Terrific news! HCIH member Kaarlo Havu has been granted an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellowship.
Many congratulations to him.
Kaarlo will be researching: Imagination, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Early Modern Europe (1500-1650)
The project studies the importance of imagination for early modern (1500-1650) political rhetoric in Paris, London and Madrid. It investigates rhetorical strategies for visualizing things and events, their uses in political discourse, and their links to an early modern anthropology that stresses the abilities of imagination to engage people emotionally. While the project takes its cue from a more general trend to focus on the persuasive dimension of early modern political thought, it aspires to provide a completely novel interpretation of the centrality of the visual, imaginative dimension of politics. Given the ongoing debates on the dynamics of argumentation in the public sphere, the project raises historical awareness of the ways in which emotional, imaginative, and rational arguments were thought to interact in the early modern period.