Past FNI International Conferences

FNI has held four past conferences, in 1995, 1998, 2001, and 2005, each devoted to a particular facet of the historical experience in German Europe. With support generously granted by the Max Kade Foundation, DAAD, Duke University, the Josiah Charles Trent Foundation and other agencies, each of these conferences was a resounding success.

1995. The conference group's founding conference at Duke University took up the theme of Infinite Boundaries. The conference was organized by FNI President, Max Reinhart (German, University of Georgia). A selection of essays from that conference was published under the same title in 1998: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, edited by Max Reinhart (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998).

1998. Convening again at Duke University, FNI President James Van Horn Melton (History, Emory University), organzed the 2nd FNI International Conference: Cultures of Communication. Selected papers, revised and edited by James Van Horn Melton, appeared in 2002: Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in the Early Modern German Lands, edited by James Van Horn Melton. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2002.)

2001. In 2001, FNI president Mary Lindemann (History, Carnegie Mellon University) chose the theme of Ways of Knowing for the third conference, which was held at Carnegie-Mellon University. Selected conference papers have appeared in: Ways of Knowing: Ten Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Mary Lindeman (Boston: Brill, 2004).

2005. In 2005, the fourth conference returned to Duke University. FNI President Randolph C. Head (History, University of California at Riverside) organized a program with nearly seventy scholars from Europe and the Americas that addressed the theme of Orthodoxies and Diversities in Early Modern German-speaking Europe. Selected papers from the conference have been collected in a volume of essays edited by Randolph Head and Daniel Christensen, Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies: Order and Creativity in Early Modern German Culture, 1500-1750, which is currently under review. See the program for the 2005 conference here.

For details on the published conference essays see our Publications page.