Displacement and Return in the Late Stuart World, 1658-1715
The Bangor Conference on the Restoration: 26th - 28th July, 2022
The Restoration decades in the Stuart world involved many in displacements, and sometimes returns: the results of religious persecution, political defeat, trade in humans, economic opportunity, European warfare, cultural travel, and other forces. The period 1658-1715 was marked by all kinds of migrations, exiles, forced transportations, colonisations, tours, retirements, searches for fortune, and also by returns from such wandering. These were both experienced directly, and imagined or remembered; they could be real journeys, or ones rhetorically or symbolically constructed; and they affected diverse groups: royalists, slaves, Huguenots, soldiers, catholics, traders, radical whigs, Jacobites, settlers, students, disappointed politicians, economic migrants and so on.
The Bangor Restoration Conference in July 2021 will explore these themes. The conference will cover both the Stuart realms of Britain and Ireland, and places Stuart subjects touched, including the American colonies, continental Europe; and the trans-oceanic posts of Britain’s early commercial and territorial empire. The emphasis will not only be on the basic experience of displacement and return; but also on the loss, alienation, exoticism, excitement, transformation, relief, or otherness, that these brought.
Suggestions and questions can be sent to Professor Tony Claydon at t.claydon@bangor.ac.uk and Professor Thomas Corns at els009@bangor.ac.uk. Although the main deadline for papers has passed, there may be room for last minute additions to the programme, if you have a suggestion for a 20 minute paper that would fit these themes.
Plenary Speakers:
Sharon Achinstein: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of the Border
Mark Goldie: The Exiles’ Return: Whig Retribution in 1689
Robin Gwynn: Revocation and Revolution: Huguenot refugees in Britain, and the defeat of Louis XIV’s France
Paulina Kewes: Displaced Rulers: A Transnational Perspective
We shall also stage a plenary round table discussion of the challenges of presenting the history of slavery to the public.