The Department of History presents
our Distinguished Lecture in European History for the Spring 2026 term
by
Ted McCormick
(Isobel Haldane Professor of British History)
University of Pennsylvania
Engines of Division: Technological Projects, Social Order, and Labor in the Seventeenth-Century British Atlantic
on
Thursday, April 2, 2026
4 pm
301 Van Dyck Hall
McCormick's lecture draws on ongoing research into the history of projects — schemes of technological, scientific, economic, or social transformation — in the later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British world, or what Daniel Defoe called the "Projecting Age." Through the example of a typical mid-seventeenth-century project, a perpetual motion machine, his talk explores features of projecting that illuminate its implications for social order and economic production in metropolitan and colonial contexts, problematizing its reduction to a phase in the taming of capitalism, the creation of the bureaucratic state, or the formation of the modern subject.
Cosponsored by The Rutgers British Studies Center