Turin, 10-12 September 2025

The Summer School aims to explore the modern debates surrounding slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Americas within the timeframe

of the Early Modern period, defined here broadly as stretching from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.

The project aims to encourage a comparative perspective, focussing on three key aspects: 1) Early Modern and Enlightenment debates ranging from race and ethnicity to the rights of man. Debates about enslavement begin with ethical, economic and theological questions, and evolve in the period towards a greater focus on race, ethnicity and discussion of the rights of man. How are notions of race debated in the period? 2) Serfdom and slavery. Serfdom existed widely across Europe in the Early Modern period. The challenges relating to research into serfdom in part mirror the challenges concerning enslavement, yet the two phenomena are almost always studied separately. To what extent are there parallels between serfdom and slavery? 3) The role of imaginative literature and the creative arts. Novels, stories, plays, operas, paintings and prints play an increasingly important role, in the Enlightenment period in particular, in exploring notions and constructions of otherness, and in creating often paradoxical fictions of enslavement.

SCIENTIFIC CO-ORDINATION: NICHOLAS CRONK
Turin 10-12 September 2025

PROGRAMME

Palazzo d’Azeglio | via Principe Amedeo, 34 – Torino

9:30 Participants’ registration
10:00-10:15 Opening remarks
Piero Gastaldo (Fondazione 1563)
Nicholas Cronk (THP and Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford)
10:15-11:15 Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers) The Politics of the Archive: Slavery Studies and the State of Method
Chair Caroline Gleason-Mercier
11.15-11.45 coffee break
11:45-12:45 Matthew Hewitt (THP), Bianca Mazzinghi Gori (THP) and Laurie Venters (THP) Reflexions on the Research Cycle 2023-2025, ‘Slavery, ethnicity and race in the Mediterranean: Ideas and attitudes from Homer to Columbus’
Chair Nicholas Cronk
12:45-14:15 lunch break
14:15-15:15 Vanessa Massuchetto (Max Planck Institute for Legal History & Legal Theory, Frankfurt) Gendered Legal Histories and women’s agencies: unraveling colonial statutes of Indigenous servitude in the Iberian-American Worlds (17th-18th centuries)
Chair Caroline Gleason-Mercier
15:15-16:00 Aleksander Musiał (gta Institute, ETH-Zürich and THP) Serfdom and Slavery: Stanislas Poniatowski’s Eastern European emancipatory patronage between antiquarianism and abolitionism
Chair Nicholas Cronk
16:00-16:30 coffee break
16:30-18:00 Summer School early career researchers: presentations
Chair Morgan Golf-French
18:00-18:15 Piero Gastaldo and Vincenzo Ferrone The new book collection of F1563: Quaderni del THP, n° 1
18:15 Cocktail reception

Palazzo d’Azeglio – via Principe Amedeo, 34

9:30-10:30 Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College) The Happy Slave: On the Origins and Subsequent Fortunes of a Stubborn and Pernicious Trope
Chair Nicholas Cronk
10:30-11:00 coffee break
11:00-11:45 Nicholas Cronk (THP and Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford) Voltaire, slavery, serfdom
Chair Devin Vartija
11:45-12:45 Pärtel Piirimäe (University of Tartu) Contesting Freedom: Serfdom Debates in the Baltic, 1760-1820
Chair Aleksander Musial
12:45-14:00 lunch break
14:00-14:45 Samuel Harrison (THP) Il faut que l’enfant sache qu’il y a des êtres semblables à lui: theories of moral sentiments and the rise of republican racism
Chair Nicholas Cronk
14:45-15:30 Morgan Golf-French (THP) Studying Race in the German Enlightenment: Examining Student Notes from Christoph Meiners’ Lectures
Chair Nicholas Cronk
15:30-15:45 coffee break
15:45-17:15 Summer School early career researchers: presentations
Chair Samuel Harrison
17:30-19:00 Visit of the Mole Antonelliana/Cinema Museum (optional)

Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi – via G. Mazzini, 11

09:45-10:00 Musical welcome, curated by Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi
10:00-11:00 Demetrius Eudell (Vassar College) ‘All those strangers of Christian nations’: Religion, Race, and Slavery in the Early Modern Era
Chair Morgan Golf-French
11:00-11:30 coffee break
11:30-12:30 Talk & recital Caroline Gleason-Mercier (THP) and Giorgia Delorenzi (Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi) Becoming Fugitive Wives: Women Composers of the French Revolution
Chair Nicholas Cronk
12:30-14:00 lunch break
14:00-15:00 Ann Thomson (European University Institute, Florence) ‘It made my heart ache to see them’. The ambiguities of an English slave trader on the West coast of Africa in the 1730s
Chair Samuel Harrison
15:00-16:00 Devin Vartija (University of Utrecht) ‘Nothing is so unequal as equality itself’: Reflections on (Anti-)Slavery and (In)Equality in Early Modern Europe and the Americas
Chair Nicholas Cronk
16:00-16:30 Visit of the Conservatorio

Palazzo d’Azeglio
Via Principe Amedeo 34 – Torino

Palazzo d’Azeglio is a historic building located in the centre of Turin, it has been the headquarters of the Turin Humanities Programme – THP – of Fondazione 1563 since 2021. Its history began in 1679, when it was built as part of the second expansion of the city. It was the residence of local noble families, including the Taparelli d’Azeglio, hence the name. Since 1970 it has housed the Luigi Einaudi Foundation, a national point of reference for the social sciences. The interiors and the decorations of the building feature a variety of architectural and decorative styles, which are the result of several refurbishments due to the various owners who have alternated over the course of more than three centuries.

Dipinto Casa D’Azeglio, Torino
Sala of the Conservatorio "G. Verdi", Turin

Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi
via G. Mazzini, 11 – Torino

The Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Turin was founded in 1936 and is one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in art, music and dance in Italy. Illustrious musicians and composers of the past trained here. The Conservatorio offers academic courses and PhDs. It also carries out artistic production activities and it participates in music festivals organized by local institutions.