premodern Unfreedoms will take place over two days (October 27th and 28th, 2023) in the Levis Faculty Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The keynote lecture will be given by Dr. Don Wyatt (Middlebury College). This conference is being planned in conjunction with The Medieval Globe under the expectation that select papers from participants will constitute a special issue of the journal.
Schedule
*Draft Schedule for Premodern Unfreedoms
Friday, October 27
9:00-9:30, BREAKFAST
9:30-10:00, OPENING REMARKS
10:00-11:30, PANEL 1
- Dr. Xiao Chen, Grinnell College, “Farms, Mines, and the Promises of “Self-Renewal”: Penal Transportation and Convict Labor in Xinjiang (1758-1857).”
- Zekun Zhang, Yale University, “Enslaved Captives from the Korean Peninsula and the Tang State, 600-750.”
- Adrian van der Velde, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Nocturnal Unfreedoms: Captivity and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World.”
11:30-12:30, LUNCH
12:30-2:00, Rare Book and Manuscript Library Excursion
Please register to access library materials in advance of the excursion. Link:https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/research-instruction/register-to-access-collections/
2:30-4:30, PANEL 2
- Xinyi Wei, Princeton University, “Spectrums of Unfreedom: Marriage and Slavery Practices in the early Mongol Empire.”
- Dr. Emma Kalb, University of Bonn, “The Eunuch and the Emperor: Reading Elite Slavery in Islamicate South Asia.”
- Holley Ledbetter, Oberlin College, “Serving in Stone: Aestheticizing Unfreedom at Khirbat al-Mafjar.”
- Caroline Schmidt Patricio, Lehigh University, “Before we were moderns: Aztecs and Maya women’s bodies and capital accumulation before the Invasion to Colonization.”
5:00-7:00: KEYNOTE ADDRESS
- Dr. Don Wyatt, Middlebury College
Don Wyatt (A.B. Beloit; A.M., Ph.D. Harvard) has taught at Middlebury College since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections of identity and violence and the nexuses of ethnicity and slavery. He is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China, the past editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, and the former concurrent president of its Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies. Among his most recent publications are chapter essays in the medieval volumes of both the Cambridge World History of Violence and the Cambridge World History of Slavery as well as in Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900. Articles have recently appeared the Journal of Religion and Violence and in Mediaevalia as well as in Itinerario and China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies. His latest books are the Cambridge Element in the Global Middle Ages series, Slavery in East Asia, and the shortly forthcoming, Song China and the World.
Saturday, October 28
9:00-10:00, BREAKFAST
10:00-11:30, PANEL 3
- Dr. Martina Saltamacchia, University of Nebraska, Omaha, “Marco Carelli and the Tartar Girls: Freeing Slaves in Medieval Milan?”
- Dr. Jaeyoon Song, McMaster University, “Freeing Slaves in a Neo-Confucian World: The Exodus of the Enslaved in Nineteenth century Korea.”
- Dr. Elizabeth D. Urban, West Chester University, “What Does it Mean to Be Freed?: A Comparison of Enslaved and Freed Women in Early Islamic History.”
11:30-12:30, LUNCH
12:30-2:00, PANEL 4
- Samia Errazzouki, University of California, Davis, “Between the ‘yellow-skinned enemy’ and the ‘black-skinned slave’: early modern genealogies of race and slavery in Sa`dian Morocco.”
- Dr. Timur Pollack-Lagushenko, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign “Antoni Simon, the Moor: Debate over Race, Slavery, and Freedom in Pamiers (1446).”
- Brittany Joyce, University of Michigan, “Enslaved Infants, New Christians: Clerical Authority and the Raising of Abandoned Children in Late Antiquity.”