The conference will focus on the pragmatics of comparison in the appraisal of new places and peoples. How does a strange place or people become comparable with those more familiar? What does it take to relate a new plant or animal to those already well known? How does one standardize observations and mobilize things and people and situations so they have meaning elsewhere? That is, how was the Pacific made into the obligatory site for exploring the issues that mattered in the Atlantic world? In particular, this conference will examine the ways in which both oceanic regions were co-produced through a complicated series of intellectual and practical interactions over many centuries. Moreover, it will seek ways in which to make the Pacific visible again in global scholarship.

Speakers include: Janet Browne (Harvard),Jorge Caņizares-Esguerra (Texas), Joyce Chaplin (Harvard), Anita Herle (Cambridge), Joseph Meisel (Mellon Foundation), Damon Salesa (Michigan), Simon Schaffer (Cambridge)

Please visit our website for a full program and registration information: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/sawyer_seminar_series/conference/index.shtml

The Sydney Sawyer Seminar is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney.