Daily Archives: 23 September 2016

Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks, PMRG / CMEMS Free Public Lecture @ UWA

“Adjusting Our Lenses to Make Gender Visible”, Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Date: 7 October, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Austin Lecture Theatre (1.59, first floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia

This is a free event. You don’t need to RSVP – just come along.

The oldest surviving examples of eyeglasses in the world, dating from around 1330, were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the nuns’ choir in the Cistercian Kloster Wienhausen near Celle in northern Germany. Several pairs were stashed there, along with prayer books, small pictures, devotional objects, and the materials used for making these, such as scissors, beads, cloth, paper, and needles, most likely when Duke Ernest the Confessor attempted to introduce Lutheran practice to the convent in the 1520s. Using these wooden rivet spectacles as both material object and metaphor, my talk will examine the ways that scholarship in many disciplines over the last forty years has sharpened our view of gender in the medieval and early modern periods, allowing us to see greater complexities in things close at hand and a wider panorama beyond.


Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She specialises in the history of early modern Europe, with research interests in women’s work in Germany, the history of Christianity (especially gender and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations), and global history. Professor Wiesner-Hanks is currently the Senior Editor of Sixteenth Century Journal and an Editor for the Journal of Global History. Her recent publications include: A Concise History of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). She is also the editor of: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World: Critical Concepts in Women’s History, 4 volumes (Routledge, 2015); Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2015); Cambridge World History, 7 volumes in 9 books (Cambridge University Press, 2015); (With John P. McKay, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Roger B. Beck, Clare Hara Crowston, and Jerry Davila), A History of World Societies, 10th ed. (Bedford/St. Martins, 2015); (with Andrew D. Evans, William B. Wheeler, and Julius R. Ruff, Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence, 7th ed. (Cengage, 2014).