Currencies between Cultures
Thursday, 3 July, 2014
Humanities Building, Room 148, The University of Warwick.
Organised by Clare Rowan (C.Rowan{@}warwick.ac.uk).
Registration is now closed.
About the Conference:
Though money is often characterised as an impersonal medium of exchange, it remains intricately connected to cultural value systems, social relationships, and political regimes. These characteristics are linked to the role of currency as a medium of commensuration designed to render equivalent and transitive once incomparable objects, ideas, signs, and meanings. In this way money goes ‘between’ cultures, and as a medium at the point of contact, money can often become ideologically charged. The eurozone, the rise of alternative currencies like Bitcoin, and the symbolic transformation of currencies during events like the Occupy movement ("We need a Revolution"), indicate that the social, ideological, and political aspects of money remain key modern concerns. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the differing ways money has connected, subverted, and entangled different cultures throughout history.
Programme:
CURRENCIES BEYOND BORDERS
10-10.30am: Globalisation, experimentation and foreshadowing: United States coins in the 1870s
Steve Roach, editor in chief of Coin World, Independent Scholar
10.30-11am: Crossing cultural frontiers: when is a Roman coin not a Roman coin?
David Wigg-Wolf, Römisch-Germanische Kommission, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
11-11.30am: “One world, one language, one currency”: The Esperantic proposal in 1907
David Astori, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy
11.30am-12pm: Tea break
12-12.45pm: PLENARY SESSION
Capturing a place: A (post-colonial) reading of numismatic iconographic strategies
Liv Yarrow, Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA
12.45-1.30pm: Lunch
CURRENCIES AND COMMUNICATION
1.30-2pm: Audience targeting and the projection of power in the reign of Nerva
Nathan T. Elkins, Baylor University, USA
2-2.30pm: “Stamped all over the king’s head”: defaced pennies and the campaign for women’s suffrage
Thomas Hockenhull, Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum
2.30-2.45pm: Break
CULTURAL INTERACTION AND ENTANGLEMENT
2.45-3.15pm: Symbols of interaction: entangled objects as numismatic imagery in ancient Thermae (Sicily)
Clare Rowan, The University of Warwick
3.15-3.45pm: Bilingual coins of Severus Alexander: facets of cultural interaction in the Roman provinces
Dario Calomino, Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum
3.45-4pm: Break
CURRENCIES AT A TIME OF CHANGE
4-4.30pm: Language, narrative, value: The literary life of silver in seventeenth-century China
Sarah E. Kile, The University of Michigan
4.30-5pm: Placing a value on Syria’s past and present cultures: change and continuity on Syrian banknotes under the Al-Assad regime from 1963 to present
Rebecca Dodd, Independent Scholar
5pm: Wine Reception
Generously supported by the Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick.