CfP: Global Skins
Submitted by ccarlin on 11 April 2019 - 12:55amKing's College London, 19–20 September 2019
The Renaissance in Europe saw a reinvigorated focus on natural surfaces as a key to creating order. Medical and natural philosophical frameworks emphasized the continuity of surface between the human and non-human: skins covered the humoral bodies of humans, animals, vegetables, and even minerals. At the same time, as global encounters became more frequent and more densely interwoven in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, skin increasingly acted as a marker of social identity, hierarchy and difference.