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On 15 & 16 January of 2026, an international workshop will be organised in Ghent (Belgium) on cultures of consumption, focusing on the relation between products, desire and imagination in Europe from 1500-1800.

In our contemporary world, consumers are bombarded daily with advertisements to buy products. Most advertisements in modern media are not limited to the utility of the product as their main selling point.  They instead sell the fantasy that the consumer’s life is elevated by buying the advertised product. Consumption cannot solely be defined as the opposite of production, and is instead an autonomous force, intrinsically tied to the imagination and identity of the consumer. How consumerism and consumer culture emerged has been a fruitful topic of debate in recent scholarship on the rise of consumer society in Europe. Scholars like David Graeber have challenged the definition of consumption as the opposing force to production, while steering towards a more critical analysis of consumption that also involves the link between consumption and cultural imagination.

In the critical analysis of the origins of consumption and consumer culture, such as Graeber’s, much scholarly attention has been paid to early modernity. In early usages of the word in French and English starting from the fourteenth century consumption was linked to disease and the wasting of material goods. The desires and fears of early modern people concerning consumption and objects of desire were explored and portrayed in art, theatre and science. These desires and anxieties were rooted in class, gender and colonial relations. ‘Cultures of consumption’ therefore is defined broadly within this workshop. We are particularly focused, however, on the aspect of cultural imagination and the ways in which this imagination engages with the desire to purchase and possess products.

We invite researchers to reflect on this dimension of imagination and its interaction with the affective aspects of consumption from a variety of media perspectives. This may include insights drawn from the study of literature, theatre, visual art, and early examples of advertising. A range of academic disciplines can be brought to bear on this topic, including cultural history, history of emotions/affect studies, theatre studies, socio-economic history, philosophy, and material studies. This international workshop at Ghent University aims to bring the many divergent approaches to the history of consumption and desire together.

Please join us for Prof. Roland Greene’s Inaugural Francqui Lecture and the 2025 Belvedere Lecture: New Perspectives on Early Modern Studies.

Greene’s lecture will trace the decline of universalism: the idea that certain themes, experiences, or values in literature are common to all humans, transcending specific cultural, historical, or geographical contexts. This doctrine ruled the study of literature until about 75 years ago. Its disappearance made possible new canons of experimental, ethnic, and Indigenous writing, but left literary studies with a crisis of authority—and a diminished place in public culture—that remains the topic of countless jeremiads. After sketching a provocative history of this transformative episode in the life of a discipline, Prof. Greene will offer ideas toward the rebuilding of literary criticism’s authority on a sounder basis than what it was established on—in effect, remaking its foundation with a new sense of ethics and justice.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A with the audience and a reception.

Register before 04-03-2026 18:05.

Prof. Roland Greene is the Mark Pigott KBE Professor, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. During 2026, he will be a Francqui International Chair at Ghent University.

His research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present. His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). His other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999); and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991). Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997), and he is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012).

In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. His theme for the 2016 Annual Convention in Austin, Texas was Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future. At Stanford Greene is co-chair and founder of two research workshops in which most of his Ph.D. students participate. Renaissances brings together early modernists from the Bay Area to discuss work in progress, while the Poetics Workshop provides a venue for innovative scholarship in the broad field of international and historical poetics. Greene has taught at Harvard and Oregon, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Belvedere Lecture: New Perspectives in Early Modern Studies (https://www.belvederelecture.ugent.be) is a joint initiative of various research groups at Ghent University, including the Institute for Early Modern History, the Sarton Centre for History of Science, the Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMS), the Institute for Legal History, THALIA and RELICS