List of Sessions 2026

9/25/2025: Chairs are currently reviewing submissions; some sessions have an extended deadline of October 3rd. These sessions are listed as OPEN in the lists below. Thank you!

Please note:

• Round 3, Call for Session Papers, has closed, however some sessions have an extended deadline (October 3rd). Please check below
• All submissions must be submitted through the Annual Meeting portal. See the Submissions Instructions and Important Deadlines for details.
• Contact Executive Director Benita Blessing for technical support and questions (director@asecs.org).
• Please do not email abstracts to chairs.

Please Note:
The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) will sponsor its own panels at the ASECS meeting. For more information, please see blog post update here or contact Rachel Bani (rachel.bani@converse.edu) by 10 September 2025.

ABSTRACTS

Panel Abstracts

CLOSED 1776: Page, Stage, Screen [ID 214]
Chair: Jason Shaffer, US Naval Academy Dept of English

As the 250^th anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence approaches, this panel invites potential presenters to consider the question of why, exactly, the “origin story” of the United States so quickly became a creative touchstone for adaptational story-telling—indeed, practically as soon as the “shot heard round the world” was fired. To quote the formerly omnipresent musical Hamilton, questions of “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story” will be at the forefront of its emphasis. Applicants are invited to invite papers that consider how the Revolution has been framed by artists who recollect or outright reinvent its history in written, staged, or filmed form.  Who tells which stories of the Revolution, and why?

Keywords: Atlantic World; History; Politics

OPEN Africa’s Eighteenth Century [ID 246]
Chair: Steven W Thomas, Tennessee Tech University

What did the eighteenth-century look like from the perspective of people living in Africa? Much of the scholarship at eighteenth-century studies conferences such as ASECS tends to examine African history and culture in relation to European colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and the African Diaspora, but the diverse peoples of Africa certainly had their own histories. Moreover, as Sylvia Wynter has pointed out, critiquing Eurocentric metanarratives of history such as Marxism’s understanding of capital and liberalism’s understanding of the enlightenment, they also had different metanarratives of human history for which the “eighteenth-century” might not even signify. At the same time, Africa’s eighteenth century was global, and therefore local events always occurred in relation to the rest of the planet. This panel invites proposals that consider African political history, literature, art, and other cultural dynamics.

Keywords: Africa; Black Atlantic; Ethiopia; Race and Empire

Keywords: Visual Culture/Studies

Bibliography’s Unacknowledged Revolutions (sponsored by The Bibliographical Society of America) [ID 61]
Chair: Emily Spunaugle, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In recognition of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the Bibliographical Society of America welcomes proposals that address the intersection of bibliography and revolution in its multiple valences. Bibliography is interested in the manufacture, acquisition, and exchange of textual and cultural artifacts such as books, manuscripts, fragments, tactile texts, image-based texts, digital texts, and more, with special focus on the human agents involved in thse processes. Papers may address the texts and makers that explicitly undergirded, supported, or opposed the American Revolution, but proposals may also treat “revolution” within different bibliographical contexts: the pervasive, sociological changes brought about by textual objects and their creation, dissemination, and use; the revolution or reversal of fortunes of practitioners in the print trades, including printers, publishers, writers, and editors; the liberatory ethics or, alternatively, carceral logics engendered by texts of the 18th Century; or, more mechanically, the revolution-ary, axial movement of the rounce, rolling the press bed underneath the platen. This panel is open to seasoned bibliographers and newcomers alike. The BSA especially invites independent scholars, librarians, archivists, curators, graduate students, and early career scholars to submit. Think you might do bibliography, but not sure? Send queries to Emily Spunaugle at spunaugle@wisc.edu.

Keywords: Bibliography; Books/Publishing; Material Culture;revolution

OPEN Burney(s) and Blue Studies: Sea and the City (sponsored by the Burney Society of North America) [ID 30]
Chair: Francesca Saggini, Università della Tuscia (Italy)

Frances Burney is part of a significant network of artists –from Hogarth to Gay, from Fielding to Boswell– who imagined strategies for representing and mediating, on paper and in artworks, the (psycho-)geographies, interactions, and landscapes that characterize the modern urban environment. While Burney’s engagement with the rural/urban framework has been extensively explored, the recent rise of Blue Studies, also known as Blue Humanities, makes the sea another space within which to reconsider Burney’s modernity. We welcome reflections on this neglected aspect of Burney’s world and imagery: the sea and water. How do sea and maritime ecologies enter the text, and how can a shift in focus from the city to the sea contribute to our understanding of Frances Burney and her family? The seminar invites proposals that develop or simply move from the following topics to think how the sea and water shaped cultural practices, identities, and narratives in Burney(s):

•  The maritime dimension in the life and work of Frances Burney and her family.
•  The sea and the city as backdrops and protagonists.
•  Expectations, prohibitions, ambitions, and desires on land and at sea.
•  Walkers, sailors, and their spatial and cultural encounters.
•  The sea, the city, and language: maritime and urban idioms.
•  The sea and the city as metaphors.
• Networking on land and at sea.
• Water-centric thinking in Burney(s).
•  Naval warfare, colonialism, and capitalist logic in Burney(s).

Keywords: Atlantic World; Britain/England; Culture/Cultural Studies; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Interdisciplinary

OPEN Crafting Identity: Literature, Objects, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Asia [ID GS202]
Chair: Susan Spencer, University of Central Oklahoma

What does a lacquered box, a poetic manuscript, or a popular print reveal about how people understood themselves and their world in the long eighteenth century? This panel invites proposals that explore the intersection of literature, material culture, and identity formation across Asia between roughly 1680 and 1820. From palace chronicles and theatrical scripts to talismans, textiles, devotional images, and household manuals, it welcomes research on how tangible and textual artifacts shaped meaning and social life.

The panel especially encourages work that examines how writers, artists, performers, and everyday people crafted identities amid political upheaval, religious change, shifting economies, or evolving literary conventions. How did texts and objects reflect or reshape social roles within their cultural settings? How did material and literary forms circulate within or across regional, linguistic, or class boundaries? What kinds of selves were forged—claimed, contested, or reimagined—through these processes? And how might reading objects alongside texts offer a more expansive view of Asia’s historical and cultural diversity?

Proposals are welcome on any part of Asia—including but not limited to China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—and from scholars at all career stages and from any discipline. Papers may focus on literary works, material artifacts, or their interplay.

Keywords: Asia; Culture/Cultural Studies; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Material Culture

OPEN Eighteenth-Century Italy and the “American Experiment”  (sponsored by the Italian Studies Caucus) [ID 54]
Chair: Francesca L Savoia, University of Pittsburgh 

Italian involvement in American affairs long preceded the birth of the US. Scattered settlements of Italians (artisans, musicians, merchants and religious or political refugees) had been present in North America since the 17^th century. As of the 1760s, many exponents of the Italian Enlightenment considered it a land of freedom, founded on religious tolerance, individual liberty and political rights, a conviction which only increased following the American Revolution. Enthusiasm for the newly sovereign state was exemplified by the poet and dramatist Vittorio Alfieri in his L’America libera (1781-1783), and by scientist and statesman Luigi Castiglioni in the account of his travels in the US in 1785-1787. Several states of pre-unification Italy established diplomatic relations with the US, mirroring the intellectual exchanges, friendships and collaborations between the founding fathers and Italian enlightened thinkers. This helped the interest in, and taste for Italian arts, literature, and political thought to grow in the early US.

Proposed topics covering the period 1680s-1830s may include:

• American independence as a paradigm of Italian Risorgimento
• Early presence of Italian travelers and immigrants in the US  
• Italian involvement in transatlantic slave trade
• Abolitionist discourse in Italy
• Italian awareness of Anglo-America and prominent individuals such as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine
• Relations between Italian and North American intellectuals, statemen, entrepreneurs (Filangieri- Franklin, Mazzei-Jefferson… )
• Influence of specific Italian works (such as Dei delitti e delle pene) on the US founding fathers
• Italian literature and art inspired by the “American experiment”

Keywords: Enlightenment; History; Italy/Italian; North America;movements 

OPEN Inventing the ‘Indian’ across the Americas: Colonial Epistemologies and Resistance in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID GS210]
Chair: Sahai Couso Diaz, Kenyon College

The long 18th century saw a surge in projects to classify and control the peoples of the Americas. Indigenous peoples were increasingly rendered as subjects of study—collected in texts, depicted in images, measured by science. Yet these efforts to fix and define indigeneity were often also marked by contradiction, hybridity, and Indigenous resistance. While the category of the “Indian” functioned as colonial fiction, it also mediated political projects and epistemological claims. Philadelphia, with its active printing houses, learned societies, and growing interest in the Americas, served as a key node in these transatlantic exchanges and the movement of books, people, ideas, and objects related to Indigenous knowledge and identity. This panel invites papers that interrogate the conceptualization of “Indians” in the 18th century across Ibero-American and Anglo-American spheres, with particular attention to the role of Philadelphia as a key site where those narratives collided, converged, and circulated.

We particularly welcome papers that consider entangled approaches to indigeneity across the Americas and the role of intellectuals in collecting, translating, and interpreting Indigenous knowledge from the Americas, which laid the foundation for later conceptualizations of Indigenous peoples in independence narratives. This panel invites scholars to reflect on how these overlapping histories shaped and were shaped by colonial ambitions,  Indigenous presence and resistance, and the flow of ideas and objects across the Americas. We seek contributions from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to literary studies, art history, Indigenous studies, museum/archives studies, and related fields

Keywords: Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Interdisciplinary; Latin America; North America; Race and Empire      

OPEN Irish Writing and the Circulation of Ideas in the Early Atlantic (sponsored by the Irish Studies Caucus) [ID 41]
Chair: Scott Breuninger, Virginia Commonwealth University

During the eighteenth century, Ireland’s position within the emerging British Empire was fraught with tension.  The nation’s economy faced several internal and external challenges that hampered the growth of national wealth and the social and religious inequalities codified into the legal system governing the island raised serious problems of political representation.  These issues shaped the popular and literary imaginations of Irish writers, especially among those men and women who left Ireland to seek their fortunes within the Atlantic World.  Moreover, those Irish that remained in the country or emigrated elsewhere were galvanized by the political change in the Atlantic world.  In this environment, the dissemination of ideas, books, and people were sharply impacted by political, social, and religious forces.  

This panel welcomes papers that explore the circulation of Irish writing within the social, literary, economic, and/or political contexts of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World (especially North America), as well as proposals that address the nature and dissemination of Irish books during this period.   

Keywords: Atlantic World; Books/Publishing; Britain/England      

Closed Libertinage, Italian Style (sponsored by the Italian Studies Caucus) [ID 55]
Chair: Clorinda Donato, CSU Long Beach

The year 2025 marked the 300^th anniversary of Giacomo Casanova’s birth, a fitting moment to explore the theme of libertinage, an influential aspect of both Casanova’s career and Italian intellectual and social life at the time. Libertinage has a complex history in eighteenth-century Italy, often viewed through the lens of French traditions. However, a comparative reading of Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie alongside the works of the Marquis de Sade reveals that the term “libertinage” encompasses markedly different connotations, stemming from the distinct cultural and historical contexts in France and Italy. Indeed, the theme of Italian libertinage raises a number of questions, including how Italian free thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—undaunted by the rigorous oversight of the Catholic Church—influenced the particular libertine ethos that characterizes Casanova’s narrative; the formative role played by Boccaccio’s Decameron in cultivating a particularly Italian tradition of eighteenth-century libertinism; the sexual expectations and experience of British travelers of the Grand Tour; the role of libertinism within Italian academies, including playful discussions between members of the Accademia dei Diffettuosi; and the erotic imagery uncovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Additional topics may include:

• The reception of French libertinage in Italy
• Casanova’s brand of libertinism
• Painting Italian libertinism
• Musical libertinism
• 18th-century women and sexuality
• The Hell-fire club:  British libertines reenacting Italian moments of sexual license in London
• Pietro Chiari’s novels and libertinage
• Libertine antiquity: Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the sexual inspiration of archeological sites
• Criminality and libertinage: Cagliostro
• Libertinage and the theater

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies; Italy/Italian; Literature; Philosophy/Religion/Faith;Transgression

OPEN Lighting the Enlightenment: Artificial Light and the Transformation of Cultural Practices [ID 220]
Co-Chairs: Sophie Raux, Université Lumière Lyon 2, and Marie Thebaud-Sorger, CNRS, Centre Alexandre-Koyré, Paris

The renewal of theories of light in the eighteenth century, alongside the development of practices and uses related to the economy of lighting—such as lamps—contributed to shaping a metaphorical understanding of luminous phenomena within the broader discourse of rationalization that characterized the aptly named Age of Enlightenment. Artificial light came to be seen as a manifestation of humanity’s ability to overcome natural constraints, enabling the development of a wide range of practices—nocturnal sociability, theater, art academies, night work, domestic interiors—aligned with the transformation of material environments aimed at improving comfort, safety, and hygiene.
In recent years, interdisciplinary approaches have opened new avenues for research that move beyond literary or visual representations, emphasizing the role of material culture, technology, and sensory experience in shaping historical analysis.
This panel invites proposals that explore how artificial lighting influenced, enabled, or transformed social, artistic, and literary practices. To what extent did innovations in lighting modify, inspire, or make possible such practices? What relationships emerged between technical innovation and artistic or literary creativity? How did artificial light affect the visual cultures of the Enlightenment? What were its implications for the history of vision and representation?
We welcome contributions from a wide range of perspectives, including literary studies, theater studies, art history, the history of technology, the history of knowledge, and sensory studies. Special attention will be given to papers that reflect on methodological questions—for instance, the role of digital simulation or reenactment in reconstructing past sensory experiences.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Digital Humanities; Material Culture; Science and Technology; Visual Culture/Studies

OPEN Mozart in the Americas (sponsored by the Mozart Society of America) [ID 56]
Co-Chairs: Laurel Zeiss, Baylor University and Dorian Bandy

Mozart in the Americas:  This panel will explore how W. A. Mozart’s music intersects with musical life in the Americas (south, central and north) from the 1700s until today.  We invite proposals that explore this theme from a variety of angles:

• the reception of Mozart’s music in South, North, and Central America in the 1700s and beyond
• modern productions and adaptions of his music
• Mozart’s music as a pedagogical tool
• teaching Mozart and his contemporaries

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Music

OPEN Neither Vanishing nor Abstract: the Indigenous Presence in Europe [ID 292]
Chair: Robert Paulett, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

The myths of the “vanishing Indian” and the “noble savage” figured heavily in Enlightenment European thought. Likewise, recent work by authors such as Robbie Richardson and Troy Bickham among others have shown us the myriad ways in which Native Americans were abstracted, portrayed, dramatized, pictured, and theorized. This panel however aims to look past their representations and highlight indigenous peoples’ physical presence in Europe during the long eighteenth century, whether as as workers (free and enslaved), diplomats, travelers, artisans, commenters, kings, or in other ways. The material goods they produced shaped and sustained European economies. While the chair’s own background is in Native North America and the British Empire, this panel seeks papers from all disciplines and all geographic areas to set these historians in global and comparative contexts. 

Keywords: Atlantic World; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Latin America; North America; Race and Empire

OPEN Olga Tokarczuk’s Eighteenth Century [ID 219]
Co-Chairs: Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Ithaca College, and Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard University

We are assembling a roundtable on the novels of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. We hope to identify other scholars who are interested in how her fiction lays claim to the legacy of eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, repurposing the Enlightenment’s encyclopedism and universalism and its concepts of print communications, the public sphere, and the trans-national republic of letters. How do we re-see our period
—its modernity, its concerns with gender, nature, violence, nation—through the lens provided by this 21^st-century Polish novelist? Alternately, how might we trace continuities from the eighteenth century to the present in the formal experiments or thematic concerns of novels such as Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and The Books of Jacob, and what new architectures of totality or concepts of voice might we discover by doing so? 

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Transnational Novel

OPEN Placing Sylvia Wynter’s Eighteenth Century [ID 257]
Chair: Alexander Sherman, University of Texas at Austin

What exactly is the place of the eighteenth century in Sylvia Wynter’s theory and history of humanity? Building on past forums on “Sylvia Wynter’s Eighteenth Century,” including a forthcoming issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, this panel seeks to specify how Wynter’s work fits with the history and geography of the eighteenth century. To very roughly generalize, across her essays, Wynter’s key historical points are Renaissance Iberian voyaging and conquest, the staging grounds for Christian humanist Man1; nineteenth-century British capitalism, those for secularized Darwinian Man2; and finally the 1960s, when decolonial critiques of Man gather force. The long eighteenth century lies between Man1 and Man2 with comparatively little specific attention. How do we get from Sepúlveda and Las Casas to Malthus and Darwin, and how might that period between relate to Césaire and Fanon? Further, Wynter’s focus on the Atlantic raises questions about how her arguments relate to period developments across the Indian, Pacific, and Arctic oceans, regions of ongoing and increasing interest in eighteenth-century studies. Does Man take on different articulations in areas beyond Wynter’s Atlantic? 

This panel welcomes papers addressing these issues about Wynter, humanity, time, and space. Papers might prioritize Wynter’s essays themselves, foreground other primary texts, or take a comparative approach.

Keywords: Atlantic World; Black Atlantic; Critical Theory/Theory; History/Historiography; Interdisciplinary

Popularizing the Global [ID 287]
Co-Chairs: Sigrid G. Köhler, University of Tübingen, and Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College

During the 18th century, a growing sense of the global emerges not just among travelers, scientists, politicians, and philosophers but also among domestic publics, which is reflected in the establishment of journals. News must be communicated globally, because what happens in one part of the world affects all others. Journals play a vital part in this project, as they translate and circulate news, debates, and a wide array of topics. Their success is founded not least in patterns of popularization.  Journals popularize their contents to communicate across social classes, borders, and peoples – in a manner that is easily accessible: in form and content and by stimulating interest and entertainment. News of the world should be understood and ‘soaked up’ by everyone, intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) forging communities of readers. While a large body of research exists on 18th-century European and North American journals, we are especially interested in comparable media from other parts of the world that shape the news in a transatlantic context. As journals become popular, they reach into other media and genres, with resonances on stage, in advice literature, fiction, picture books, etc. Concepts of popular writing emerge implicitly, and sometimes explicitly. In any case, the popular become a force to be reckoned with. We invite contributions that are interested in the news, adjacent media, and methods of popularization and/or the reflection and conceptualization of the popular in the 18th century. A focus on German-language literature and media culture is desired; however, comparative approaches are most welcome.

Keywords: Atlantic World; Culture/Cultural Studies; German/Germany; Global/World/Any Country; Interdisciplinary; Literature

OPEN Presenting the Gendered Self through Art and Collecting [ID 229]
Co-Chairs: Lauren DiSalvo, Virginia Tech, and Katherine Iselin, Emporia State University

Men who collected in the eighteenth century often presented themselves as connoisseurs, through portraiture but also through the display or depiction of their collections. One of the core dialogues in which this panel seeks to engage is how women presented themselves as knowledgeable. Was it through similar or different expressions than their male counterparts? This panel invites papers that interrogate the presentation of self through collecting. This might entail the material remains of collections themselves, their representations in other mediums, how collections were displayed, or how portraits represent developing the self through objects. Papers that focus on material objects and visual culture will be prioritized. While this panel aims to focus on women, papers that center any expression of gender are welcome. 

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Material Culture; Visual Culture/Studies; gender

OPEN Racialized Subjects, Art, and the Built Environment in the 18th-Century Atlantic [ID 228]
Co-Chairs: Luis J. Gordo Pelaez and Miguel A Valerio

Scholarship has addressed and continues to address the contribution of people of color in the early modern Atlantic world. And yet much work remains to be done in regards to the myriad ways in which race shaped the lives of those involved in the art making and building-related fields, from their production to their patronage and consumption. This session welcomes proposals investigating the role and contribution of Indigenous, Black, Asian, and mixed-race artists, architects, and patrons in the artistic and built environment of the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. 

Keyword: Art History/Architecture; Atlantic World; Race and Empire

OPEN Reassessing Hester Mulso Chapone’s Literary and Feminist Legacy [ID 249]
Chair: Caroline Pari, BMCC, CUNY 

Hester Mulso Chapone (1727-1801) is best known for her Letters Addressed to a Young Mind (1773), for her regular attendance at Bluestocking gatherings, and her correspondence with Samuel Richardson about a woman’s right to choose her own husband. Yet, to some, she is a minor figure. While she has gained some critical attention in the last two decades, it has not been enough. As Hester Mulso, she had a lengthy writing career that began at age nine, and published poems by 18. These early works, along with her letters, essays and stories deserve much more consideration. Mulso Chapone was a complex figure who seems to have been too constrained to openly champion feminist causes but expressed deep concerns about the treatment of women in more private and personal contexts, outlined a program for women’s education, and promoted female intellectual growth. The goal of this panel is to reevaluate Mulso Chapone’s place in eighteenth-century literary history and feminist thought as well as her membership in the Bluestocking circle. This panel seeks papers that explore Mulso’s earlier writings, her life and family, her friendships or correspondences with literary figures such as Eliza Carter, Elizabet Montagu, Hannah More, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Samuel Richardson, or others, her impact on women writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, and paintings of her and/or Bluestocking writers. All topics welcome; emerging scholars and established scholars are invited to submit.

Keyword: Biography; Britain/England; Class; Literature;gender

OPEN Senegambia: Visual and Material Exchanges in the Long Eighteenth Century  [ID 242]
Co-Chairs: Harvey Guy Shepherd, The Courtauld Institute of Art , and Carole Nataf, Courtauld Institute of Art

This panel invites proposals that investigate the visual, material, and cultural histories of Senegambia and its broader networks during the long eighteenth century. The region comprised a complex geographical, cultural, and political entity that ranged from the coasts of present-day Senegal and The Gambia to the desert borders of Mauritania and Morocco, constituting a rich locus for rethinking narratives of place and identity in the early modern period.  

 This discussion aims to foreground the region not as a peripheral site within European imperial narratives, but as a dynamic cultural and artistic sphere shaped by local practices, transregional exchange, and global entanglements. Crucial to this panel is the centring of narratives of resistance, cultural survival, and alternative epistemologies within and beyond the traumatic histories of slavery and colonialism. Panellists may wish to consider how visual and material evidence offers access to histories of autonomy and creativity in the face of violence and displacement, or the ways in which local frameworks of value, beauty, and representation resist Eurocentric paradigms.  

We welcome interdisciplinary papers drawing from fields such as art history, archaeology, anthropology, comparative literature, and the blue humanities. We are especially interested in contributions that examine the visual and material cultures of Senegambia, whether produced locally or through transcultural contact. Topics might include, but are not limited to: domestic and ritual objects; dress and adornment; architecture and urbanism; and the production and circulation of images, textiles, and commodities between West Africa and the rest of the world.   

Keywords: Africa; Art History/Architecture; Atlantic World; Material Culture; Visual Culture/Studies

Sociability and Enlightenment #2: Digitizing Sociable Practices [ID 232]
Co-Chairs: Valérie Capdeville, Université Rennes 2, and Brian Cowan, McGill University

Format: Panel with 4 papers (15 min each) + discussion by Kimberley Page-Jones (UBO Brest, France)

This panel will explore the relationship between sociable practices and the experience of ‘Enlightenment’ in the British, European and colonial societies in the long eighteenth century (1650-1850) through the innovative methodologies adopted by digital humanities projects. Indeed, digital humanities have become extremely useful tools to better identify and understand sociable practices, circulations and networks as well as their actors, through the creation of dictionaries, encyclopedias, anthologies, often unveiling digitized manuscript sources ranging from private correspondences, diaries, travel narratives, essays, etc. Since the pioneering Stanford project ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’, many scholars have embraced the digital age to either enhance or revisit traditional approaches to various aspects of the social and cultural histories of the Enlightenment.

For example, the recent DIGIT.EN.S digital encyclopedia project (led by the GIS Sociabilités/Sociability), featuring about 200 entries to date, an anthology of primary sources and a gallery of images, explores a wide range of topics related to British sociability from 1650 to 1850, looking at how the circulation of models of sociability shaped European and colonial societies. Such innovative, evolutive and user-friendly digital platforms provide a wealth of data for researchers, students and the general public. Now fully accessible, searchable, connected, updatable, some using network analysis or other visualizing tools, these digital resources have also become invaluable pedagogical resources. This panel welcomes short presentations (15 min. max.) of recent digital projects to promote their research and teaching potentialities.

Keywords: Britain/England; Digital Humanities; Enlightenment; Europe; Interdisciplinary

Stories about Humans and Humanity? [ID 268]
Chair: Amit Yahav, University of Minnesota. Twin Cities

This panel aims to explore how the marshalling of evidence about the past, present, and future of our species intersect with the formal dimensions of story-telling. Intrigued by Graeber and Wengrow’s fairly recent critique of Enlightenment conjectural histories, this panel asks: What narratological features have 18^th century accounts of humans and humanity relied on? What insights might we draw from conjectural histories’ contemporaneous development with the genre of the novel? Or from its contemporaneous development with the genre of travel writing? And how have the stories the eighteenth-century has told about humanity been drawn on and continue to shape the forms of stories told in recent anthropological, historical, and psychological studies? Proposals that problematize eighteenth-century conventions and practices of story-telling about humans and humanity in any discipline are welcome. Proposals that directly engage The Dawn of Everything are appreciated, but this is by no means a requirement of this call.   

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; Global/World/Any Country

OPEN Swift and His Circle [ID 248]
Chair: Jeremy W Webster, Ohio University

In honor of Donald Mell, who organized this session for several years, this panel will celebrate the 300^th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, which remains one of the most widely read, taught, and adapted works from the eighteenth century. Papers should offer new readings of any aspect of Gulliver’s Travels, its influences, contemporaries, and/or afterlives. Proposals by early career scholars that explore innovative readings of Gulliver’s Travels and colonialism, nationalism, war, authoritarianism, and/or economic injustice and/or queer, trans, and/or ecocritical readings of Swift’s satire are especially encouraged, but proposals from scholars of all ranks and fields—literary criticism, history, book studies, children’s literature, disability studies, medical humanities, philosophy, science, science fiction, art history, etc.—are welcome. 

Panelists will receive free registration for the conference courtesy of a gift honoring Donald Mell’s contributions to the study of Swift and eighteenth-century studies. 

Queries may be sent to Jeremy Webster at webstej1@ohio.edu.

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Britain/England; Critique; Literature; Politics

OPEN Teaching the Global Eighteenth Century [ID 255]
Chair: David P Alvarez, Depauw University

We seek presentations on any aspect of teaching the global eighteenth century. It’s a big world out there. How, what, and why do we teach about it? This panel aims to share inspiring pedagogical practices and to promote interdisciplinary conversations about what we teach about the global eighteenth century and why. Submissions from all disciplines represented at ASECS are welcome.

Keywords: Global/World/Any Country; Interdisciplinary; Pedagogy

OPEN The Art of Balance – Part 2 [ID 66]
Co-Chairs: Iris Brahms, Universität Tübingen, and Elisabeth Fritz, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte / Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art (DFK Paris)

In Western politics and philosophy of the 18th century, concepts of balance, equality, and democracy experienced a groundbreaking contouring that continues to have an impact until today (see McMahon 2023). These issues were negotiated not least in the arts as a heterological dimension (see praxeological model of the CRC “Different Aesthetics”). Our thesis is that the parallelism and simultaneity of opposing views and ideologies led to a striving for equilibrium and harmony, and was articulated, for example, within the ideas of social justice and political equality – an idealistic balance that ultimately paved the way for new concepts of societal order, respectively democracy.

While in 18th-century aesthetics a certain degree of difference and hierarchy was a persistent and prevailing ideal to guarantee “harmonic” order, the political and cultural dynamics of this period kept contributing to ongoing social injustices such as slavery or gender inequality. We decisively want to include and discuss problematic strategies of appropriation and hegemonic agency and their paradoxical agenda in the names of equalization, modulation, normality, or assimilation, as well as non- Western concepts of equilibrium and collectivity. Our goal is to develop a critical methodological approach, when we ask: In which ways and to which extent the visual arts and their discourses helped to shape and spread the understanding of balance, equality, and democracy in the long 18th century?

Keywords: Aesthetics; Art History/Architecture; Critical Theory/Theory; Culture/Cultural Studies; Politics

OPEN The Art of Matthias Buchinger [ID 223]
Chair: Bradford K Mudge, University of Colorado Denver 

Ricky Jay’s widely reviewed book, Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living” (2016), did much for Buchinger’s reputation, drawing attention to a fascinating and eccentric figure well-known to collectors like Jay but largely unknown even to scholars of the period.  Born without hands and feet, Buchinger was less than three feet tall, but despite the obstacles, he became an accomplished magician, portraitist, performer, and—above all—one of the world’s finest calligraphers.  This panel will focus on his artistic accomplishments—his portraits, family trees, coats of arms, promotional souvenirs, and religious texts—with the intention of pushing past spectacle to the underlying thematics in play.  In other words, priority will be given to papers that focus on his art and how that art explained itself and its creator to his contemporary audience.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Britain/England; Disability Studies; Visual Culture/Studies

OPEN The Nature and Uses of Self-Love [ID 250]
Chair: Eugene Heath, State University of New York, New Paltz 

From the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, the concept of self-love was invoked in various works—sermons, philosophical studies, theological materials, literary texts, and treatises on political economy. Scholarly accounts of these works often skirt consideration of the meaning or implications of self-love, treating it as nothing more than self-interest. However, the concept of self-love has a long, complex history. Aristotle viewed it as a love of reason; some Stoics characterized it as a transformation of self-preservation into a reasoned search for true ends; and Augustine took self-love (at least in one form) as an overarching prioritization of the desires of the self—a counterpart to the love of God. This panel will consider the concept of self-love (whether or how it differs from self-interest or selfishness), its employments in various texts, and its relation to morals, ambition, trade, religion, the self (and self-denial), among other themes. The hope is to include participants from diverse disciplines who will take up the nature, role, and status of self-love from the late seventeenth into the eighteenth century.  Panelists may examine texts or writers, sift conceptual or historical questions, or focus on any recent scholarly treatments of the topic.

Keywords: self-love, self-interest, morality, religion, economics

The Post-Lockean Self in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Literature, and Culture [ID 282]
Chair: Trip McCrossin, Rutgers University

The history of philosophy in the long eighteenth century is animated by a number long-running controversies, including the one that arose in the immediate aftermath of the perspective on the nature of personhood and personal identity that John Locke added to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694), and remained in play at least through the appearance of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). “Person stands for a thinking intelligent Being,” Locke proposed, “that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places.” As “consciousness always accompanies thinking,” he continued, “and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self [, …] as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought,” soliely as far back as we genuinely remember doing or thinking them, that is, irrespective of bodily continuity, “so far reaches the Identity of that Person.” Resistance included charges of defining be undefinable, circularity, insensitivity to the vagaries of memory, and the specter of duplication. The controversy is interesting in and of itself, but also as reflecting related concerns in literature, culture generally. The proposed session would explore the aftermath of the Lockean watershed in philosophy, literature, and culture.

Keywords: Enlightenment; History; Interdisciplinary; Literature

OPEN The Pursuit of Progress and Happiness: Debating the Declaration of Independence in Iberoamerica (sponsored by the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (IASECS)) [ID 33]
Chair: Mariselle Melendez, University of Illinois

July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This historic date will serve as an opportunity to celebrate the history of the USA and to reappraise the impact that this event had across the globe. At a time when many countries were engaged in critical debates about the ideals on which their particular nation should be founded, the document served as an inspiration to other nations to rethink and debate the principles on which the Declaration was established: “the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the consent of the governed; and resistance to tyranny” (David Armitage). This panel focuses on the cultural, political and social impact of the Declaration of Independence in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. It explores the dialogues, circulation, debates and cross-cultural interpretations of the document in the Iberian intellectual circles of the long eighteenth century and the Enlightenment in particular. How was the Declaration of Independence within the context of the American Revolution read, understood, valued, supported or feared? Which written, oral and visual mediums were utilized to discuss and circulate local views about this pivotal moment in history? What types of transatlantic exchanges occurred between Spain, Spanish America and the United States of Americas when thinking about the pursuit of progress and happiness?  This panel welcomes papers that address these questions from different disciplinary perspectives and critical angles.

Keywords: Atlantic World; Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; Latin America;Spain

OPEN The Varieties of Theater History: Insights from the Comédie-Française Registers Project [ID 227]
Chair: Jeffrey S. Ravel, MIT

The Comédie-Française Registers Project (cfregisters.org) makes available online, high resolution, digitized versions of the daily receipts, expenses, and casting choices of the Comédie-Française Theater troupe in Paris from its founding in 1680 to 1900.  It also offers scholars search and visualization tools and other resources that allow intensive study of the theater, its performers and employees, and its repertory over more than two centuries.  In this panel, we seek papers that make use of the tools available on the web site to explore issues in eighteenth-century theater history and performance studies.

Keywords: Archives; Digital Humanities; France/French; Performance; Theatre

OPEN Troubler les Lumières: corps, relation et histoire (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies (SECFS)/Société d’études françaises du XVIIIe siècle) [ID 31]
Chair: Alexis Tétreault, Université d’Ottawa, and Leila Chevalley, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Souvent associées à la clarté rationnelle et à l’universalité des principes, ou critiquées pour leur arrogance, leur rapport à la nature ou au colonialisme, les Lumières se révèlent moins tranchantes, plus complexes qu’il n’y paraît. Ce panel propose d’en explorer les zones troubles, en adoptant un regard en biais et en empruntant des chemins de traverse. Plusieurs pistes peuvent être envisagées :

1. Penser le trouble, entre subversion et affect : analyser les discours et les pratiques qui réévaluent les frontières entre le rationnel et l’irrationnel, l’intime et le public, la norme et la dissidence.
2. Sociabilité troublée (relations et tensions) : explorer les liens sociaux au 18e siècle marqués par le désir, la transgression et les tensions entre espoir et conservatisme.
3. Corps (normativité, dissidence, résistance) : interroger la représentation des corps dans ses frontières (individu et communauté ; masculin et féminin ; humain et animal ; intégrité et pathologie).
4. Histoire (récits et contre-récits) : repenser la notion de progrès associée aux Lumières, pourtant traversées de doute et d’inquiétude – des variations philosophiques sur un âge d’or révolu à l’esquisse d’une pente négative du temps, jusqu’aux mémoires intimes où circulent des voix issues d’une bigarrure sociale souvent occultée.

Keywords: Corps;Sociabilité;Transgression;Trouble;Récit

Unclassical Theater: Performances of Gender and Sexuality in the Literature of the 18^th century [ID 236]
Co-Chairs: Mladen Kozul, University of Montana, and Ourida Mostefai, Brown University

In the margins of its more traditional themes, theater became, in the 18^th century, not only a genre but also, more broadly, a structural metaphor to experiment with configurations of sexual identity and mobile gender identification by virtue of its reliance on roles and personae. The purpose of this panel is to revisit these experiments across genres and across the century, taking that metaphor as an underlying working tool. We are particularly interested in the construction of subject and identity through desire, whether they are captured in a theatricalized narrative or in a theatrical representation. Indeed, in that perspective, theater can be apprehended not only as a (narrativized) scenic performance, but also as an imaginary space allowing for the accomplishment of transgressions, for the acting out of fantasies, but also for pushing the limits of the conceivable, and of what is deemed natural.

This panel accepts papers in English and in French.

Keywords: France/French; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Performance; Theatre

OPEN We Are Family: Queer Community and Friendship in the 18th Century (sponsored by the Queer and Trans Caucus) [ID 35]
Chair: Ziona Kocher, Florida Atlantic University 

During 2025’s virtual meeting, former leaders of the Queer and Trans Caucus shared their memories during “A History of Our Own: Stories from ASECS’s Queer and Trans Caucus.” Through these reflections, the importance of queer community remained in the forefront as speakers emphasized the caucus’s impact on their relationships within the field as well as their scholarship. To continue this conversation, we are seeking proposals that center instances of queer community and friendship from the long eighteenth century. Whether at Millennium Hall, Strawberry Hill, or the molly house, queer individuals have always found each other. What did that look like in the eighteenth century, and what do we gain when we look at queerness beyond individuals and couples? 

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies; Queer and Trans Studies

OPEN Weather, Climate, and the Anthropocene in Daniel Defoe (sponsored by the Daniel Defoe Society) [ID 60]
Co-Chairs: Rivka Swenson, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Leah Orr, University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Papers welcome on topics including but not limited to Defoe’s writing on weather, climate, and the proto-Anthropocene as a journalist, moralist, novelist, and proto-scientific observer, e.g.:

–His empirical approach to data collection and firsthand reporting on extreme weather and meteorological disaster;

–His depiction of weather as divine design, judgment, or Providence;

–His use of weather as plot device or immersive realism in the fiction;

–His development of weather-related and climate-related metaphor;

–His interest in connections between regional climate and aspects of human behavior and sociology (e.g., environment/geography, seasonal variability, daily life, agriculture, and commerce);

–His observations on environmental health and climate-related illness (physical, mental);

–His awareness of climate-related challenges to colonial exploitation;

–His prefiguring of Anthropocene themes (human dominion over nature and nonhumans; the ecological consequences of colonization, trade, empire, and urbanization; moral interpretations of environmental change; commentary on the effects of agriculture, fishing, mining, fossil fuel use, pollution, land-clearing, farming, terraforming, and urban design);

–His relevance for considering modern theories of the Anthropocene; intersections with scholars of Earth Science and Environmental Science (Johan Rockstrom, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen), Philosophy and Critical Theory (Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Timothy Morton, Jason Moore), Environmental Humanities (Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour).

Keywords: Britain/England; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Global/World/Any Country; Literature

OPEN We’re Going to See the Wizard: LLMs, Machine Learning, and Digital Humanities Projects (sponsored by the  Digital Humanities Caucus) [ID 46]
Co-Chairs: Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Case Western Reserve University, and Eliza Wilcox

For all the controversy around large language models (LLMs) and the more commonly used term of “generative AI,” the digital humanities are one of the few disciplines that has valid, meaningful uses for machine learning and its application to large, largely textual datasets. Many of our institutions are promoting the use of these tools, but how should we be including them in our own research to best make use of them? How do we interact with these methods in a way that allows us to be ethically responsible? What can we do with them, and what do we have to learn in order to apply these technologies effectively? 

In this panel, we hope to:

• Showcase some current uses of LLMs and machine learning in 18th century-based projects
• Provide information on where and how to access these tools
• Learn some best practices for using this new generation of computing technology
• Determine how to best avoid the worst aspects of generative AI (hallucinations, bias, ecological impact) in our projects.

Keywords: Digital Humanities;LLM;Machine Learning;Natural Language Processing;Methods

What can the Eighteenth Century do? (sponsored by the Graduate Student and Early Career Scholars Caucus) [ID 57]
Chair: Shruti Jain, SUNY, Binghamton University 

Working in the humanities, particular fields like eighteenth-century studies have always seemed precarious in some ways. The “crisis” seems more pronounced in the current climate. This panel asks what our work in the eighteenth century can do to address various kinds of precarities, find spaces of solidarity, form collectives, and most importantly, help us sustain. We invite scholars and artists to share what they ‘get’ from the eighteenth century. Particularly, what do histories rooted in the eighteenth century help us understand about our world today? How can collectives that emerged in the eighteenth century help modern imagined lines of solidarity? And what are the stakes of engaging with the eighteenth century?

Keywords:Advocacy; Critical Theory/Theory; Enlightenment;protest

CLOSED Panels

CLOSED Aboutness in Visual Analysis [ID 239]
Co-Chairs: Craig A. Hanson, Calvin University, and Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia

One of the most familiar moves in visual analysis is to say that a work of art is “about” something. The word “about” signals critical engagement, and it operates on a variety of levels, from the literal and iconographic (This is a painting about a family looking at an air pump) to the political and ideological (this sculpture is about gender relations in the age of European revolution). And yet, handcrafted objects often enough deflect critical assignations of aboutness. Facture, visual indeterminacy, visible signs of wear; these are just some of the ways that works resist descriptions of being about something. As T.J. Clark noted of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, “‘aboutness’, here, goes on circling its prey and never striking” (London Review of Books, April 2021). This session welcomes papers on eighteenth-century visual and material culture that question, complicate, or refine what we mean when we say a work (broadly conceived) is about something. How does the convention shape our engagement with the past? How does it guide the experience of looking and describing as anchored in the present? What does aboutness help us do? What does aboutness obscure or divert?

Keywords: Aesthetics; Material Culture; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Adam Smith: Systematic and Unsystematic I (sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society) [ID 225a]
CLOSED Adam Smith: Systematic and Unsystematic II (sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society) [ID 225b]
Co-Chairs: Jacob Sider Jost, Dickinson College, and Steven L Newman, Temple University

In his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LLD, Dugald Stewart diagnoses his teacher with “too great a desire of generalizing his principles” and with an excessive “love of system.” Smith, for his part, thought that systematizing was “natural to all men,” though he admitted that philosophers might be particularly given to it, with a tendency to “account for all appearances from as few principles as possible.”

Our panel invites papers about Smith and systems. How is his own thinking systematic or unsystematic? How does Smith theorize systems, whether philosophical or of other kinds? What eighteenth-century systems does Smith participate in, with or without conscious reflection?

As the panel organizers do not wish to forego interesting contributions out of an overly systematic conception of our topic, we will give a sympathetic reading to any proposal that offers insight into Smith and/or eighteenth-century systems more generally.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Britain/England; Economy; Enlightenment; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

CLOSED Aphra Behn Society Panel: Women and Exploration [ID 285]
Chair: Aleksondra Hultquist, Stockton University

We are looking for papers that anayze any version of women’s exploration in the long-eighteenth century: physical, scientific, literary, social, religious, or otherwise. Exploration could include real or imagined explorations from one location to another; the means of exploration and how gender might complicate that possibility; exploration of the self through social or relgious practices; exploration of modes of writing or performing; exploration of sexuality (theirs and others’); exploration of interior or exterior spaces, intellectual explorations of the arts or sciences; or any other aspect of exploration.

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Global/World/Any Country

CLOSED Anne Schroder New Scholars Session (sponsored by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA)) [ID 42]
Co-chairs: Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr College and Lea Stephenson, University of Delaware

The Anne Schroder New Scholars Panel, sponsored by HECAA, seeks to promote scholarship that represents the future of eighteenth-century studies. We invite proposals from dissertating graduate students and early-career scholars working in the academy or museum. We welcome submissions that explore topics across the cultures, spaces, and materials that are related to art and architectural history over the long eighteenth century and around the globe. We especially encourage projects that reflect new approaches to both long-standing and under-studied issues and methods in eighteenth-century studies broadly, including but not limited to: critical race art history; Disability studies; ecocriticism and environmental studies; empire, colonization, and decolonial theory; gender and queer theory; global diasporic histories; Indigeneity; and material culture studies. Papers can be based on dissertations, book or article manuscripts in progress, Digital Humanities collaborations, or curatorial projects. We particularly encourage BIPOC scholars, contingent or independent scholars, and those working outside of North America to apply.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Global/World/Any Country; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Material Culture

CLOSED Antiquaries, Ballad-Collectors, Popular Medievalists, and Forgers [ID 275]
Chair: Adam Kozaczka, Texas A&M International University

Horace Walpole and John Pinkerton were among those eighteenth-century antiquaries who wrote in defense of creative invention as part of the antiquarian process, though both had fraught relationships with this softer side of excavating the past: Pinkerton was exposed for some too-extensive ‘editing’ and even forgery; Walpole’s name was dragged through the press in relation to the Thomas Chatterton scandal (and again ten years later). The debates that moved them and others like them (Joseph Ritson, Henry Mackenzie, James Macpherson, etc.) were instrumental in locating the borderline between fact and fiction that Clifford Siskin argues was not firmly established until the ‘safe’ novels of the early nineteenth century. This panel hopes to apply both literary and historical methodologies to how long eighteenth-century antiquaries, popular medievalists, ballad-collectors, and forgers up to and including Walter Scott understood source-work and in how their struggles with authenticity contributed to the development of modern disciplinary standards. In the process, the panel will investigate the role of creative literature in the prehistory of more ‘serious’ disciplines in an era before those disciplines had epistemologically excluded invention in pursuit of fetishized factuality.

Keywords: Archives; Author/Authorship; Britain/England; Editing; Literature

CLOSED Archives, Collections, Object Making I (sponsored by the Goethe Society) [ID 36a]
CLOSED Archives, Collections, Object Making II (sponsored by the Goethe Society) [ID 36b]
Chair: Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College 

The panel seeks to return to the material harbors of eighteenth-century cultures, with a particular focus on German-language materials and repercussions for our considerations of the German eighteenth century today, including but not limited to the continued impact of Goethe and his circle as well as alternate (even adversarial) figures and the material traces and legacies they left behind. Specifically, the panel proposes to investigate the role of varied archives and collections, including those considered (inter-)national and many small, often “nameless” local archives, collections, and virtual projects. What role do “German” archives, collections, and cultural objects play in debates on relevancy and invigorating eighteenth-century scholarship beyond the English-speaking world? What is their role in place-centered inquiries and public Humanities as well as in negotiating the relationship between the material and the virtual? How do they relate to guiding concepts that have taken precedent in our discussions and that revolve around identity, history? How do selected archival contents become cultural objects? And inhabiting this new role, how do objects/archives/collections gesture beyond their place and within broader established and alternative narratives of German literary and cultural history and its place within the world? Do they break or reinforce narratives of dominance, subversion, and resistance? How are they exhibited in museums? To center the panel(s), preference will be given to “objects” that have been – figuratively speaking – retrieved from archives and collections and invigorated the stories we tell about eighteenth-century literature(s) and cultural histories. 

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Europe; German/Germany; Interdisciplinary; Material Culture       

CLOSED Beaumarchais and the French Connections with American Independence. Colonial and postcolonial perspectives. [ID 253]
Chair: Linda Gil, Université Montpellier Paul-Valéry

As a follow-up to the New York conference held in October 2024 at Columbia and Forham under the auspices of the @rchibeau project, this panel aims at exploring documents that have recently become available (such as those recently donated by the Beaumarchais family to the BNF). We welcome all proposals offering to renew our perspective on the political and commercial negotiations between Beaumarchais and the Insurgents, in the context of the military and technical support provided – first secretly – by the French Monarchy to the emerging Republic. By unearthing this archive, a new light will be cast on transatlantic history, in all its aspects (diplomatic, economic, political, etc.). A better understanding of Beaumarchais’ role in these interactions between French and American political and commercial actors will reshape our understanding of the Enlightenment in a colonial context.

Keywords: Archives

CLOSED Beaumarchais, hero of the American Revolution? [ID 254]
Chair: Linda Gil, Université Montpellier Paul-Valéry

On the occasion of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the English colonies, we wish in this session to question the place of Beaumarchais and his team in American historiography. How have his interventions and contributions been studied, recognized, highlighted, or, on the contrary, ignored from 1776 to the present day? The documents available to us today allow us to consider these questions anew and to reassess the respective roles of Beaumarchais and Lafayette, and more broadly, of the French Alliance.

Keywords: Atlantic World

CLOSED Between the Acts of Union: Anglo-Scottish Union Identities in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 266]
Chair: Phineas Dowling, Auburn University

The century between the 1707 Acts of Union that united England and Scotland into Great Britain and the 1800 Acts of Union that united Great Britain and Ireland was a period of enormous change in the relationship between England and Scotland. This panel welcomes papers on literary, artistic, and material culture of the long eighteenth century with the goal of exploring the (re)negotiation of Scottish identities and the Anglo-Scottish Union—through artistic, cultural, national, martial, political, and many other discourses. Some questions the panel seeks to explore include: What does it mean to be Scottish/British/Anglo-Scottish, and does that meaning change throughout the century? How do the Scottish characterize Scottish identities (and how might that be shaped by region, class, gender, etc.)? How do others (the English or others) characterize Scottish identities? How are the Anglo-Scottish union and identities impacted by moments of political or military crisis, such as the Jacobite risings or the American Revolution? Topics might include, but are not limited to, literary representations of Scottish national, regional, gender, or political identities; material culture of Scotland and/or the Union; cultural memory; depictions or commentary of key figures or events; the political or social beginnings, aftermath, or ramifications of the Union. Authors are welcome (and encouraged) to explore intersections with diverse methodologies and disciplines (e.g., disability studies, gender/queer theory, performance theory, and more). The panel also welcomes alternative presentation methods and styles.

Keywords: Britain/England; History; Literature; Race and Empire; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Beyond the Nation State and the National School: Unsettling Eighteenth-Century Canons [ID 222]
Co-Chairs: Megan E. Baker, University of Delaware, and Joseph D Litts, Princeton University

During daily and distant travels, eighteenth-century artists created across empires, aesthetic traditions, and political regimes. Art markets and collectors similarly traversed boundaries, with artificial borders imposing real stakes. Painters such as Benjamin West and Agostino Brunias moved through transatlantic circuits. Yet, institutions have retroactively sorted them into national schools, thereby flattening contingency and mobility. West, for instance, is “American” in New York and London, “British” in Ottawa, and “École de Grande-Bretagne” in Paris. These shifting designations expose not only the instability of national identity, but also the nationalist logics that still govern interpretation and scholarship.
This panel began with the question: What would it mean to practice eighteenth-century art history without reimposing geopolitical boundaries the period itself so often unsettled? At stake are not only questions of historical accuracy, but also the present-day mechanisms (grant structures, professional affiliations, museum metadata) that compel scholars to adopt national frameworks and extend contemporary geopolitics into the past. Even in scholarship aspiring to transnational or decolonial methods, nationalism remains the default bureaucratic unit of organization.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary—amid a broader global revival of nationalist rhetorics—the fiction of coherent, national art histories deserves renewed critique. We invite proposals across the humanities and from scholars at all stages.
Possible topics include:
-Artistic circulation, mobility, reception, and training
-Colonial and imperial art geographies
-Institutions and the construction of national schools
-Maps as art/art as map
-Nationalism as disciplinary constraint
-Public patrimony, reparations, and repatriation
-Revolutionary or anti-national aesthetics

Keywords: Aesthetics; Art History/Architecture; Critique; Race and Empire

CLOSED Borderlands As Method (sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists) [ID 52]
Chair: Sal Nicolazzo, University of California, Davis

In a year that celebrates the 250th anniversary of a rapaciously settler-colonial nation-state that is currently intensifying its violent claims to territoriality through the further militarization of borders that lacerate Indigenous lands, this panel invites historical and critical work that speaks to our moment from and through the borderlands of the early Americas. “A border,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 25). So-called “early America” was a place of many such dividing lines and emotional residues. It was a place of migrations (both free and forced), displacements, creolizations, and ways of understanding lands and relations that refused the logic of the border altogether. This panel welcomes submissions across a variety of linguistic, geographic, and disciplinary focal points, especially multilingual work and/or work that pushes the boundaries of “academic writing.” It also seeks to continue the conversation begun at last year’s SEA panel at ASECS, “Land As Method,” by particularly welcoming work that centers Indigenous histories and epistemologies as critical perspectives on—or refusals of—colonial border-making.

Keywords: Black Atlantic; Caribbean; Hispanophone/Lusophone spheres; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; North America

CLOSED Censoring the Free: Speech, Suppression, and Expression in the Global 18th Century I [ID 238a]
CLOSED Censoring the Free: Speech, Suppression, and Expression in the Global 18th Century II [ID 238b]
Chair: Elena Deanda Camacho, Washington College

We seek submissions for a panel exploring the complex and contested terrain of censorship and freedom of speech during the 18th century in a global context (Europe, the Americas, and decentered Enlightenments). This period witnessed the expansion of print culture, the emergence of learned societies, and the shifting power dynamics between empires, states, churches, communities, and individuals. Many questions about who was able to speak, write, and publish—and who may not—became pressing and contentious. 

We welcome papers from scholars across disciplines including history, literature, philosophy, political science, law, media studies, and religious studies, among others, analyzing case studies, theoretical questions, or comparative approaches in themes such as:
•    Legal frameworks of censorship and freedom of expression in 18th-century Europe, the Americas, and beyond
•    Religious and inquisitorial censorship and theological controversies
•    Trials and punishments due to speech
•    Self-censoring, dysphemization, and euphemization
•    The world of the anonymous and the pseudonyms 
•    The Enlightenment as shaping public discourse
•    The production, control, circulation, and consumption of books, pamphlets, and newspapers
•    The press as a site of struggle
•    Colonial and imperial dimensions of speech control
•    Gender, race, class, and the politics of silence
•    Freedom of speech in revolutionary contexts (e.g., France, the Americas, Haiti)

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Culture/Cultural Studies; Law/Legal Studies; Literature; Politics

CLOSED Colonial Dyestuffs [ID 263]
Co-Chairs: Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder

Dyestuffs are an overlooked commodity. In comparison to colonial products like sugar, spices, silks, tobacco, cacao, coffee, cotton and fish, dye is a surprisingly absent factor in eighteenth-century studies. Their impact is undeniable. Eye-catching colors enticed people of all cultures, and Europeans sought to exploit the lands they settled in a variety of ways: Networks of colonial, indigenous and enslaved labor and trade knit together the people planting, harvesting, collecting, and extracting from both land and sea with those transporting dyestuffs. Examples include indigo, dyewoods, turmeric, mollusks, and cochineal. These and other dyestuffs were transported to rasping houses and dyers in urban metropoles. Finished dyes and stains found application in textiles, furniture, cosmetics, food, inks, paints and paper. Livelihoods depended on dyes, and for some, fortunes were made. This call invites an interdisciplinary approach to the study of non-European dyes in the eighteenth century. Possible topics include but are not limited to literary representations, technical processes, application, cultural uses and appropriations, environmental factors, technologies and experimentation, labor, transportation, trade, finance, and/or medicinal use.

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Economy; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Material Culture; Science and Technology

CLOSED Colonial Worldmaking in Eighteenth-Century European Spaces, Ideologies, and Imaginations I [ID 241a]
CLOSED Colonial Worldmaking in Eighteenth-Century European Spaces, Ideologies, and Imaginations II [ID 241b]
Chair: Alisha Ma, London School of Economics and Political Science 

The long eighteenth century was a critical era in consolidating the Eurocentric imperial world order—not just on a global military and economic scale, but also within domestic spheres. For instance, art, science, and leisure served as influential cultural arenas for the fabrication of European coloniality within public imaginations. The increased flow of global commodities during this period both diversified and enriched the ways that Europeans could engage with non-European cultures. The concept of an imperial experience took on a more expansive meaning over the eighteenth century as the lands and peoples at the furthest reaches of European empires—or at least a filtered version of them—could be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, and heard by more Europeans than ever before. The intellectual spheres of European society also made significant contributions to colonial worldmaking; French Enlightenment writers penned plays discussing the morality of foreign customs and despots, while English periodicals satirized the cultural obsessions with exotic fashions.

This panel explores the various means through which European colonial narratives, ideologies, and aesthetics were produced or reinforced over the long eighteenth century. On a historiographical level, the panel highlights the dark underbelly of early modern ‘globalization’. We particularly invite papers which aim to reconcile perspectives from global history with postcolonial thought, showcasing the multiple, simultaneous realities and legacies of the long eighteenth century. The thematic breadth of this panel warrants contributions from diverse subdisciplines such as visual and material culture; literary studies; history and philosophy of science; sensory history; and intellectual history.

Keywords: Europe; Global/World/Any Country; Material Culture; Race and Empire; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Cultural Cartographies of Empire in the Asia-Pacific, ca. 1670-1830 I [ID 203a]
CLOSED Cultural Cartographies of Empire in the Asia-Pacific, ca. 1670-1830 II [ID 203b]
Chair: Ruth Hill, Vanderbilt University 

Laura Hostetler and Xuemei Wu have framed the Chinese illustrated manuscript of the vast and diverse population ruled by the Quing dynasty as a “cultural cartography of empire.” Loosely inspired by their Cultural Cartography of Empire, this panel explores imperial and colonial representations of internal and external others from the Asia-Pacific region. It seeks a variety of scholarly approaches to material culture (maps, books, newspapers, paintings, tapestries, folding screens, dress, ceramics, etc.). Paper topics might include Japanese, Korean, Indian, African, Chinese, Indonesian, and Amerindian slaves and servants and their resistance; Indigenous epistemologies and practices; colonial architecture that acknowledges a diverse population; imperial and colonial governance; Catholic and Protestant cultures of coloniality (including plantations and missions). Analyses tied to Qing China, Spanish and Portuguese Asia, Dutch Asia, French Asia, Mexico, Peru, and British Asia, ca. 1670-1830, will be equally considered.

Keywords: Asia; Europe; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Latin America; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Eighteenth-Century Dogs! [ID 269]
Chair: Taylin P Nelson, Rice University

Last year we had “Eighteenth-Century Cats”! Now it’s time to give the eighteenth century’s best friends their due.
Dogs were everywhere in the eighteenth century: roaming city streets, curled up at the feet of aristocrats, pacing alongside soldiers, and appearing in paintings, plays, and philosophical treatises. As hunting companions, lapdogs, objects of satire, emblems of fidelity, and subjects of natural history, dogs helped shape the social, scientific, and emotional life of the period.
This panel invites papers that explore the presence, representation, and significance of dogs in the long eighteenth century across genres, disciplines, geographies, and species boundaries. We are especially interested in work that considers how canine figures mediated evolving understandings of:

• Human-animal relationships and the boundaries of species
• Emotion, affection, and domesticity
• Class, gender, and race
• Empire, colonialism, and the circulation of breeds
• Science, taxonomy, and natural history
• Visual culture, material culture, and the decorative arts
• Literature, satire, and theater

We welcome proposals grounded in literary studies, art history, histories of science, animal studies, cultural/media studies, and beyond. Papers might focus on individual texts, material artifacts, or broader conceptual frameworks related to dogs and dog-like figures.

Keywords: Class; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Film/Television/Media; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Material Culture

CLOSED Eighteenth-Century Literatures of Mutual Aid [ID 224]
Co-Chairs: Kelly Swartz, Adelphi University, and Emily M N Kugler,

Historians have charted the rise of mutual aid societies in eighteenth-century Europe and early America, especially examining their rise in relation to early labor organizing. Mutual aid has long served marginalized communities, but its importance increases at this time of institutional failure and collapse. For Peter Kropotkin, mutual aid was a common instinct across species and characterized human behavior as well. He argued that we ought to look beyond competition and attend to acts of solidarity when examining techniques of survival. 

Such aid is generally direct and material, but can forms of writing—including fictions or expressive literature—operate in an analogous sense? This panel seeks to explore the relationship between eighteenth-century literature and mutual aid. “Literature” here need not be limited to imaginative, expressive writing and might consider book production and trade, or knowledge-making practices more broadly in the context of mutual aid. 

What eighteenth-century modes of representation or other forms of writing or publishing aimed to advance a more collective (not necessarily “public”) good, or encouraged collaboration and polyvocality as opposed to individualistic competition or psychology? Might the emphasis in eighteenth-century studies on sympathy and its mechanisms have obscured other forms, practices, or institutions of mutual support and solidarity? What eighteenth-century resources enable us to theorize forms and practices as mutual aid, and how might the theories, practices, and forms be rendered valuable for our present?

We invite papers considering the eighteenth-century literature of mutual aid from any discipline, and encourage scholars working on Indigenous and non-European perspectives to submit. 

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Gender/Sexuality Studies; History; Literature; Race and Empire

CLOSED Farce: Why that? Why then? Why now? I (sponsored by the Theatre and Performance Caucus) [ID 26]
CLOSED Farce: Why that? Why then? Why now? II (sponsored by the Theatre and Performance Caucus) [ID 69]
Chair: Joseph R Roach, Yale University

From Restoration to Regency, critics denigrated farce, and even playwrights who wrote farces apologized for them, but farcical main-pieces brought audiences to the theatre and farcical afterpieces kept them there (or brought them in late at half price). Why? To say that farce exists solely to make people laugh begs the question: “What’s so funny? To say, as theorists do, that farce is “only” physical action in a moral vacuum, in which stereotypical characters bump into one another harmlessly like inflatable toys in zero gravity, raises the question: “Nothing more to it than that?” To say, as some critics do, that farce is a literary genre provokes theatre historians to ask: “Can farce exist without farceurs?” and the methodological follow up: “Can the actors’ contributions be recaptured and evaluated?” To say that farce belongs solely to the theatre, however, as other critics do, ignores the frequency with which the word farce is used to describe other human follies, then and now, and how closely life imitates art in politics especially (see Karl Marx, “the second time as farce”). This panel is open to submissions on any aspect of farce in the long-eighteenth century and its periodic revivals, including but not limited to individual plays or playwrights, reconstruction of performances, trends in repertoire, farce elements in other genres and media (such as narrative fiction, for instance, or graphic satire), the sociopolitical uses of farce, and theories of laughter itself.

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Performance; Politics; Theatre

CLOSED Fictions of Discontent I [ID 262a]
CLOSED Fictions of Discontent II [ID 262b]
Chair: Lynn Festa, Rutgers University

This panel invites papers on fictions of discontent: the disappointments, disaffections, or unfulfilled expectations depicted in — and also possibly experienced by readers of—eighteenth century literature.  Defined by Samuel Johnson as “uneasy at the present state; dissatisfied,” discontent is an unsettled and unsettling state of being.  It may point to thwarted prospects or hopes, marking an ambivalent relation to a lost, missing, or unrealized ideal; it may be voiced as complaint or embodied as a muted restlessness, personal and/or collective.  What narrative resources do eighteenth-century writers find in the perturbations of discontentment?  How do their plots channel, arouse, sustain or resolve discontent?  What potential do the minor affects that emerge around unsatisfactory situations or balked desires, including (but not limited to) the “ugly feelings” described by Sianne Ngai, possess for organizing individual or political agency, commitments, or action?  On what terms may discontented narrative create grounds not only for expressing grief and grievance but also for critique, resistance, or even something like utopian reinvention?

Keywords: Aesthetics; Literature; Politics; gender

CLOSED Founder’s Chic and America’s Future National Memory [ID 271]
Chair: Kaitlin Tonti, Raritan Valley CC

As America’s 250th birthday nears, considerations of legacy, collective memory, and national imagination are of necessity as the nation considers its future – especially in the midst of such unprecedented executive oversight. Many eighteenth-century scholars have considered the influence of founder’s chic on the American consciousness, and to what extent it influences what Americans choose to believe about their national identity. Most recently, founder’s chic was used to address the impact that the musical Hamilton had on the generation coming of age in the late 2010’s. However, there are other ways in which founders’ chic impacts the everyday fabrics of how the country functions. This panel seeks papers that largely examine founder’s chic and the way that it impacts the current historical, political moment, and/or the way that it may impact America’s future. 

Potential 200 word abstracts may address:

• Current television shows, movies, or plays that address the lives of the ‘founding’ fathers and mothers
• Consideration of how founding moments and people are addressed in political conversation, national elections, issues of national attention…etc…
• Ways that historical moments, ideas, or peoples are re-imagined to create news narratives in either positive or negative ways
• Analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry or other forms of writing that would constitute what we consider founder’s chic; i.e. poetry about Washington and other ‘founders’
• Consideration of how untold stories or otherwise silenced voices interrupts the narratives that we tell ourselves about America’s founding moment

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Film/Television/Media; History/Historiography; Interdisciplinary; Literature

CLOSED Frontières des Lumières/Borders of the French-Speaking Enlightenment I [ID 230]
CLOSED Frontières des Lumières/Borders of the French-Speaking Enlightenment II [ID 298]
Chair: Logan J Connors, University of Miami 

This bilingual session invites participants to investigate the borders – literally and/or figuratively – of the French-speaking Enlightenment. 200-word (approx.) proposals are requested for presentations that focus on the geographical breadth of Enlightenment discourses, personalities, and institutions; on intercultural, colonial, interfaith, etc. contact zones, on issues of inclusion vs. exclusion and of universalism vs. particularism. Other topics related to the creation, bolstering, and transgression of borders in the eighteenth-century French-speaking world are also welcome.

Cette séance bilingue invite les participant·e·s à explorer les frontières – au sens propre et/ou figuré – des Lumières francophones. Des propositions d’environ 200 mots sont sollicitées pour des communications portant sur l’étendue géographique des discours, figures et institutions des Lumières ; sur les zones de contact interculturelles, coloniales, interreligieuses, etc. ; sur les dynamiques d’inclusion et d’exclusion, ainsi que sur les tensions entre universalisme et particularisme. D’autres thématiques liées à la création, au renforcement ou à la transgression des frontières dans le monde francophone du XVIIIe siècle sont également les bienvenues.

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; France/French; Interdisciplinary

CLOSED Fugitivity and the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 245]
Chair: Kaushik Tekur, Binghamton University

This panel invites abstracts that engage the eighteenth century through the critical lens of fugitivity. As Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Marisa Fuentes, and Marquis Bey, among others, elaborate, fugitivity marks a mode of subversive relation with exploitative socio-political and aesthetic regimes. Scholars continue to employ the category to understand historical figures, affects, political acts, and literary forms in the eighteenth century and its afterlives. Fugitivity helps us productively read different instances of flight, refusal, and nonconformity that challenge forms of enslavement, marginalization, and meaning-making. It disturbs categories crucial to the liberal order such as individual, subject, sovereign, citizen, and property. As a modality, it helps us read against the archival grain, and look for openings against different kinds of constraints. It offers us a way to engage voices, behaviors, and relations occluded by liberal historiography and literary history, undergirded by plantation economies, police regimes, and imperial knowledge systems. 

The panel, then, asks: what does fugitivity, broadly understood, offer us in our attempts towards a more egalitarian study of eighteenth century literature, culture, and society? What are its affordances in studying the global eighteenth century, alongside the now well-explored path of Black Studies? How do we read for fugitivity? What are the other registers in which we encounter fugitivity in the period? 

Keywords: Archives; Atlantic World; Global/World/Any Country; Law/Legal Studies; Literature

CLOSED Getting Technical: Practice as Research in 18th-century Performance Studies (sponsored by the Theatre and Performance Caucus) [ID 27]
Chair: Amanda D Moehlenpah, Colgate University

This panel is designed to be an interactive workshop/roundtable of 3-5 presenters with the objective of bringing together practice, theory, and historical analysis of actual 18th-century performances as well as of re-performances today. The panel offers a space where contributors can present brief outlines of methods used in practice as research or performance projects resulting from such methods. It also provides an opportunity for contributors to experiment with practice-as-research methods and to engage audiences in teaching demonstrations of such methods. Performance practice is writ large for the purposes of this panel, including but not limited to declamation, pantomime, dance, music (vocal and instrumental), design, artistry and artisanry, creative writing, acrobatics, masquerade, etc. Contributors may present individually or as collaborative teams and are encouraged to include visual, audio, and somatic components in their presentations.

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Music; Pedagogy; Performance; Theatre

CLOSED “Has Beens” in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Obsolescence, and Cultural Relevance I [ID 201a]
CLOSED “Has Beens” in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Obsolescence, and Cultural Relevance II [ID 201b]
Chair: Chloe A Northrop, Tarrant County College 

‘“Has-Beens’ in the Eighteenth Century,” seeks to explore figures, ideas, institutions, and cultural trends that once held influence but later faded into obscurity or irrelevance. From disgraced political leaders and forgotten literary luminaries to outmoded military celebrities and waning cultural fashions, this panel invites papers that consider what it meant to be a “has-been” in the eighteenth century. How did individuals and institutions attempt to reclaim their former prestige? How did contemporaries perceive and depict those who had “had their day”? What role did satire, nostalgia, and reinvention play in shaping the legacies of those who had been left behind by progress? This panel aims to generate discussion about the dynamics of success and obsolescence in the eighteenth century, inviting reflection on the lifecycle of influence and the processes by which individuals, ideas, and institutions transitioned from prominence to the margins of history. This conversation seeks to foster discussion about the mechanisms of decline, the ways in which figures or ideas were framed as outdated, and the broader implications of obsolescence in the eighteenth century. Papers that engage with these historiographical debates or reassess so-called “has beens” in light of new research are particularly welcome.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Critique; Culture/Cultural Studies; History; Material Culture

CLOSED Kant’s Aesthetics Now I [ID 207a]
CLOSED Kant’s Aesthetics Now II [ID 207b]
Chair: Jess Keiser, Tufts University 

This panel seeks papers that will consider the continuing relevance of Kant’s aesthetics for contemporary literary studies and art criticism. Appearing in 1790, Kant’s “Third Critique” stands as both a summation and break with eighteenth-century aesthetics, as it synthesizes and transforms concepts like beauty, the sublime, disinterest, free play, taste, and genius. Given this, it should be no surprise that Kant’s work continues to inspire and vex contemporary thinkers. Ngai’s work on aesthetic categories, Moten’s rethinking of genius and nonsense, and Nicholas Brown’s defense of autonomy all owe something to Kant. Following their lead, this panel invites papers that put Kant’s aesthetics into conversation with the most exciting and pressing questions in our field today. While papers that plunge into the labyrinth of Kant’s system, or that trace out the influence on his thought of earlier British and German aesthetics are welcome, the panel is most interested in proposals that puts Kant’s aesthetics to work on contemporary questions and concerns in criticism. That might include: papers that ask what the “new formalism” owes to Kant’s conception of “mere form”; that consider the place of aesthetic judgment (and pleasure) in continuing calls to move beyond “critique” and “suspicion”; that track the parallels between “free play” and “close reading”; and that examine art’s social or political relevance alongside Kant’s thinking about autonomy and “disinterest.”

Keywords: Aesthetics; Art History/Architecture; German/Germany; Literature; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

CLOSED La construction des catégories du masculin/féminin au cours du long dix-huitième siècle I (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies (SECFS)/Société d’études françaises du XVIIIe siècle) [ID 11a] 
CLOSED La construction des catégories du masculin/féminin au cours du long dix-huitième siècle II (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies (SECFS)/Société d’études françaises du XVIIIe siècle) [ID 11b] 
Chair: Monika Malinowska, University of Warsaw 

Cette session en langue française, dans le cadre d’une réflexion interdisciplinaire, invite à des communications orientées vers la thématique de la construction, la contestation ou la reconfiguration des normes de genre au cours du long XVIII^e siècle. C’est une époque qui a réfléchi à la différence entre les hommes et les femmes dans de nombreux domaines : social, culturel, littéraire, linguistique… Raewyn Connell et John Beynon, dans leurs études sur la masculinité, ont montré que celle-ci est liée au contexte culturel et social d’une époque. Il en va de même pour la féminité. Ainsi, l’étude des catégories du masculin et/ou féminin doit tenir compte des origines sociales, des mentalités ou des coutumes propres à la période envisagé. L’objectif est d’analyser comment la catégorie du masculin/féminin peut être une classification fermée ou/et interconnectée, mutuellement influencée et transformée dans des contextes sociaux, culturels, littéraires, linguistiques… En croisant les approches des théoriciens modernes (Joan W. Scott, Thomas Laqueur, Judith Butler ou Michel Foucault) nous proposons non seulement d’éclairer les discours du XVIII^e siècle sur la construction du féminin et/ou masculin (auteurs ou autrices connu-e-s/inconnu-e-s/oublié-e-s), de comprendre la manière dont cette époque a pensé — et parfois brouillé — les frontières entre masculin et féminin, mais aussi de réfléchir à la manière dont cette construction/déconstruction peut influencer la pensée critique contemporaine.

Keywords: masculin;féminin;gender;construction;différence

CLOSED Landscape, Art, and the Environment in the Long 18th C. [ID 283] 
Chair: Kristin M. O’Rourke, Dartmouth College

Building upon the current interest in eco-art and the Anthropocene in the industrial world, this session hopes to investigate the relationship of art to the environment in the long eighteenth century, focusing on the representation of landscape in the visual arts as well as on the innovations in landscape design and its interventions in the shaping of nature. This century saw the transition from the overly controlled French gardens to the pseudo-natural landscape of the English style, both styles reflecting political and ideological positions and enabling highly codified social behaviors. At the same time, the genre of landscape in painting, drawing, print, and embroidery, for instance, reflected the growing awareness of vernacular art styles, locations, flora, and natural wonders. This panel seeks papers that investigate the genre of landscape art and design in all its facets: as pleasure gardens, picturesque tours, or as food source (kitchen gardens and hunting grounds), and from landscape as background or setting for historical narratives to pure painting of the spectacle of nature. Papers that examine the intersection of art and the natural world are particularly welcome.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Material Culture; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Lessing’s Materials/Materialities (sponsored by the Lessing Society) [ID 62]
Chair: Francien Markx, George Mason University, and Mary Helen Dupree, Georgetown University

In May 1770, Lessing assumed the office of librarian at the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel, known today as the Herzog August Bibliothek, a position he held until his death in 1781. As librarian, he was responsible for reorganizing the library’s holdings, which consisted of over 100,000 volumes, and for expanding the library’s collection on a limited budget, which he accomplished by selling off or exchanging duplicates (Doublettentausch). Although born of necessity, this concern with the materiality and exchange value of the book mirrors the frequency with which material goods and objects are foregrounded in Lessing’s oeuvre, including rings (Nathan der Weise, Minna von Barnhelm), letters (Miß Sara Sampson), textiles and money (Nathan der Weise), and paintings and sculptures (Emilia Galotti, Laokoön). This panel draws attention to the role of material objects and materiality in Lessing’s life and works and in Lessing scholarship. Inquiries could address topics such as:

• Representations of material objects, collections, and collectors in Lessing’s dramatic works
• Library and museum collections connected with Lessing, e.g., the Herzog August Bibliothek, Lessinghaus Wolfenbüttel, and Lessing-Museum Kamenz
• The materiality of books, periodicals, and correspondence, e.g., paper, marginalia, writing utensils, ephemera
• Inventories, (re)classification, and taxonomies of objects
• Dupes, frauds, and fakes
• Theater and its material objects (props, costumes, actors’ debts)
• Money, gambling, and lottery tickets 
• Correspondences and collections of letters 
• Materiality and the spirit/matter distinction, e.g., in Lessing’s theological writings

Keywords: Archives; Culture/Cultural Studies; German/Germany; Material Culture; Theatre

CLOSED Literature and Philosophy: Rethinking Interdisciplinary Approaches [ID GS211]
Co-Chairs: Tristan J Schweiger, University of Chicago, and Andrew U Pitel, University of Chicago

Intellectual life in the eighteenth century is distinctive from our vantage point because, although we can recognize many affinities between the kind of work we do and that of eighteenth-century thinkers, writers, and artists, their work was not narrowly siloed into the academic disciplines of today. Indeed, the modern university – with its focus on specialized disciplinary knowledge and research – emerges only in the so-called Humboldtian model of higher education in the nineteenth century. While the best work in eighteenth-century studies has always sought to overcome the disciplinary constraints of the modern university, whether in fuller accounts of theories of the subject and its artistic representation, the intersections of literature and empire, or the metaphysical foundations of early modern science, cuts to humanities funding have only exacerbated the push to hyperspecialization that makes creative teaching, research, and conversation among those working in these archives increasingly challenging. The chairs on this panel are a philosopher and a literary critic, and the idea for the panel emerged from our creation of a class that would give equal attention to philosophical and literary theories of the subject, affect, and action in the eighteenth century. We invite a broad range of papers on literature and philosophy that seek to transcend those disciplinary constraints. Such work may itself seek to inhabit this interdisciplinarity toward answering specific scholarly questions on the subject, the mind, the social, etc., or may reflect more broadly on the challenges of and methods for interdisciplinarity in research and/or pedagogy.

Keywords: Interdisciplinary; Literature; Pedagogy; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

CLOSED Lived and Invented: Women Poets Writing Lives I [ID 216a]
CLOSED Lived and Invented: Women Poets Writing Lives II [ID 216b]
Chair: Jennifer M. Keith, University of North Carolina Greensboro 

Most studies of life-writing by women in the Restoration and eighteenth century focus on various genres in prose, despite recent efforts to enlarge the kinds of genres that constitute life-writing. Only a few scholars have considered the nature of women’s poetry in that era as related to life-writing. Such an omission persists despite, or perhaps because of, earlier practices of reading poems by women so autobiographically as to ignore their existence as works of art. I seek papers that explore the complications and opportunities in interpreting women’s poems by examining the lives inscribed, whether seemingly autobiographical or using more obviously invented speakers, narrators, or characters. Participants might consider the following questions:

• Given the mediation of poetic forms and language, how do we distinguish between lives lived and those invented when reading poetry? What interpretive principles might more usefully guide the study of these lives inscribed?
• How do women poets mirror or transform their specific positions—especially in relation to gender, class, race, sexuality, and disability—in articulating their lives lived and invented? How do choices of kinds (e.g., hymns, verse epistles, odes, and occasional poems); modes (e.g., pastoral or satirical); formal elements (e.g., meter and rhyme); and masking techniques (e.g., translation, sobriquets, or personae) define the life inscribed and its degree, or kinds, of mediation or invention?
• How do the production and dissemination of poems (e.g., in manuscript) contribute to defining the lives inscribed?
• How does poetry as a genre, and women’s poetry in particular, challenge current theories of life-writing?

Keywords: Aesthetics; Critical Theory/Theory; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature

CLOSED Masculinity, Sexuality, and Refinement in the Long Eighteenth Century I [293a]
CLOSED Masculinity, Sexuality, and Refinement in the Long Eighteenth Century II [293b]
Chair: Joelle Del Rose, Independent Scholar

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, middle-class Britons and their counterparts in the Atlantic world re-imagined and changed their domestic spaces. As new luxury goods, furniture, and the layout and social uses of rooms changed, so too did the behavior of the men and women inside of them. Refinement affected all aspects of the domestic and public world, and inspired new social codes of behavior and speech.  As the century progressed, long held assumptions about masculinity, seduction, and courtship were challenged by new codes of behavior privileging gentleman and those who aspired to politeness. 

The masculine ideal was accordingly remade to include the refined behavior that had crept in over decades. In art and literature, in newspapers and on the stage, men were valorized for their self-sacrifice, good manners, education, and their consideration of women.  Men who would be successful in courtship and seduction sought to refine their speech, appearance, and sexual skills.  This panel seeks papers that explore the connections between objects, print culture, and the changing ideals of masculine behavior in terms of romantic or sexual desirability. This panel seeks papers the topic of masculinity, sexuality and refinement as they relate to the material world.  How did middling codes of politeness, the vagaries of fashion, new entertainments, and the flood of didactic literature, print culture, and beliefs about privacy, domesticity, and visual status markers change the underlying beliefs about men?  Particularly in the realm of courtship and seduction, what was notable and different? 

Keywords: Women, Gender, Sexuality

CLOSED Music and the British Empire in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the North American British Music Studies Association) [ID 48]
Chair: Peter M Kohanski 

This session explores musical configurations of the British Empire during the long eighteenth-century. Recently, musicologists have begun to adopt imperial frames to study eighteenth-century British musical cultures, an agenda which views the empire as a diverse whole. Such scholarship operates alongside but often separate from British imperial history, which has long understood how theatrical performance “helped consolidate a national and imperial culture that was being formed both within and beyond the nation’s borders” (Wilson 2022). Similarly, as Britons traversed the empire, they developed musical meanings and practices distinct from those in the metropole. Music formed empire in everyday life and at the structural level. This session invites proposals related to this imperial musical culture. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, musical expressions of British imperial identities, colonial knowledge attained through music, colonial and imperial places constituted through music, colonized people’s experiences with Western music and Britons’ experiences with indigenous music, and music, the family, and imperial domesticity. Ultimately, this session aims to open interdisciplinary dialogues between musicologists, imperial historians, and other scholars of the British Empire.

Keywords: Britain/England; Music; Race and Empire

CLOSED New Work on Restoration Theater: A Panel Sponsored by Restoration: Studies in Literature and Culture [ID 265]
Chair: Laura J. Rosenthal, University of Maryland 

We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Restoration theater: comedy, heroic plays, tragedy, drama theory and criticism, performance, performers, staging, historical significance, reception, audience response, genre, impact, revivals, and close analysis of particular plays. Revised papers will be considered for publication in Restoration Journal. 

Keywords: Britain/England; Culture/Cultural Studies; Literature; Theatre

CLOSED No Kings [ID 273]
Chair: Brett Wilson, William & Mary

One of the most lasting legacies of the Enlightenment—on display in the protests of June 2025—is the idea of moving political life beyond the arbitrary and uncheckable rule of “kings.” Taking that moment as both inspiration and a bid for further historicizing, this session invites submissions on long 18th-century representations and theorizations of alternatives to monarchy, whether voiced in panic or in hope. Possible topics might include but are certainly not limited to polemics for (and against) revolution, anarchism, communalism, and bureaucracy; writers from settler and imperial nations taking indigenous political formations seriously; depictions of royals and rulers as monstrous, laughable, and in name only. Contributions welcomed from scholars working both inside and outside of the contexts, geographies, and paradigms of the English-speaking world.

Keywords: Atlantic World; Global/World/Any Country; Literature; Politics

CLOSED Ordering Nature [ID 240]
Chair: Kristin Girten, University of Nebraska, Omaha, and Katie Sagal, Cornell College

How best to perceive and portray the structure of nature was a pivotal question in the Enlightenment Era, illuminating a pervasive desire to make sense of the natural world through tidy, often artificial organizational systems. Adapted from classical sources to accommodate Christian as well as more secular worldviews, the Great Chain of Being would continue to influence portrayals of nature and humanity’s place within it throughout the long eighteenth century. However, the major religious, scientific, philosophical, and political shifts of the Enlightenment significantly influenced how the Great Chain was understood and depicted. In some cases, other ways of ordering nature would ultimately come to supplant the Great Chain completely, presenting alternative metaphors and methods of organizing the material world.

We seek papers for this session that offer interpretations of the various and varying ways Enlightenment Era figures perceived and portrayed nature’s order while considering the epistemological and/or ontological implications of these interpretations.

Potential topics might include

• questions of taxonomic systems (such as Linnaean vs. Lamarkian);
• articulations of hierarchy within and alongside scientific texts;
• ordering metaphors (such as chain, tree, family, etc.);
• the role of literature in formulating and supporting natural order;
• folk vs. scientific methods of ordering;
• relationships between political, social, religious, and natural order.

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Enlightenment; History; Literature; Philosophy/Religion/Faith; Science and Technology

CLOSED Pronatalism/Antinatalism: Eighteenth Century Ideologies of Reproductive Control I [ID 288a]
CLOSED Pronatalism/Antinatalism: Eighteenth Century Ideologies of Reproductive Control II [ID 288b]
Co-Chairs: Fiona Brideoake, American University, and Nicole Garret

Writing in 1758, J. Massie denounced practices of enclosure and shifts in trade and fashion that he claimed led farmers to move into urban trade, and encouraged women into sex work, “from whence have followed decreases in the number, stature and vigour of their posterities […and threatened] total extinction and national weakness.” Such anxieties, clustering around demographic and economic change and family composition and sexuality, are prominent in current political discourse. So-called ‘pro-natalist’ policies are being enthusiastically promulgated in the contemporary United States, endorsed by think tanks, tech oligarchs, and the White House. These proposals emerge from conservative ideologies of gender and the family, privileging heteronormative models of marriage, childbearing, and domesticity, while devaluing non-white communities and undermining reproductive freedom. Simultaneously, a philosophy of anti-natalism has taken hold among some groups who cite social, economic, and environmental impacts of population growth. This panel seeks to investigate how the eighteenth century can inform our understanding of contemporary pro-natalist movements or their antinatalist counterparts. We seek papers that explore the historical connections and points of differentiation between the past and present. We invite papers on topics including: pronatalism and enslavement; pronatalism and empire; virtuous motherhood; foundling hospitals and child welfare; disability; biopolitics; the ‘invention’ of childhood; Poor Laws; French Republican fatherhood; the role of midwives and male professionals; Evangelicalism and ideologies of population management; attitudes towards abortion & contraception; antinatalism, Mathusianism, and fears of domestic & international population growth. 

Keywords: Childhood/Children/Youth; Disability Studies; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Health and Medicine; Race and Empire

CLOSED Proto-Disability Justice in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Disability Studies Caucus) [ID 43]
Co-Chairs: Lesley Thulin, UCLA, and Paul Kelleher, Emory University

In 2016, the performance project Sins Invalid defined “disability justice” as a form of activism that eschews a rights-based framework aimed at achieving access for disabled people, in favor of an anti-ableist framework that tackles systemic inequality. Sins Invalid writes that disability justice “understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met,” while adding that “all bodies are caught in these bindings of ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them. … We are in a global system that is incompatible with life.” While acknowledging disability justice’s contemporary context—one that has emerged in the decades following the disability rights movement of the twentieth century—we invite papers that examine what might be described as “proto-disability justice.” How did disabled people in the long eighteenth century recognize forms of affinity, attachment, or coalition (e.g., petitions against removal orders, as David Turner has demonstrated), despite not belonging to similar kinds of legally or politically recognized communities that exist today? How were these forms of relation inflected by the rise of the British Empire and the transatlantic slave trade, and how did they span multiple categories of identity, like race, gender, class, and sexuality? How did literature or art imagine proto-disability justice? We invite papers that explore disability justice from a range of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary angles. Please submit an abstract of 200 words.disability, justice, poverty, mutual aid communities, solidarity

Keywords: Class; Disability Studies; Economy; Health and Medicine

CLOSED Recent Research on Rousseau I: Sex & Gender (sponsored by the Rousseau Association) [ID 39a]
CLOSED Recent Research on Rousseau II: Politics (sponsored by the Rousseau Association) [ID 39b]
Co-Chairs: Masano Yamashita, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Ourida Mostefai, Brown University

We invite papers that take up new directions in scholarship on Rousseau. These might include, but are not limited to the fields of disability studies, environmental studies, gender and feminism, and philology. Papers that situate Rousseau in his historical, aesthetic, and socio-political contexts are especially welcome. Please include a title and brief abstract of up to 250 words. 

Keyword: Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; France/French; Literature; Politics

CLOSED Reception History and the Eighteenth Century [ID 259]
Chair: Brian Glover, East Carolina University 

This panel seeks to gather scholars who are investigating the ways eighteenth-century cultural productions – including of course written texts, but also visual art, architecture, music, and more – were read, discussed, and interpreted in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Histories of reception may often overlap with histories of editing, publication, and communications as well.  And eighteenth-century ideas about reading, discussion, and criticism themselves undoubtedly cast long shadows into what Hans-Robert Jauss called “horizons of expectations” in later eras.  As we work to determine what the eighteenth century means in our current time, let’s take a look at what it meant under other historical conditions.

Keyword: Author/Authorship; Books/Publishing; Culture/Cultural Studies; History/Historiography; Literature

CLOSED Remembering the Ladies: Writing New Histories of Creative Women I [ID 251a]
CLOSED Remembering the Ladies: Writing New Histories of Creative Women II [ID 251b]
Co-Chairs: Jennifer Germann, Independent Scholar, and Heidi Strobel, University of North Texas

In her introduction to Singular Women: Writing the Artist (2003), Kristen Frederickson considers how to best write about female artists, whether or not they were Academy members. Given archival absences and gaps, what is the best way to “remember the ladies,” as Abigail Adams implored? How do we ensure that famous female artists and authors are not merely categorized as exceptions? What are ways to reconstruct the stories of those who are not protected by institutional memory? Is it the monographic form, a genre that tends to, in Frederickson’s words, “privilege an appearance of coherence … over a more honest telling in which gaps and contradictions play a role,” or other approaches that reach beyond academic audiences?

To remember the ladies is not only to recover biographies, but also to transform the way historical value is assigned, to challenge inherited narrative forms, and to foreground process over product. The eighteenth century, with its evolving print culture, Enlightenment structures, and proto-modern gender debates, offers fertile ground for rethinking how histories of creative women in the arts broadly defined, literature, and the sciences, are imagined, written, and remembered. And while the term ‘ladies’ would have applied to a more limited group, we seek histories that understand women as a diverse and expansive category. This panel invites interdisciplinary papers from scholars at all career stages that offer innovative strategies for writing women’s histories that will add to the new approaches (microhistories, creative nonfiction, hybrid genres) that have appeared in the last few years.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; History; Literature

CLOSED Revolutionary Science I (sponsored by the Science Studies Caucus) [ID 51a]
CLOSED Revolutionary Science II (sponsored by the Science Studies Caucus) [ID 51b]
Chair: Anita Guerrini 

Between the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the French Revolution a century later (with of course the American Revolution in between), profound changes built on and also shifted the foundations established during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.  Modern disciplines and journals emerged. Buffon and Linnaeus recast the boundaries of natural history; biblical chronology was shattered by a new geology and a new history; and a full-blown Chemical Revolution, culminating in Lavoisier and Dalton, recast concepts of the material world.  These and other ideas were both unsettling and invigorating, reflected in art, music, and literature as well as scientific practices.  This session seeks proposals for papers that reflect the revolutionary nature of eighteenth-century science and the impact of political revolutions on scientific practice.  While topics related to Philadelphia and the emergence of American science in the revolutionary era are especially welcome, the session will consider proposals on any aspect of eighteenth-century science and its communication.

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Enlightenment; Health and Medicine; Science and Technology;revolution

CLOSED Sizing Up the Long Eighteenth Century: The Big, the Small, Everything In-Between, Scale, Magnitude (sponsored by the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) [ID 38]
Chair: Kevin L. Cope, Louisiana State University / South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 

Scholars of the Enlightenment have told us much about microscopes and telescopes, but still unexplored is the concept that underlies the fascination with these distance- and scale- adjusting devices: size.  Concerns about size are everywhere in our period, whether in science, art, literature, philosophy, or adventuring.  How many miles are in one degree of latitude?  How big is the sun?  How can a painter’s picture frame contain anything from a close-up of a flower to an alpine panorama?  How can so much action take place in Clarissa’s tiny bedchamber?  How can a playwright or librettist fit an army or navy on a stage?  How can an explorer’s ship hold enough crew and supplies even to get started on a world tour?  What about the sublime, which delivers big items and bigger experiences in small compositions? What about Samuel Johnson’s character Rasselas, who tunnels through a mountain a few feet at a time?  Even the period designator, “the long eighteenth century,” evokes a sizing issue.  Concerns about size, sizing, scale, fit, and are everywhere in an era eager to enter every opening, whether atomic, interplanetary, or in-between.  Papers on any aspect of size and sizing are welcome.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Enlightenment; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Science and Technology

CLOSED Sociability and Enlightenment #1: Mapping Sociable Practices [ID 233]
Co-Chairs: Brian Cowan, McGill University, and Valérie Capdeville, Université Rennes 2

This panel will explore the relationship between sociable practices and the experience of ‘Enlightenment’ in the British, European and colonial societies in the long eighteenth century (1650-1850). It will draw on the collaborative work led by the GIS Sociabilités/Sociability, an interdisciplinary international research network, that has renewed approaches to sociability studies, adopting comparative, transnational as well as global perspectives. The papers will examine the Enlightenment as a combination of practices more than as an abstract intellectual movement; they will aim to demonstrate that ‘the Enlightenment’ was a real experience lived by eighteenth-century individuals and informed by meditation and circulation. Papers are welcome to explore the main practices, spaces or institutions that emerged from the mid-seventeenth century and promoted Enlightenment ideas and sociable interactions. Sociability will also therefore be considered as having a decisive educational function, as sociable experiences shaped an increasingly enlightened public. The centrality of the discourses and practices of sociability in our understanding of both the Enlightenment experience and historiography will be at stake in this panel. Examples will range from social, political, literary or art history.  

Keywords: Books/Publishing; Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; History; History/Historiography

CLOSED Summoning the Dead [ID 256]
Chair: Manushag N. Powell, Arizona State University 

Ushered in by the Great Plague of 1665-1666, the long eighteenth century was a period preoccupied with death.  High infant and maternal mortality rates, disease, public executions, and prolonged warfare made death a part of daily life, while ghost-sightings, the advent of spiritualism, the popularity of the Graveyard Poets, the rise of the Gothic, and the pervasiveness of mourning scenes throughout the literature of sensibility all showed a society eager to engage the dead. 
 
This panel focuses on writing as a means of communing with the dead during this period.  Tristram Shandy famously promises to publish two volumes every year that he lives, yet the novel’s ninth and final volume suggests a writing career cut short by death.  How might writing enable such conversations to continue from beyond the grave?  How do eighteenth-century authors, readers, and texts conceive of writing as a way to summon the dead by speaking for them or about them, or by endowing them with voices to speak on their own behalf?  How does writing serve as a means of commemorating, reanimating, reimagining, or otherwise engaging the dead?  
    
Ways into the topic could include, but are not limited to:
• literary descriptions of ghosts and spiritualism
• literary representations of dead characters, deathbed scenes, and graves
• texts from any genre that take as their thematic concern communication with the dead
• writing in which someone speaks from beyond the grave: epitaphs, wills, supernatural missives

Keywords: Britain/England; Europe; Literature; North America

CLOSED The Eighteenth Century in Film and Television [ID 247]
Co-Chairs: Steven W Thomas, Tennessee Tech University, and John H O’Neill, Hamilton College

The eighteenth century has been the topic of numerous movies and television shows, from adaptations of classic novels by Defoe, Swift, and Austen, to dramatizations of historical events and issues such as piracy, slavery, and the American revolution, to imaginative fantasies such as the TV programs Bridgerton and Outlander. Many explore changing conceptions of identity, nation, race, class, and gender while also reflecting on the structure of narrative form and aesthetics. This panel invites new scholarly work analyzing the engagement of such film and television (both new and old) with the eighteenth century.

Keywords: Film/Television/Media

 CLOSED The Eighteenth-Century Body Between Science, Sensibility, and Power I [ID 289a]   
CLOSED The Eighteenth-Century Body Between Science, Sensibility, and Power II [ID 289b]
Chair: Rebecca Messbarger, Washington University

This panel invites papers that explore the human body as a site of inquiry, imagination, and control in the long eighteenth century. At the intersection of medical science, religious belief, criminal justice, literary and artistic expression, the body was both object and agent—dissected, displayed, venerated, disciplined, and performed. How did Enlightenment novelists, poets, and playwrights; anatomists; artists; theologians; judges; and philosophers envision the body’s interior and exterior? In what ways did sensibility and scientific empiricism shape understandings of health, gender, race, sexuality, and criminality? Contributions are welcome that examine the body through a wide lens: anatomical modeling, autopsy and spectacle, embodied suffering and sainthood, theatrical or operatic performance, forensic science, literary and visual portraiture, penal medicine, or philosophical meditations on pain, desire, or decay. Especially encouraged are medical humanities and cross-cultural approaches.

Keywords: Health and Medicine; Interdisciplinary; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED The Eighteenth-Century Resurgence of the Problem of Evil in Philosophy, Literature, and Culture [ID 286]
Chair: Trip McCrossin, Rutgers University

The problem of evil—the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on,” as Susan Neiman has written [1]—a theological and philosophical concern as far back as the Book of Job, enjoys a resurgence beginning in the long eighteenth century, with Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) and Gottfried Leibniz’s response in Essais de Théodicée sur la Bonté de Dieu, la Liberté de l’Homme et l’Origine du Mal (1710). Their exchange, between what comes to be known as the latter’s “Optimism” and the former’s “Pessimism,” is succeeded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François-Marie Arouet deVoltaire’s and later Immanuel Kant’s response to David Hume and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s to Kant. The problem animates not only the history of philosophy and theology but literature—Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733-34), for example, and Edward Young’s The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (1742-45)—and culture generally. The proposed session would explore the rise and development of optimistic and pessimistic responses to the problem of evil in philosophy, literature, and culture.

[1] “What Is the Problem of Evil?, in Maria Pia Lara, ed., Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, 2001, Berkeley: University of California Press. Her perspective is laid out in more detail in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, 2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; History; Interdisciplinary; Literature

CLOSED The Other Disciplines: Dubious, Failed, and Obsolete Knowledge I [ID 281 a]
The Other Disciplines: Dubious, Failed, and Obsolete Knowledge UU [ID 281 b]
Co-Chairs: Mark A Algee-Hewitt, Stanford University, and Seth Rudy, Rhodes College

Histories of eighteenth-century scholarship have figured large in our understanding of the emergence and evolution of contemporary disciplines. From the work of knowledge compendia such as early encyclopedias to the explosion of print, to the experimental work of the Royal Society, we can trace how biology, chemistry, economics, and even history itself emerged in Europe during the eighteenth-century. But the history of institutional knowledge was not a straight road. For every eighteenth-century subject of knowledge that became a twentieth-century university department, there were many avenues of disciplinarity that led to blind alleys, dead ends, or some other form of obscurity. Whether, like heraldry, they became obsolete in the new knowledge regime, or they survived, like alchemy, as pseudoscience, or whether they were simply failed experiments in knowledge generation, they still form a key part of the fabric of knowledge production in the period. In fact, by recovering a history of vanished disciplines (or almost-disciplines) we can better understand the conditions of what emerged as the successful institutionalization of knowledge. In this panel, we seek papers on obscure, obsolete or failed disciplines of the eighteenth-century, whether they emerged from the transformations of knowledge during the century or whether they are older subjects that were superannuated by the very same processes. We welcome papers engaging with all methods or fields of eighteenth-century study.

Keywords: Classification; Culture/Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; History/Historiography; Science and Technology

CLOSED The Rise of the Lyric I [ID 252] The Rise of Lyric II [ID 297]
Chair: Michael Paul Berlin, Washington & Lee University

This panel welcomes papers on the social history of lyric poetry. Whereas studies of the eighteenth-century novel have stood upon questions of character, credit, and personhood, the lyric continues to draw its authority from those of autonomy, devotion, and formal constraint. How do our histories, both private and collective, shape the senses of personhood expressed through lyric poetry? What of those poets—the oppressed, the mad, and all those whom society pushes to its margins—for whom the “tranquility” that Wordsworth identified with the composition of lyric poetry is elusive? If the lyric was reinvented for modernity through what Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have called “lyricization,” then what were the social and material conditions for the eighteenth-century rise of the lyric? This panel is particularly invested in the relationship between genre, race, and empire, but, more generally, it invites papers that address the relationship between form and history through lyric poetry.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Classification; Critique; Literature; Race and Empire

CLOSED Threads of Thought: Reading Women’s Needlework I [ID 209a]
CLOSED Threads of Thought: Reading Women’s Needlework II [ID 209b]
Chair: Anna Battigelli, SUNY Plattsburgh 

Eighteenth-century needleworkers are often presented passively as schoolgirls dutifully duplicating images from pattern books, prints, painters, engravers, or schoolteachers. In novels, they are depicted as inclined over their work, listening attentively to a noisy and repressive world from which their work provides a tenuous shield. Recent scholarship questions this passivity by asking us to consider more fully the creative agency that needleworkers, even young needleworkers, brought to their work. By tying needlework to the concrete conditions and practices of women’s lives, scholars such as Andrea Pappas, Crystal B. Lake, Chloe Wigston Smith, Serena Dyer, Elizabeth Eger and others ask us to consider how the represented worlds on canvas reflect women’s lived experience. Lake has shown that many schoolgirls selected verses for their samplers from the same primer that schoolboys used to practice penmanship, a claim that asks us to complicate without erasing gendered understandings of education and literacy. Turning to depictions of landscapes in pictorial needlework, Pappas argues, among other things, that the botanical precision of leaves and fruits convey women’s informed understanding of the natural world and agricultural practices. Such work opens the door for using needlework as a lens through which to see women’s lived experiences and ways of knowing more fully.

This session invites papers that further explore women’s creative agency in engaging in all forms of needlework, either in life or in fiction, during the long eighteenth century.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Material Culture; Pedagogy

OPEN ‘To Stain thy Glossy Floods’: Eighteenth-Century Rivers and Riparian Landscapes [ID 243]
Chair: Nicolle Jordan, Univ. of Southern Mississippi 

(Why) does it matter whether rivers are alive? This panel adapts Robert Macfarlane’s recent book title, Is a River Alive?(2025), to explore eighteenth-century precedents for his question. As the past several decades of ecocriticism suggest, rivers constitute crucial and nearly ubiquitous features of landscape the world over, and watersheds are the source of many narratives about the origins of civilization, nation-building, and urbanization. What is to be gained, then—or lost—in an ecocritical approach to our century that attributes life to various natural waterways? How does a river’s life resemble and/or differ from human and non-human animal life, and with what consequences? Conversely, what are the implications of treating rivers as categorically inanimate? Or, consider how depictions of river pollution inform the century’s apprehension that tainted water might pose a dire and perhaps existential threat to humanity. How does the animate/inanimate formula enable or inhibit productive conversations about maintaining or recovering a robust river ecology? Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, this panel welcomes papers that employ historical, literary-critical, art-historical, geographic, or perhaps other methods of river inquiry. 

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Global/World/Any Country; Interdisciplinary

CLOSED Untold Art Histories I [ID 277a]
CLOSED Untold Art Histories II [ID 277b]
Chair: Kaitlin R. Grimes, Independent Scholar

Calling art historians, visual culture specialists, and material culture authorities. Do you have a paper, image, or object that you have always wanted to present at ASECS, but have never found a panel? Is there some idea you have always wanted to research, but could never justify it? Have you craved to bring awareness to new 18^th-century art histories, methodologies, or geographies outside normal art historical praxis?  Do you have a weird art history idea you want to explore with your colleagues? Well, now is the time! This panel calls for the random, the weird, the unusual, the unconventional, the marginal, and the unexplored art histories whose stories have yet to be told.  There are no rules or themes; rather, this panel gives scholars the opportunity to experiment, to question, and to investigate untold 18^th-century art histories. The panel invites papers from emerging, junior, and senior scholars and is open to papers outside the potential ideas listed above.  Please submit an abstract of 250 words. 

Keywords: Aesthetics; Art History/Architecture; Material Culture; Visual Culture/Studies

CLOSED Women’s Work and the Age of Revolutions (sponsored by the Women’s Caucus) [ID 47]
Chair: Lisa Vandenbossche, University of Michigan 

This panel will explore the roles that women played in the Age of Revolutions (American, French, Haitian, etc.). Women are an often-understudied presence in moments of geopolitical tension in this period, yet in various capacities they were agents in revolutionary practices and ideology through petition signing, images of iconography, and active protest. We ask you to reconsider the ways in which women’s presence and work contributed to the revolutions themselves and shaped the people, places, and movements that followed in their wake. Topics panelists might consider include: images of revolutionary women; women who fought in revolutionary battles; women who offered material support to these movements (and possibly the goods they produced); women who participated in boycotts, riots, and other protests; women who wrote about revolutionary ideas in pamphlets, novels, letters, or any other form.

Keywords: women;revolution;protest;agency;movements

CANCELLED Tropical Imaginaries: New Directions (sponsored by the Southeast Asian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) [ID 65]
Chair: Li Qi Peh, Nanyang Technological University 

This panel proposes to read dominant European representations of the tropics against the grain. By the eighteenth century, the tropical zone had come to be associated with backwardness, disease, excess, and all things alien and Other. This panel seeks papers that challenge such representations to arrive at new ways of knowing and imagining the world. What might an alternative eighteenth-century “tropicalist aesthetics,” to borrow the art historian Samantha A. Noël’s term, look like? What theories from Black studies or the Global South might we borrow to consider the “torrid zone” anew?  All methods, approaches, and archives welcome.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Asia; Critical Theory/Theory; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Race and Empire

Poster Sessions

OPEN Poster Session: Teaching the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Pedagogy Caucus) [ID 12]
Chair: Linda Troost, Washington & Jefferson College

How do we continue to engage students with the eighteenth century in innovative ways? All aspects of pedagogy are welcome for poster presentations that cover an entire course or focus on a particular element of a course. Brief presentations (5 minutes) will be followed by time for conversation. Speakers on panels or roundtables are also welcome to participate. Guidance on how to prepare a poster is available; posters will remain on display throughout the conference.

Keywords: Pedagogy

Roundtables

RT: Creative Alt Ac? Writing Popular Historical Fiction [ID 235]
Chair: Sharon Harrow, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

Historical fiction is big business. It’s on mass market best-seller lists and on the Pulitzer Prize list. As readers, we see the broad appeal of such fiction. We like to immerse ourselves in the past; and we like to reimagine the past through our contemporary lenses. As scholars, we read, teach, research, and write about 18th-century literature, but are we well placed to write historical fiction or adaptations? Is this a route for scholars in a moment when the traditional academic career is in such a precarious state? 

This roundtable will consider how scholars research, adapt, and invent the 18th century for 21st-century readers of historical fiction. We invite papers on multiple aspects of the writing process for historical fiction. 

For instance, remarks could include: 

• Ethical considerations in writing about the 18th century through a 21st-century lens
• World building – how do we immerse readers in period-specific settings 
• The balance in adopting and adapting 18th-century writing strategies
• Use of 18th-century primary sources (diary, historical documents, letters, newspapers)
• Use of real historical figures
• Imagining counterfactual histories
• Research strategies for writers of creative historical fiction
• Popular versus literary fiction
• Adapting the 18th century 
• How writing historical fiction can reinvigorate or animate the classroom
• “Writing back” the absences in historical fiction 

Keywords: Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent; Film/Television/Media; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Pedagogy

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OPEN RT:  DH DIY: What do we do when we’re all we’ve got? (sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus) [ID 45]
Chair: Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Case Western Reserve University, and Eliza Wilcox

DH projects often begin individually, whether by necessity or design. But DH projects rapidly need infrastructure, tools, and possibly collaborators to make it work.How do you find those things when you’re the only one in your department working on DH, an independent scholar, or otherwise unsupported? For this roundtable, we look to provide a collaborative approach to sharing resources, funding possibilities, and hard-won knowledge with our fellow scholars.

In the wake of funding decimation at both the federal and university levels, this roundtable is hoping to bring together participants to discuss how we forge a path forward in digital humanities without large scale support. In particular, we hope participants will come with practical knowledge as well as their own questions about how to navigate the DH landscape at this moment. For example,what are tools that are low or no cost that might be viable alternatives to expensive licensed software? Whose projects might already be working on a low-support model that we can collectively learn from/ How might we build collaborative relationships that honor the work being done when financial compensation is scarce? Are there ethical questions we might engage with as a group to help shape our philosophies and policies in response to this moment? Overall, we hope that this roundtable will serve as a generative space for building connections, praxis, and resilience within the 18th century DH community.         

Keywords: Digital Humanities;Resources;Independent Researchers;Community;Planning

RT: Jane Austen and Disability [ID 234]
Co-Chairs: Emily B. Stanback, University of Southern Mississippi, Matthew L Reznicek, University of Minnesota School of Medicine

What does it mean to be disabled in a Jane Austen novel? How does Austen understand embodiment in the years of flux and contestation as medical models of disability developed? What care does suffering call forth from other characters, and how does that care produce social ties? Austen endured her own terminal illness and cared for multiple family members over her lifetime; how might those experiences have led her to understand and represent human variability? With nineteenth-century discourses of normalization on the horizon, how did Austen understand and narratively render earlier notions of who is “well” and who is “ill”?   

We invite papers that explore: medical and health humanities perspectives on Austen’s oeuvre; how representations of disability intersect with race and empire; the gendered and classed elements of suffering and treatment; the treatment of disease and disability in the critical history, life writing, and canonization; disability in Austen’s afterlives, including how her extraordinary bodies and minds get represented in cinematic and novelistic adaptations; how we might read Austen’s representations of bodyminds in relation to other authors of the period; how Austen’s representation of disability invokes care, and the work care does in the novels; how Austen’s treatment of impairment altered across her oeuvre; the relationship between Austen’s representations of variable bodyminds and her famed “style”; disability and aesthetics in Austen’s novels; Austen, disability, and the history of the novel.

Keywords: Austen; Disability Studies; Health and Medicine

OPEN RT: Justice and Moral Cupidity:  Does greed couched under the guise of morality override Justice? (sponsored by the New Lights Caucus) [ID 64]
Chair: Jennifer Vanderheyden, Marquette University 

Benjamin Franklin stated the following: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” This roundtable proposes interdisciplinary discussions of our current political discourse in light of debates and treatises in the long Eighteenth Century regarding justice, equality, freedom, virtue and empathy, especially from the perspective of what is moral and decent.  For example, in his long article in the Encyclopédie on the word Vertu, the Chevalier de Jaucourt links virtue with sentiment in terms of doing that which is naturally and inherently good. He emphasizes that the judgment of a virtuous act depends on the intention behind the deed: a pure action is more virtuous and genuine. The disparate nature of society requires laws, which a virtuous person follows. The difference between virtue and vice, between justice and evil, is self-sacrifice and control for the good of the whole, for the public: “Le méchant…ordonne le tout par rapport à lui; tandis que l’autre s’ordonne relativement au tout” (Diderot and D’Alembert). “The malevolent one orders everything in relation to himself, whereas the other one orders himself as he relates to the whole.” When leaders choose personal reward over the benefit of the country and its citizens, how do these actions alter accepted definitions of civility and virtue? Does the danger of certain citizens modeling the same behavior become a viable threat to democratic nations?

(much of this paragraph was taken from Moral Cupidity and Lettres de Cachet in Diderot’s Writing, Jennifer Vanderheyden, 2019)

Keywords: Art History/Architecture; Enlightenment; Interdisciplinary

OPEN RT: Liquid Frontiers: Oceans, Seas, Rivers, and the Flows of British Colonial Capital [ID 221]
Chair: Mita Choudhury, Purdue University Northwest

This panel explores the role of waterways—rivers, seas, oceans, and ports—in shaping the cultural imaginary and socio-political infrastructure of British imperialism during the long 18th century. Framing maritime spaces as “liquid frontiers,” this panel will examine how the British Empire leveraged these dynamic environments for territorial expansion but also for the circulation of knowledge, information, capital, labor, and commodities.

The eighteenth century marked an early phase in the consolidation of British colonial power, characterized by the rise of entrepôt capitalism. Ports such as Calcutta, Kingston, and Liverpool emerged as nodal points in a vast imperial network, where goods, enslaved people, and financial instruments converged. As Sujit Sivasundaram argues, the ocean was not a void between empires but a “connective tissue” that shaped colonial encounters and epistemologies (2020). Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of the “littoral”—the contested zone between land and sea—as a site of imperial governance and indigenous resistance (Chi-hung Luk 2025). Historians have begun to reassess the role of inland waterways in sustaining imperial economies, highlighting how rivers like the Ganges or the Niger were not passive conduits but active agents in the making of empire (Lambert and Lester 2006).

This “roundtable” panel invites brief presentations which highlight how British imperialism was materially and symbolically constructed through water. Topics may include reframing the boundaries of British theater, the language of maritime supremacy, global histories of environmental transformation of riverine landscapes, the legal geographies of port governance, and the cultural imaginaries of the sea.

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Culture/Cultural Studies; Interdisciplinary; Material Culture; Race and Empire

OPEN RT: Mixed Race Figures in the Long 18th Century [ID280]
Co-Chairs: Nina Moon, Governors State University; Jennifer Comerford

While novels featuring mixed-race figures – such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour – have become increasingly interesting to scholars in recent years, there has yet to be robust research around the mixed-race figure in the long eighteenth century, especially in dialogue with the field of critical mixed race studies. This roundtable invites papers that discuss mixed-race figures – both fictional and historical – from the long eighteenth century. 

Keywords: Race and Empire

OPEN RT: Moving to the “Dark Side” II: Transitioning from Academics to Administration (sponsored by the Irish Studies Caucus) [ID 40]
Chair: Scott Breuninger, Virginia Commonwealth University

For many contemporary scholars of the eighteenth century, the academic world poses an increasing number of challenges.  Some of these stem from broader cultural issues, such as the familiar questioning of the value of the humanities in general; however, these ‘abstract’ concerns can have a very real impact upon the lives of individuals when they provide justification for shuttering departments devoted to humanistic inquiry or decisions to drop a tenured faculty lines in these fields.  On a personal level, eighteenth century academics today are faced with diminishing career options and increased uncertainly about their future.

In this context, it is important to recognize that administrative positions may provide faculty (and graduate students) with opportunities to have a significant impact upon their institutions and the profession.  Unfortunately, the training for their fields that many academics have received often does not address the skills and vision that are needed for making this type of transition.  This roundtable will discuss some of the benefits and challenges that accompany moving from a faculty position to an administrative one, as well as the skills, service, and strategies that can help ease this transition.

Keywords: Administration; Interdisciplinary

OPEN RT: Philadelphia Funding and Research Resources in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (and beyond!)  (sponsored by the Science Studies Caucus) [ID 53]
Chair: Al Coppola

This roundtable will include representatives from the many major research institutions in Philadelphia that focus on the history of science (but are not limited to that area).  These include the American Philosophical Society and its library, the Science History Institute, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Library Company, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  This is not an exclusive list and other institutions may be added.  After brief introductions to the representatives and their institutions, the floor will be open for questions about collections and funding opportunities.  There will be handouts.

Keywords: Archives; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Health and Medicine; Science and Technology;Resources

RT: Political Corruption in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 213]
Co-Chairs: Ramesh Mallipeddi, University of British Columbia, and Dwight Codr 

The term “corruption” in common parlance refers to the abuse of institutional power by an entrusted person for private gain, but its etymological meanings also encompass decay and putrefaction. Indeed, corruption is not only a political fact and institutional practice, but also a discourse that has been mobilized for diverse ends. This interdisciplinary panel invites papers from scholars working in the fields of literary studies, history, and political theory that consider the ways in which the language of corruption functioned in the history of eighteenth-century political thought. 

Keywords: Britain/England; Critical Theory/Theory; Enlightenment; Interdisciplinary; Politics

RT: Sad Scribblers: Making the Eighteenth Century Relatable to Sad Students (A Pedagogy Roundtable) [ID 274]
Chair: Jamie Lynn Kramer, University of Tennessee

It’s not news that we are teaching a sadder bunch of students who statistically deal with greater rates of depression and anxiety than ever before. There’s no shortage of authors who dealt with their own mental stresses, strains, and illnesses during the long eighteenth century, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, Jonathan Swift, David Hume, and Alexander Pope, to name several. Should we frame the authors we teach as vulnerable human beings just like us, in hopes that our students will be more intrigued and inclined to read? What moments from personal letters, juvenilia, ephemera, or biographical details do you share with your class, and when do you choose to share these in relation to the literature? Panelists should provide an overview of, and reasoning for, their selected materials and a particular work of literature or author’s selected works: what is the story that these items tell about your author, and how might this help your students connect to the author’s work as readers?

Keywords: Archives; Author/Authorship; Biography; Health and Medicine; Literature; Pedagogy

OPEN RT: Strategic Pedagogies of Race & Empire (sponsored by the Race and Empire Caucus) [ID 28]
Chair: Peter DeGabriele, Mississippi State University, pgd23@msstate.edu

Recent years have seen the passage of several ideologically charged state level bills aimed at restricting what can be
taught in institutions of higher learning, especially as they pertain to race, gender, and sexuality. Many ASECS
members now find themselves teaching content, concepts, and ideas that have been restricted or
prohibited by their state or government legislatures. This roundtable invites contributions from those who
have negotiated these problems, or who have pedagogical strategies in response to these problems, as well as reflections
on what academic freedom and freedom of speech (concepts also traceable to the European
Enlightenment) mean in today’s context. Proposals from those working in precarious labor conditions are especially welcomed.

Keywords: Pedagogy; Politics; Race and Empire

OPEN RT: Practical Considerations for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars: Teaching the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Graduate Student and Early Career Scholars Caucus) [ID 59]
Chair: Pamela R Ahern, University of Delaware

Many graduate students and early career scholars find themselves teaching or designing courses for the very first time with little guidance beyond their experience as TAs. This roundtable discussion invites submissions from participants who are in the early stages of teaching and would like to share what has and has not worked in their classrooms. Some topics to consider include how to write a syllabus, how to choose a textbook or course readings, how to research for a course, how to navigate AI use, your approaches to teaching the eighteenth century (and beyond), or how you sell your teaching experience in job applications. Please join us for this collaborative conversation on how can we promote both the importance of history and eighteenth-century ideas through our teaching. 

Keywords: Pedagogy;Resources

OPEN RT: The Joys of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Disability Studies Caucus) [ID 44]
Co-Chairs: Paul Kelleher, Emory University, and Lesley Thulin, UCLA

Like other identity-based forms of activism and critique, disability studies arose in the twentieth century in response to lived experiences (individual and collective) of exclusion, pathologization, and unwanted medical intervention. For many good reasons, then, “negative” affects–such as fear, alienation, and anger–have fueled how disability identities are asserted and how disability critique is articulated. But what remains to be said about how “positive” affects have energized and sustained atypical bodyminds? What, in other words, are the joys of disability? This roundtable takes inspiration from recent work that theorizes Black, queer, and trans* joy as modes of being, survival, and flourishing, and at the same time, seeks to historicize the relationship between atypical bodymindedness and positive affects, such as happiness, contentment, pride, amusement, gratitude, and love. To that end, we invite 5-7 minute presentations that explore what the long eighteenth century, a crucial period in the even longer history of disability, reveals about how disabled folks–in “real life” or in the realms of representation–cultivated positive affect in order to live, love, survive, and thrive. Please submit an abstract of 200 words.

Keywords: Disability Studies; Health and Medicine

OPEN RT: The Unwritten Word: Alternative Texts, Epistemologies, and Ontologies  (sponsored by the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (WSECS)) [ID 34]
Co-Chairs: Rachael King, WSECS, and laheva S. Tuaone, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

This roundtable follows on from the 2025 WSECS Annual Meeting, held at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. The theme of “The Unwritten Word” aimed to de-center European epistemologies and ontologies and to highlight alternative communications systems. We solicit short (8-10 minute) talks on the following potential topics, or related ones: moving beyond text-based evidence; honoring other ways of knowing: tattoos, oral stories, music, genealogical knots, and pictograms; talking sticks, talking drums, talking books; arts & crafts; images, charts & graphs; the body as an alternative text: fashion, style, gestures; women’s alternative contributions; indigeneity; the other in the 18th century. Please submit a 250-word abstract.

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Books/Publishing; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Global/World/Any Country; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies

OPEN RT: The U.S. Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798  (sponsored by the Race and Empire Caucus) [ID 29]
Chair: Humberto Garcia, UC Merced, hgarcia22@ucmerced.edu

This panel invites papers that highlight reflections on and responses to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws restricted immigration and political dissent for promoting national security during a period of rising political tensions between the U.S. and France. In March 2025, President Donald Trump cited these laws to deport non-citizens deemed criminal invaders, depriving them of due process rights and free speech protections under the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Papers will reflect on these laws to explore links between the past and present and across national borders. Possible topics include literary representations of, discourses about, or documented instances of deportation and transportation, critiques of sovereignty and constitutions of otherness, freedom of speech and the press, and intellectual genealogies of enemies, aliens, and non-citizens.

Keywords: History; Law/Legal Studies; Literature; Race and Empire

OPEN RT: Visual Culture, Tristram Shandy, the “Science” of Naming, and Lexicography [ID 258]
Co-Chairs: Rebecca Shapiro, City University of New York, and Vivian Zuluaga Papp, CUNY New York City College of Technology

Rebecca Shapiro’s work has recently focused on legal lexicography and the etymology of disability terms. Vivian Zuluaga Papp’s work addresses semiotics and sense disambiguation within scientific study.

Our ideas coalesced around our assignments of having students learn about 18th-century dictionaries and scientific categorization. Rebecca’s students read about 18th-century dictionaries and then write their own. They afterwards write a paper on the process of determining lexicographical principles, creating  front matter and back matter, presenting choice and issues—much like Johnson, Bailey, and Webster did.

Building on her work on “nondescriptions” in 17^th-18^th-century texts, Vivian writes about linguistic representation in scientific works and in Tristram Shandy; categorization and species naming in the 18th century was dependent on norms that we do not necessarily agree with today. In class, she has students study how and why “bumble bees” are named, despite not being “bumbling.” Then she asks them to name and define the insect according to principles that they have learned from their acquisition of  18th-century scientific knowledge.

These assignments teach students about history, etymology, rhetorical processes, 18th-century political norms and literacy, among other things.

We are likewise fascinated by the visual culture in Laurence Stern’s work; Sterne’s texts and the semiotic possibilities related to imperfect naming, shifts in meaning, details that appear unrelated to space and time, ploitting “journeys,” how anaphora works with linguistic identifications, and so on.

We suggest a round table where 4-5 of us share short works on how language is constructed, reconstructed, and revealed in various, gloriously arbitrary ways.

Keywords: History; Law/Legal Studies; Literature; Race and Empire

RT: Wayward Intent; or, how the Eighteenth Century Goes Astray [ID 267]
Chair: Michael Genovese, University of Kentucky

The eighteenth century has been much associated with direction: the improvement of projects, the philosophical freedom of secular enlightenment, the discoveries of empirical science, the outward arrow of trade, the expanding hand of conquest, the increased management of people by the state.  What this roundtable seeks to explore, however, is the waywardness lurking within such direction, the unplanned or unforced errors that literary or other cultural artifacts uncover in the best-laid plans.  The century is rife with examples of philosophies that fail in practice (one thinks of Parson Adams), of colonial adventures gone awry (the Darien Scheme), of succession plans that end in dismay (The Castle of Otranto, and maybe everything Gothic that follows).  What does it mean to go astray, and is there any rhyme or reason to writing that takes going astray as a key trope?  This panel is not about solutions or goals: it is about the alarming things that follow when solutions or goals are pursued but just won’t come about.  As a roundtable, this session will have as its goals breadth of examples and tightness of analysis, and to that end a wide variety of approaches are welcome: theoretical, historical, political, generic, aesthetic, etc.   

Keywords: Aesthetics; Critical Theory/Theory; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

OPEN RT: What Exactly are the New Perspectives in the Eighteenth-century?: Reimaginings, New Boundaries, Futures  (sponsored by the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SEASECS)) [ID 37]
Chair: Nathan Brown, Furman University

Inspired by the name of the affiliate journal New Perspectives on Eighteenth Century of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth Centuries Studies (SEASECS), this panel invites scholars to reflect on the boundaries of the new, nouvelles, or novelty brought on by technological and philosophical discoveries and imperial contact and projects in the period. What are the boundaries and tensions (i.e. ancient and modern, familiar and bizarre, New World and Old World, et cetera) of novelty in the study of the period? What is the future of novelty? Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship is welcome in this roundtable that hopes to bring together scholars across disciplines (art, history, material culture, literature, philosophy, law, politics, et cetera) to explore newness / novelty. We encourage new PhDs and early scholars to apply, as well as scholars working on and / or from extra-European perspectives. We aim to showcase cutting-edge work among our colleagues (including current and potential members in SEASECS)!

Keywords: Atlantic World; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Material Culture; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

OPEN RT: What Must An Ecological Criticism Be? [ID 218]
Chair: Christopher Catanese, University of North Carolina

This roundtable explores the ramifications for eighteenth century scholarship of the indications that ecological upheaval will be increasingly central to our future. In the interest of articulating a collective rallying point for a project already pursued by individual scholars in the field, we ask what—aside from addressing environmental topics or espousing “environmentalist” values—are the necessary elements of a methodologically explicit ecological criticism? Starting from an intuition that important recent thinking may have appeared in fields such as energy, infrastructure, or “eco-Marxian” studies, we seek participants willing to hazard more synthetic, programmatic, or polemic accounts of precisely what should (or should not) feature in the future of ecological thought in the humanities. Although working within literary history, we suggest that a thoroughly ecological criticism entails specific philosophical and ontological positions; determinate social, ethical, and political orientations; and articulated theories of political economy, history, ideology, textual interpretation, reception, and so on. We seek contributors willing to stake normative claims, propose non-negotiable criteria, and formalize methodological desiderata within this larger intellectual framework—and also within the specific disciplinary context of a humanistic approach to the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding its growing importance in Renaissance studies, extant ecological criticism focuses overwhelmingly on the post-1800 period; given that our field represents a traditional historiographical inflection point between a “moral,” “organic,” or “premodern” and a “modern,” “fossil,” or “industrial capitalist” political economy (or better, political ecology), what specific insights or historical concepts of nature, humanity, or value should eighteenth century studies contribute to a larger disciplinary project?

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Economy; History/Historiography; Literature

CLOSED Roundtables

CLOSED RT: 70 years of 18th-century scholarship: Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment, 1955 to today (sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation)
Co-Chairs: Gregory S Brown, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Nicholas E Cronk, Voltaire Foundation 

In April 1952, Theodore Besterman wrote to Herbert Dieckmann, who had recently discovered previously unpublished Diderot manuscripts, that new “Voltaire Institute” he was setting would have “a publications policy to enable scholarly undertakings … at the expense of the institute and without interference” of commercial concerns. “The endless talk that goes on about the crisis in learned publication seems to me singularly unprofitable; what is needed is to do something.” That “something” was the series, long known as “Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,” later “SVEC” and since 2014, “Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment” has published over 700 volumes of essays, monographs, editions and primary sources. This panel will take stock of achievements, assess current developments and discuss the future of 18th-century scholarship. Contributions are welcome from any field and might be historiographical, assessments of specific works in the collection, or propositions on current status or future directions of the series and of scholarly publishing in the field. 

Keywords: Books/Publishing; Enlightenment; History/Historiography;Voltaire;Editions

CLOSED RT: Academic Freedom and Eighteenth-Century Thought [ID 276]
Co-Chairs: James Mulholland and Charlotte Sussman

What eighteenth-century concepts of freedom and liberty might inform contemporary notions of academic freedom? At a pivotal moment for understanding and preserving academic freedom, and set against the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this panel explores the early modern and eighteenth-century roots of academic freedom to shed light on today’s debates and future challenges. The eighteenth century offers crucial insights, though interpretations of academic freedom’s origins vary. Keith Whittington, in Speak Freely, argues that principles underpinning today’s free speech debates stem from Enlightenment commitments to open inquiry and skeptical investigation, yet were shaped by the era’s political tensions, such as Federalist-Jeffersonian conflicts. Historians Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger trace academic freedom from early roots in religious liberty to its modern form, articulated in the AAUP’s 1915 and 1940 declarations—documents that define it as faculty’s right to research and teach without interference, grounded in a professional duty to pursue truth.
Tensions from the eighteenth century—between authority and dissent, orthodoxy and toleration—echo in today’s campus controversies. Examining these historical debates reveals persistent challenges in protecting intellectual freedom against pressures toward conformity or censorship. Tracing current debates to their Enlightenment contexts shows how ideals of liberty, inquiry, and skepticism continue to shape modern academe. This history invites reflection on universities as guardians of intellectual exploration and democratic discourse, while also confronting their legacies of exclusion and control. We invite scholars to draw on eighteenth-century thought to better understand current conflicts and reimagine academic freedom today.

Keywords: Britain/England; Critical Theory/Theory; Enlightenment; Law/Legal Studies; Politics

CLOSED RT: Affect and the Cliché [ID GS270]
Chair: Jonathan Sadow, SUNY Oneonta

As we pay attention to more non-canonical texts, we are tempted to dismiss works that employ cliché as bad or uninteresting.  Of course, some are.  But some works also use the language of cliché to make a structure of feeling visible.  Many late eighteenth-century novels, for example, use common tropes and much-repeated expressions to produce still-innovative, ambitious, and affecting works. This roundtable welcomes assessments of the use of cliché in various genres with a non-dismissive eye and an interest in affect.  Possibilities include the cliché’s relationship to sensibility, romanticism, or empiricism; theoretical understandings (either ours or the eighteenth century’s); examining the cliché’s connection to literary realism or the lived reality of writers; or linking seemingly-universal phrases to historically concrete meaning.

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Critical Theory/Theory; Literature

CLOSED RT: Ants and Women Redux: Rewriting the History of Enlightenment Philosophy [ID 261]
Co-Chairs: Andrew H Clark, Fordham University and Lynn Festa, Rutgers University

In a provocative 1987 paper, the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff claimed that when it came to feminism in contemporary French philosophy, “the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of insects are better defended than the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of women.” An important part of Le Doeuff’s project has been to forge new definitions of philosophy and its history to make room for women’s work. Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies (by Andrew Janiak, Florence Lotterie, Natania Meeker and Joanna Stalnaker, among others) has offered new perspectives on the place of women in Enlightenment philosophy. This roundtable picks up on this new work and asks how the broader history of Enlightenment philosophy might need to be rewritten in its wake.

Keywords: Enlightenment; France/French; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Philosophy/Religion/Faith

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CLOSED RT: Building a Print / Digital Edition [ID GS208]
Chair: Hilary Havens, University of Tennessee

Scholarly editions are the essential foundations of eighteenth-century studies, as they make texts available, accessible, and comprehensible to scholars, students, and larger audiences.  This roundtable asks panelists to reflect on the theory and practice of editing in print and/or digital formats, particularly their own (planned) print and/or digital editions.  The digitization of texts and proliferation of online resources have transformed the process of building an edition for scholars working in the twenty-first century.  Some questions that panelists might consider include: what is the significance of the standard edition in the digital age?  For editors of print texts, what are strategies for pitching editions to publishers?  For digital formats, what are the technical skills needed to produce an edition, and how did you acquire them?  Or more broadly, what are specific challenges and rewards you have encountered while preparing your scholarly edition?  Is editing more open to collaboration than traditional scholarship?  Is it recognized and rewarded as research activity within your institutions?

Keywords: Archives; Books/Publishing; Digital Humanities; Editing

CLOSED RT:  “But how can you know?”: Queer and Trans Methodologies in Eighteenth-Century Studies (sponsored by the Queer and Trans Caucus) [ID 32]
Chair: Noah Chaskin, Northwestern University

This roundtable aims to explore the diverse methods by which queer and trans studies scholars approach eighteenth-century subjects. We seek abstracts for brief (7-10 minute) remarks on method through which we might expand and challenge how we understand our roles as critics, theorists, archivists, teachers, and creatives. How can we navigate historical specificity or historicist challenges to our subjects? Are our studies limited to figures (real or fictional) whose sexual practices or gender are explicit? And how might queer and trans methodologies inform work that is not primarily focused on queer or trans figures? 

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory; Gender/Sexuality Studies; History/Historiography; Queer and Trans Studies

CLOSED RT: Eighteenth-Century Cancel Culture: Naming, Blaming, Shaming [ID 272]
Chair: Hazel Gold, Emory University

While the term ‘cancel culture’ belongs to our own era, the phenomenon of calling out and exacting retribution on individuals and groups for their controversial beliefs, ideological positioning, or perceived moral failings is richly represented in eighteenth-century history and culture. Blackballing – the rejection of applicants for membership in private clubs – was a known procedure during the Enlightenment period; Byron was the object of savage public criticism; Rousseau endured exile; Manuel Godoy, secretary of state and later prime minister under Charles IV of Spain, was toppled from his political perch; more violent examples include the Jacobin attacks on the clergy and nobility of the Ancien Régime and confrontations with profiteers during the eighteenth-century English food riots. Contributors to this panel will explore how social ostracization and reputational damage (and worse) were inflicted on those who became objects of opprobrium during the long eighteenth century through satire and ridicule, rhetorical disavowals, censorship, and other forms of scapegoating, shaming, and silencing. What sorts of trespasses were caught in these retributive, exclusionary practices? What role was played by the manipulation of emotions? In establishing authority to ‘cancel,’ how did public opinion and state apparatuses interact? The panel welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from fields including history, literature, the visual arts, science, philosophy, and religion.

Keywords: Critique; Culture/Cultural Studies; Global/World/Any Country; History; Politics

CLOSED RT: Eliza Haywood and Genre [ID 278]
Chair: Catherine Ingrassia, Virginia Commonwealth University

This round table seeks to provide a corrective to the narratives that too often divide Haywood’s writing life into halves (scandalous vs. “reformed” writer), too frequently characterize it primarily as one dominated by fiction, and too rarely explore the full range of diverse genres and forms in which Haywood worked. This panel, sponsored by the Eliza Haywood Society, seeks five to seven minute statements that generate conversation about the range, diversity, and experimentation of form and genre in which Haywood wrote (which, in turn, illustrates the range of genres that appealed to readers). To that end, this session seeks comments on genres including but not limited to her periodicals, romance, plays, conduct books, travel fiction, political writing, poetry, speculative fiction, translations, the ‘novel of manners,’ and meta-fiction. Can we talk about Haywood’s “theory of genre”? How does that connect to her strategies for reaching different kinds of readers? Her role shaping mass popular culture consumption? What is the relevance and legacy of Haywood within the formation of genres of the period?

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Books/Publishing; Literature

CLOSED RT: Experiments in Oceanic Humanities [ID 279]
Chair: Heather Zuber, Suny, Maritime College

On July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice ruled that the world’s largest climate polluters may be held accountable for damage caused by rising sea levels in small island and low-lying coastal nations.  Addressing anthropogenic environmental change demands not only legal and economic accountability, but also broader cultural understanding of human interaction with and impact on the world’s oceans, what Margaret Cohen calls “ocean literacy.”  The emerging field of Oceanic Humanities explores the relationship between human beings and the water that covers 71% of the earth’s surface and produces new forms of scholarship that integrate scientific data/methods with the production and study of literature, history, philosophy, geography, and the arts.  Oceanic Humanities is thus a decolonizing theoretical/political lens and interdisciplinary area of inquiry that integrates work on the environment, legacies of empire, and global inequality. 
This roundtable seeks informal 10-15 minute presentations on Oceanic Humanities projects with a focus on (or ties to) the eighteenth-century.  We welcome traditional research projects rooted in eighteenth-century maritime literature, history, and culture such as Isabel Hofmeyr’s Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022), public-facing projects such as Margaret Cohen Fiorenza Micheli’s development of Stanford’s new Oceanic Humanities program, and experimental forms like John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett’s prose journal/data catalog Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941).
We aim to spark discussion of the transformative potential of Oceanic Humanities to rethink the role of eighteenth-century studies (and the humanities) in addressing twenty-first century challenges.

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Digital Humanities; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies; Science and Technology

CLOSED RT: Making the Material Book I (sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP)) [ID 58]

Chair: Hannah Doherty Hudson, Suffolk University

This session invites papers that engage with the physical attributes of books,  periodicals, and other printed works in the long eighteenth century. From advertisements boasting of a new magazine’s high-quality paper to publishers who offered books in boards as an alternative to unbound sheets, the decisions, resources, and priorities of eighteenth-century people shaped the material forms of the books they made. We welcome research that sheds light on the materials and processes of eighteenth-century book-making, from typecasting and papermaking to printing and binding, or that engages with the material qualities of surviving books from the era. Papers might also, for example, investigate the physical characteristics of books by a particular publisher, consider the differences in paper or typeface in books at various price points, or track changes in book-making practices over time. Please send abstracts of 150-300 words to hhudson@suffolk.edu. You need not be a member of ASECS and SHARP to submit a proposal but, if selected, you must be a member of both to present at the conference.

Keywords: Bibliography; Books/Publishing; History; Labor/Business; Material Culture

CLOSED RT: New Approaches to Gender, Women and Periodicals in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 217]
Co-Chairs: Fauve Vandenberghe, Ghent University; Giulia Coppi, Ghent University; Zoe Van Cauwenberg

Women have always played an important role in the rapidly emerging periodical culture of the long eighteenth century. Jennie Batchelor’s and Manushag Powell’s 2019 landmark edited collection Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s has firmly established women’s vital contributions to periodical culture not just as authors, but also as editors, readers and publishers.
Building on this work, this roundtable panel seeks to revisit and expand the scope of women’s engagement with the periodical press. This panel invites short papers that reflect on the current state and future directions of periodical studies, with a focus on women’s roles in eighteenth-century print culture. We especially welcome contributions that integrate interdisciplinary approaches—including but not limited to book history, pedagogy, affect theory, translation studies, transnationalism, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies. How do these frameworks reshape our thinking about periodical culture, and what do they reveal about the gendered dynamics of print in the eighteenth century? How might new methods and critical frameworks advance our understanding of women’s roles in periodical production, circulation, and reception?
The goal of this roundtable is not only to highlight the breadth of women’s contributions to periodical culture but also to offer a space for methodological and theoretical reflections and scholarly exchange about future directions in the field.

Keywords: Culture/Cultural Studies; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Material Culture

CLOSED RT: New Approaches to Revolutionary Violence [ID 291]
Chair: Mark Boonshoft, Virginia Military Institute

Recent scholarship on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions has made violence an organizing concept. That revolutions were violent might seem obvious. But generations of work obscured similarities across the revolutionary Atlantic, treating some revolutions as violent, and others as “orderly,” in ways that reified existing hierarhcies. This panel takes its inspiration from a spate of recent work–including Linda Colley’s Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt, Robert Parkinson’s work on racial violence in the American Revolution, several new studies on the French terror, and Julia Gaffield’s recent biography  of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. We welcome submissions from scholars working on all forms of violence–racialized, gendered, intimate, martial, and more–across the revolutionary Atlantic. We are particularly eager to place into conversation scholars working with different methodologies. How does revolutionary violence look different through literary, material, visual or social historical analysis?

Keywords: Atlantic World; History; Politics

CLOSED RT: The Child And The Limelight: Children and Celebrity Culture in the Eighteenth-Century [ID 212]
Chair: Aparna R. Gollapudi, Colorado State University 

Although the eighteenth century has been credited with the “invention” of both childhood and of celebrity, these two cultural constructs are rarely considered together. This roundtable explores how children and childhood fared in the emergent celebrity culture of the long eighteenth century.  
On the one hand, established traditions of fame and renown were complicated by the new category of public attention toward individuals that emerged in this period, one we now recognize as celebrity culture. On the other, the period also witnessed shifts in conceptualizations of “the child” as a figure of sentimentalized or fetishized innocence, as tabula rasa, as the perfect Enlightenment pedagogical project, or even as a consumer of the little books published by Newberry. This roundtable asks: How did these new constructions of childhood relate to emergent models of public notability and visibility? How were children’s lives touched by this evolving celebrity culture? How did adult stardom compare to that of children who became famous for their prodigious acting or musical talents? Were there any juveniles amongst the criminals and highwaymen whose notoriety was tinged with celebrity? How did the progeny of lionized parents fare? What were the economics of childhood celebrity? How was the child in the limelight differentiated from other ‘ordinary’ children?  
These are some of the questions this roundtable explores. Presentations considering these or any other areas of overlap between the child’s world and the realm of celebrity are welcome. 

Keywords: Childhood/Children/Youth; Culture/Cultural Studies; Interdisciplinary; Performance; Theatre                     

CLOSED RT: The Gig You Didn’t Know Existed (sponsored by the Women’s Caucus) [ID 49]
Chair: Victoria Barnett-Woods 

This roundtable will explore jobs and positions outside the tenure track university stream (library positions, grant writing and research support positions, non-profit work, corporate writing, administration in various capacities, etc.). We hope to discuss some of the following questions: In an era of precarity and scarcity in the academic industry, where can you find a job that you didn’t even know was out there? How do you transition to a job you never imagined having or wanting? What does it mean to think of one’s career as a series of (related or unrelated) jobs, rather than one predetermined track?  How can we support ourselves and our students through these questions? In this roundtable, we hope to build on experiences and think more capaciously about our abilities and skills, relying on folks who have “made the leap” or are contemplating a career change. Individuals who have positions outside of the tenure track stream are particularly encouraged to apply and share. 

Keywords: Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent                      

CLOSED RT: The Jewish Eighteenth Century [ID 231]
Chair: Sue Lanser, Brandeis University

In his magisterial two-volume work The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Shmuel Feiner marks the long eighteenth century as the genesis of both Jewish Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation: a time of growing Jewish engagement with the non-Jewish world and intensified attention to Jews and Jewishness by the Christian majority.  But despite a rich body of scholarship on Jews in/and the eighteenth century, Jewish studies has held a small place in the intellectual life of ASECS and in eighteenth-century studies tout court.  My hope is that this roundtable will launch a multifaceted and intersectional conversation that can be pursued at subsequent annual meetings to deepen connections between eighteenth-century studies and Jewish studies.
Questions that contributors might explore:  How do Jews and Jewishness figure in eighteenth-century texts, performances, politics, or social relations?  Which stereotypes prevail, which are challenged, and which change over the period?  How do Enlightenment thinkers grapple with Jewish peoplehood and Jewish thought? What are the contours of Jewish exclusion or the terms of Jewish inclusion? What are the eighteenth-century’s dynamics of Jewish emancipation—and of Jewish conversion—and how are these specific to particular countries?  How might attention to Jews in North Africa and the Levant challenge a Eurocentric Jewish historiography?  How does Jewishness figure in emergent configurations of race?  How do Jews figure in the political and commercial economies of empire?  In short, what does the eighteenth century look like through a Jewish lens?  These are only suggestions; please draw on your own scholarship to offer us a lively entree into new ways of thinking about Jews, Judaism, and/or Jewishness in the eighteenth-century.  

Keywords:

CLOSED RT: The Measure of a Man: English Masculinity and the Long Eighteenth Century [ID GS205]
Chair: Kit Kincade, Indiana State University

The long Eighteenth Century has provided us with a variety of social displays of masculinity.  Certainly, much of our current social masculine varieties are rooted in social and idealistic changes from this period.  From fictional constructions (from Horner to Charles Surface to Fitzwilliam Darcy) to biographical/autobiographical accounts (like those of Savage or Johnson) to conduct book advice (such as Chesterfield or Fordyce) and even those who pointed out or represented instabilities (from Rochester through Lewis), the methods for and prescripts against displays of types of masculinity began to vary widely during this period.  As the lines between the middle classes and gentry blurred, the rise of military men differentiated, and the political and national pressure to conform to new versions of “Englishness” multiplied, masculinities evolved. This panel seeks to examine masculinities either in fiction or biography, historical or idealistic, real or mythological.

Keywords: Britain/England; Culture/Cultural Studies; Gender/Sexuality Studies; History; Literature

CLOSED RT: The Possibilities and Limitations of Literary Evidence I [ID 215a]
CLOSED RT: The Possibilities and Limitations of Literary Evidence II [ID 215b]
Chair: David A. Brewer

What is literary evidence evidence of? What can we do with it? What can we not do with it? What should we do or not do with it? What is it good for? In short, scholars from across the humanities routinely hold up plays, poems, prose fiction, essay periodicals, and other literary forms and texts as evidence for the arguments they’re making, not all of which have stakes that are primarily literary in any obvious sense. What are they doing right (or wrong)? Are there ways in which we can make better (more imaginative? more responsible? more far-reaching?) use of literary evidence? What, in short, is the value and utility of literary evidence for dixhuitièmistes in the mid-2020s?
Proposals for informal, methodologically oriented talks or polemics of roughly eight to ten minutes are welcome from across the disciplines and national/linguistic traditions represented in ASECS.

Keywords: Archives; Global/World/Any Country; History/Historiography; Interdisciplinary; Literature

CLOSED RT: Wollstonecraft at Work: A Roundtable [ID 237]
Co-Chairs: Shawn Lisa Maurer, College of the Holy Cross, and Cynthia D Richards, Wittenberg University

While Mary Wollstonecraft’s contributions as a philosopher are uncontested, her reputation as a writer remains unsettled.  Arguably, we grant her a place in the literary canon because her influence is undeniable and not because the quality of her production is uniform and unassailable. This roundtable seeks to challenge that perception by focusing on Wollstonecraft as a writer at work, a writer consciously and deliberately innovating to produce a rich and varied oeuvre revealing forms of intellectual and professional labor beyond her better-known philosophical treatises and novels.  
Possible topics might include Wollstonecraft as a working woman/professional writer/public intellectual; Wollstonecraft as an artistic innovator; Wollstonecraft’s growth and development; Wollstonecraft and visual culture; Wollstonecraft as an educator.  We also seek responses that address Wollstonecraft’s historical as well as contemporary resonances in literary, artistic, and feminist political contexts across the globe. We encourage reflections on the productive imbrications of Wollstonecraft’s life and work; on her critical reception, her artistic legacies, and her place in popular culture.  Finally, we invite papers on editing and teaching Wollstonecraft’s work. How does she continue to educate us and our students?

Keywords: Author/Authorship; Britain/England; Interdisciplinary; Literature; Pedagogy

CANCELED T:  In Search of the New Beaumarchais [ID 206]
Chair: Gregory S Brown, University of Nevada Las Vegas 

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best known as the author of plays performed at the Comedie Francaise, which were later adapted into operas. He has also been, less frequently, studied for his role in procuring and providing military support for the American Revolutionaries, for his involvement in several legal and political controversies in the 1780s, and as the publisher of the first edition of the complete works of Voltaire. Since the biography by Louis de Loménie in 1856, very little work on Beaumarchais has been based on his letters or personal papers — for the very good reason that they remained inaccessible to most scholars! In autumn 2023, this changed when the Beaumarchais family donated 35 cartons of material to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and as of summer 2025, these papers are inventoried and accessible to scholars. This round-table offers an opportunity to take stock of the significance of this collection for 18th-century studies. Communications are invited on any topic relating to the papers — the collection itself, on the prospects for inventorying and editing of the collection, or work that draws in any way on the manuscripts to explore previously unstudied topics or themes in Beaumarchais’s life. Just as the availability of 10 reels of microfilm of unpublished Voltaire letters in 1956 led to a reassessment of Voltaire, the Enlightenment and the 18th century, this roundtable seeks to promote such reassessment based on the Fonds Beaumarchais. 

Keywords: Archives; Author/Authorship; Biography; France/French; North America

Special Sessions (includes preformed sessions, book sessions, seminars, workshops)

SpS: Bed, Wed, Dead: Jane Austen Edition, part II [ID 290]
Chairs: Dana Gliserman Kopans, SUNY Empire State University, and Nora Nachumi, Yeshiva University, and Teri Doerksen, Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania – Mansfield

This special game session is open to all as a drop-in session. No need to register in advance.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Perhaps, but who wants to marry him? The fact that one can easily procure a t-shirt, coffee mug, key chain, note cards, or a ton of other products emblazoned with “Keep Calm and Marry Mr. Darcy” is a testament (in addition to the far more scholarly ones) to the ubiquity and staying power of Austen’s work, and the extent to which they continue to invite readers to emotionally invest in the relationships about which they read. In this interactive panel, panelists will facilitate the playing of the Jane Austen version of the forced choice game and invite the participants to disclose their own choices of which of Austen’s characters they would—hypothetically—sleep with, marry, and kill.  

The facilitators debuted this game at SEASECS, and were so delighted by the range of responses and ideas for teaching Austen that came out of the session that it was decided that the game should continue.  Newcomers and alums from SEASECS are very welcome to come and play!

Keywords: Austen; Games; Gender/Sexuality Studies; Literature; Pedagogy

 

SpS: New Work Using the London Stage Database [ID 260]
Chair: Mattie Burkert, University of Oregon

The London Stage Database (londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu) is a digital humanities project that makes eighteenth-century theater records available and searchable through an open-access, open-source website. Since its launch in 2019, the project has cultivated a diverse and steadily growing user community of scholars, archivists, family genealogists, data scientists, students, theater practitioners, and writers. In 2024, project lead Mattie Burkert and her team at the University of Oregon were awarded a three-year, $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to upgrade and expand the database; like nearly all NEH grants, however, this funding was abruptly terminated by the DOGE service in April 2025. Funds allocated for projects that “no longer effectuate agency priorities” were redirected to initiatives to mark the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, such as “Celebrate America!”—a collection of challenge grants that, according to an NEH press release,  “help students and the public celebrate, study, and reflect on our nation’s founding and history of exceptionalism.” As ASECS marks America’s 250^th in Philadelphia, eighteenth-century scholars must reckon with the ways our academic fields are being conscripted to provide a veneer of intellectual legitimacy for hegemonic narratives and the destruction of academic freedom.

Keywords: Advocacy; Archives; Digital Humanities; Performance; Theatre