The Interlopers with Vera Keller

Please join us for our next event in the NACBS Book Launch Series.

The Interlopers with Vera Keller

Thursday, August 29 9:00am PT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge by Vera Keller. For this event, she will be joined in conversation by Frederik Albritton Jonsson, Ted McCormick, and Debapriya Sarkar.

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“Many accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. According to these views, scientists such as Francis Bacon produced certain knowledge by pacifying their emotions and concentrating on method. In The Interlopers, Vera Keller rejects this emphasis on discipline and instead argues that what distinguished early modernity was a navigation away from restraint and toward the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe. 

Keller follows early seventeenth-century English "projectors" as they traversed the world, pursuing outrageous entrepreneurial schemes along the way. These interlopers were developing a different culture of knowledge, one that aimed to take advantage of the disorder created by the rise of science and technological advances. They sought to deploy the first submarine in the Indian Ocean, raise silkworms in Virginia, and establish the English slave trade. These projectors developed a culture of extreme risk-taking, uniting global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. They saw the world as a riskscape of empty spaces, disposable people, and unlimited resources.

By analyzing the disasters—as well as a few successes—of the interlopers she studies, Keller offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself. While many influential accounts of the period characterize European modernity as a disciplining or civilizing process, The Interlopers argues that early modernity instead entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.”

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Vera Keller is an author of three monographs and over forty articles. Her first book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge UP, 2015), studied the entanglement of science with political theory as the experimental sciences came to be imagined as the form of knowledge most serving the "public interest."  Her second book,  The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (Hopkins, 2023), winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, challenged the idea that modern science disciplined the self, society, and knowledge. Instead, the removal of the safeguards protecting the liberal arts fomented a no-holds-barred conquistadorial approach to knowledge appropriation, experimentation, and disruptive invention around the globe.

Her third monograph, Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge UP, 2024), studies how academics in the late seventeenth century labored to create the research disciplines and the research university as a means to incorporate undisciplined, advancing knowledge back into the liberal arts via infrastructures designed to promote critical reasoning and defenses against bias. Her next project, Superability, will offer a disability history of ability in the Renaissance. With Markus Friedrich and Christine von Oertzen, Keller co-edits a book series from De Gruyter, Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History. She serves as a board member for the Renaissance Society of America and as Chair of its Membership Committee.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Chair of the Committee for Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He is also the co-editor of The Journal of Modern History. His research and writing covers Britain and the British Empire from the early modern period to the twenty first century with a special focus on topics in environmental history, political economy and history of science. His most recent book is Scarcity: a History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard, 2023), coauthored with Carl Wennerlind. Forthcoming work includes the first political history of Britain's fossil transition and an anthology entitled The Long Acceleration.

Ted McCormick is Professor of History and Fellow in the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009) and Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2022).

Debapriya Sarkar is Associate Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. She researches and teaches at the intersections of early modern literature, literature/science studies, ecocriticism, premodern critical race studies, maritime studies, women’s writing, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).