Event Description
An online conference organised by the Thomas Harriot Seminar and hosted by The Warburg Institute. Convenor: Dr Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University London)
The English mathematician and natural philosopher Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) was a true Renaissance polymath, working in fields as diverse as optics, navigational mathematics, alchemy, and mechanics. This conference commemorates the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of this remarkable figure, but also celebrates the exciting new intellectual landscape through which he moved. By placing Harriot within global and local contexts, this conference aims to shed light on broader developments in the long sixteenth century.
Thursday 9 September
Lauren Working (Oxford) “Thomas Harriot and the Material Atlantic”
Vera Keller (University of Oregon) “The Virginia Company in the History of Projects”
Alexander Marr (Cambridge University): “‘I flamed amazement’: The Identity of Isaac Oliver’s A Man Consumed by Flames”
Mordechai Feingold (CalTech) “Philosophizing Freely in Thomas Harriot’s England”
Philip Beeley (University of Oxford) “Fallacies, Fictions, and Half–Truths. On Thomas Harriot’s reception in later seventeenth–century scientific discourse”
Friday 10 September
Matthias Schemmel (MPWIG): “The Place of Thomas Harriot in a Global, Long-term History of Knowledge”
Annaleigh Margey (Dundalk Institute of Technology) “Thomas Harriot and Ireland: surveying and mapping in sixteenth-century Munster”
Jim Bennett (Oxford): “The Mathematical Seamen of Elizabethan England”
Norman Biggs (LSE) “Harriot, Money, and Mystery”
Misha Teramura (University of Toronto) “Hotspur’s Skepticism: Harriot, Percy, Shakespeare”
Thursday 9 and Friday 10 September 2021, 15:30-20:00 BST