List of Sessions 2025

Please note:

• All submissions must be submitted through the Annual Meeting portal. See the Important Deadlines for details.
• Please do not email abstracts to chairs.
• Contact Executive Director Benita Blessing for technical support and questions (director@asecs.org) or if you see any edits that need to be made.

ABSTRACTS

Panel Abstracts

Africans and Africa in Italy (sponsored by the Italian Studies Caucus) [ID 51]
Chair: Wendy Wassyng Roworth, University of Rhode Island, wroworth@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

Given the interest generated by the “Africans and Africa in Italy” panel at the 2024 ASECS meeting, the Italian caucus proposes another panel on the same topic for the 2025 online meeting. This session is dedicated to the realities and representations of African peoples and their homelands in the various Italian States, be they economic, political, religious, artistic, social, educational, etc. Papers may examine the lived experiences of Africans in rural and city environments, among nobility and other classes, and in relation to a variety of public entities. Portrayals of Africa and Africans may come from literary, theatrical, figurative, ceremonial, academic, etc. sources. Examples include but are not limited to: Africans featured in portrait and other figurative arts genres, treatment of/reference to Africans in historical, scientific, medical, ethnographic, encyclopedic and travel narratives; Africa as protagonist and/or setting in fictional, scientific, poetic, or dramatic literature. Papers may also interpret “Africans in Italy” in an indirect sense, i.e., to include the heated debates taking place in Italy (in person and in print) on the experiences of Africans outside of Italy. Chief among those discussion topics would be Africans’ experience of the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent enslavement in the Americas.

Keywords: Africa, Italy/Italian, Material Culture, Slavery/Enslavement; Ethiopia

Aging and Ageisms across European Enlightenments [ID 126]
Chair: Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti, Stanford University, cinziag@stanford.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

As François de La Rochefoucauld puts it: “Peu de gens savent être vieux” (“Few people know how to age decorously”). With his customary wisdom and wit, he understood well how old age is less the result of a biological reality, than the by-product of a cultural and social construction. Each culture and society determines its age and rites of passage relative to specific life stages, but more importantly, this social construction influences and dictates how old people experience aging and are supposed to live it.  Modern society is plagued by a fear of old age and by a widespread, overwhelming ageism. Ageism is a very unusual and disquieting form of social discrimination: it is not directed against a different “other,” but against our future self, while also being one of the most socially condoned and institutionalized forms of prejudice. We also have a tendency to believe that different eras treated old age in different ways, but is this actually the case? Or aren’t we deceived into believing that “youth do not respect their elders anymore,” a prejudice actually as ancient as Plato’s Republic.

Early modern times generally seem to consider old people as wiser, more experienced, and morally superior to the youth. Enlightenment discourses and fictional works present a far less cohesive picture: while old people prevail in the production of discourses, slowly but steadily, the course of the 18th-century witnesses the rise and success of young authors and thinkers. How did this change occur? Was it widespread across cultures and languages, or were there national/regional variations? The objective of this panel is to reunite scholars working on age matters in the Enlightenment and open a wider conversation spanning early modern and Enlightenment epochs, across European nations and cultures.

Keywords: Childhood/Children/Youth, Cultural Studies, Europe, France/French, Gender/Sexuality Studies        

Anne Schroder New Scholars Session (sponsored by Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) [ID 53]
Chair: Laurel Peterson, Yale Center for British Art, laurel.peterson@yale.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

The Anne Schroder New Scholars Panel, sponsored by HECAA, seeks to promote scholarship that represents the future of eighteenth-century art and architectural studies. We invite proposals from advanced graduate students and early-career scholars working in the academy or museums. We welcome submissions that explore topics across the cultures, spaces, and materials that are related to art and architectural history globally over the long eighteenth century. We seek papers 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 encourage scholars from underrepresented communities, contingent or independent scholars, and those working outside of North America to apply.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Cultural Studies, Material Culture, Visual Culture/Studies

Anti-Sentimentalism [ID 143]
Chair: Laura Rosenthal, University of Maryland, lrosent1@umd.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The past few years have seen some excellent work on sentimentalism, noting in particular its entanglement with colonialism, race, and gender ideologies. This panel proposes to explore various forms of resistance to the sentimental in the eighteenth century. Are there ideas, people, things, groups, or places that could not be sentimentalized? What are the political valences of resistance to the sentimental? Proposals are invited that explore the limits of the sentimental: outright opposition; satire; philosophical objection; failure; political resistance, outrage, etc. Proposals welcome that engage any genre, geographical region, or language.

Keywords: Cultural Studies, History of Emotion

Artificial Intelligence: How Could its Use Enlighten, Enhance or Negatively Affect our Disciplines? (sponsored by the New Lights Forum) [ID 159]
Chair: Jennifer Vanderheyden, Marquette University, jennifer.vanderheyden@marquette.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

In their article “Embodiment in 18th Century Depictions of Human-Machine Co-Creativity,” authors Kantosalo, Falk and Jordanous outline the interactions between Artificial Intelligence and the creation of embodied systems in the long Eighteenth Century: “By the end of the Long Eighteenth-Century, speculations about AI had become commonplace, and the marvelous automata that had dazzled the European public had begun to lose their allure for an intellectual or scientific audience (Hankins and Silverman, 1999, 213–216). With her blockbuster novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley simultaneously revived public interest in AI and sent the discussion in a new direction. The myth of the rebellious superintelligence was born.” For example, Hankins and Silverman pose the question of agency, and whether a machine or other object could be responsible for creativity, or at the least, for co-creativity with an actual person through such embodied systems.

This interdisciplinary panel invites discussions of Artificial Intelligence and its connection with the Long Eighteenth Century in terms of ethical, moral or practical implications, such as how its use could enlighten, enhance or negatively affect our disciplines.

Keywords: Science

Authority in the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (sponsored by the Lessing Society) [ID 54]
Chair: Jonathan Fine, Brown University, jonathan_fine@brown.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The question of authority pervades Lessing’s writings: In his critical and aesthetic texts, Lessing constructs himself as an authority figure and tangles with various opponents. His theatrical works dramatize both how authority figures operate and how they are undermined. In his theological works, Lessing simultaneously operates from a position of authority and disavows the implications of that power. This panel welcomes papers that consider authority construed broadly across Lessing’s oeuvre.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• the rhetoric of authority

• authority figures in Lessing’s texts

• notions of amateurism/dilettantism and expertise

• power and tolerance

• gender and authority

Please include a short bio in the “notes” section of the submission form.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Gender/Sexuality Studies, German/Germany, Religion/Faith, Visual Culture/Studies

‘Bad’ Art of the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 109]
Chair: Katherine Iselin, Emporia State University, kiselin@emporia.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

What constitutes “bad” art? In art history, we often focus on surviving works that are unique or masterful in some way; works that epitomize the major interests of the period or works that exemplify the skill of the maker. But many other examples of art survive that do not qualify for any of these descriptions, or are perhaps even as far from them as possible. This panel looks to highlight these oft-forgotten pieces that occasionally sit in museum storage or private collections, hidden away from public eyes because they are considered unworthy of display. Yet we can learn much from such works: they can tell us a great deal of the levels of artistic production and appreciation, the accessibility of art to the non-elite, or artistic tastes outside the well-renowned. This panel seeks papers that examine works of art that might be construed as “bad” in some way, exploring their place within the history of art in the long eighteenth century. Papers might also consider the role of accessibility for the artist, patron, or owner, as well as how works may have been displayed or viewed during their initial creation and by later collectors or owners.

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

¡Basta ya! Citizen Protest in the Iberian Atlantic and Pacific Worlds (sponsored by the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) [ID 77]
Co-Chairs: Hazel Gold, Emory University, hgold@emory.edu; and Renee Gutiérrez, Longwood University, gutierrezar@longwood.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Well before the establishment of democratic regimes, citizen protests erupted during the long 18th century across Spain, Portugal, Spanish America and other territories within the Hispanophone and Lusophone spheres in Africa and Asia. These protests assumed multiple forms of dissidence, including economic boycotts, printed propaganda (letters, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, treatises), street protests, and other public displays of resistance. This panel invites interdisciplinary contributions that examine the phenomenon of Enlightenment-era protest in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds as registered in the work of historians, philosophers, politicians, theologians, literary authors, and artists of the period. Examples of protest articulated in other languages—Catalan, Galician, indigenous American and African languages—are also welcome. Topics might include rural and urban protests; commerce and protests; indigenous and peasant revolts; verbal and non-verbal forms of civil disorder; visual and/or musical representations of protest; satire and parody; organized and spontaneous violence; suppression of protests within and outside the legal system. What lessons might these popular protests impart to us in the 21st century, at a time of heightened unrest channeled through social and political protest movements?  

Keywords: Politics, Print Culture, Race and Empire, Visual Culture/Studies, Hispanophone and Lusophone spheres

Bodies of Thought: Re-conceptualizations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture [ID 130]
Chair: Dorothy Johnson, University of Iowa, dorothy-johnson@uiowa.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

The Enlightenment in Europe witnessed radical shifts in the representation of the human figure in art and visual culture from the Rococo period to Neoclassicism and Romanticism.  Transformations in the typology of the body in art can be best understood in the context of changing aesthetic, social, cultural, and political ideas and ideals that inflected the eighteenth century.  The rise in prominence and prestige of the natural sciences during this period, which interrogated human origins and evolution, corporeal structures, biological, physiological, social and cultural identity and behavior, were ineluctably intertwined with artistic transformations in style and meaning. 

This panel invites papers that investigate the new meanings that accrued to the body as sign and signifier of cultural evolutions and revolutions.           

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, History/Historiography

Bridgerton and Beyond: The Eighteenth Century in a Golden Age of Television [ID 121]
Co-Chairs: Ellen Ledoux, Rutgers University-Camden, eledoux@rutgers.edu; and Sarah Hagelin, University of Colorado-Denver, SARAH.HAGELIN@UCDENVER.EDU

Weekend: March 28/29

Although critics quibble about the dates, the advent of “Prestige TV” in the early 2000s has led to a surprising number of recent popular and/or critically acclaimed series set in the long eighteenth century. While Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte (Netflix) immediately come to mind, many other comedies and dramas have chosen the global eighteenth century as a setting intended to entice viewers in today’s increasingly competitive streaming universe. These include Our Flag Means Death (HBO Max), Harlots (Hulu), Franklin (Apple TV+) and Renegade Nell (Disney+) among several others. How historically accurate are these series? Does it matter? In what ways have they attempted to reshape narratives about the eighteenth century as they relate to race, gender, sexuality, and social class? What does the current fascination about the eighteenth century reveal about contemporary cultural anxieties? Do eighteenth-century settings and characters work to assuage twenty-first-century fears abounding during a time of racial reckoning, a global pandemic, and worldwide threats to democracy? Do these series offer important content that can be useful in the classroom? In short, this panel will investigate if these series are doing vital cultural work that extends beyond their status as a “guilty pleasure.”    

Keywords: Aesthetics, Film/Television/Media, Gender/Sexuality Studies, History/Historiography, Race and Empire      

Burneys and Dis/ability (sponsored by Burney Society North America) [ID 16]
Chair: Linda Zionkowski, Ohio University, zionkows@ohio.edu; and Misty Krueger, University of Maine at Farmington, misty.krueger@maine.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This session will focus on the Burney family’s experience of and portrayal of disability. Papers may investigate the Burneys’ reaction to the social norms that defined and constructed disability in their culture; their understanding of disability’s intersection with concepts of gender, race, ethnicity, and class; their artistic and textual representations of people with disabilities; and their personal struggles with being rendered disabled.  We encourage papers from a variety of disciplines, including humanities, arts, and medicine.

Keywords: Britain/England, Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, Health and Medicine

Cultural Influences and Digital Humanities: How can Digital Tools Help Us Identify and Measure the Exchange of Ideas in the 18th Century? [ID 120] 
Chair: Glenn Roe, Sorbonne University, glennroe@gmail.com

Weekend: April 4/5

The eighteenth century is known as a period of profound theoretical revolutions. While still influenced by classical and Christian ideas, artists and thinkers proposed new political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories in response to the significant social and technological upheavals of the era. The explosion of printing and the newfound ease of commercial and personal exchanges between countries fostered a national and international network of intellectual influences. In this network, literary works and philosophical, political, and economic systems of both the present and the past engage with each other, giving rise to new original syntheses.

Although scholars have already made efforts to reconstruct these mutual relationships, new digital tools now enable us to investigate this phenomenon more deeply by leveraging the vast availability of digitized and analyzable corpora of texts, archival documents, private correspondences, and more. How do computational methods help us measure the influence of an author or a thought, its dissemination, and its success? What are the most appropriate digital techniques to investigate this phenomenon? What epistemological and practical obstacles might arise? How can we reconstruct and model possible relationships between subjects?

This panel aims to consider the criteria for identifying the paths of circulation of ideas, concepts, and texts in the eighteenth century through various case studies and broader theoretical reflection, thus attempting to understand how digital humanities can prove useful in assessing their impact on the creation of a common culture during this pivotal period.

Keywords: Author/Authorship, Digital Humanities, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Print Culture, Influence

Data Feminism and Feminist Data (sponsored by the Women’s Caucus) [ID 84]
Chair: Kate Moffatt, Simon Fraser University,  klmoffat@sfu.ca.

Weekend: March 28/29

In Data Feminism (2020), Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein define data feminism as “a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought” (8). Taking inspiration from D’Ignazio and Klein’s work, this panel asks contributors to meditate on how we encounter and define eighteenth-century (feminist) data and (feminist) data about the eighteenth century. How is data feminist? How can data feminism help in our readings of the period? Conversations might focus on: categorization, identities, absences, affect, fabulations, and infrastructure.

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory, Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities, Gender/Sexuality Studies

Disability and the Environment (sponsored by the Disability Studies Caucus) [ID 55]
Co-chairs: Paul Kelleher, Emory University, pkelleh@emory.edu; and Lesley Thulin (UCLA) lthulin@g.ucla.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel welcomes papers that investigate disability’s relationship to the environment, broadly construed. How do the natural and/or built environments of the eighteenth century shape our understanding of physical and cognitive disability and chronic illness, and vice versa?

Papers may examine disability’s entanglement with eighteenth-century articulations of “the environment” within the natural sciences, cartography, aesthetics, and literature, as well as environments like medical institutions and asylums, the British colonies, the plantation complex, the industrial workplace, the enclosed countryside, and rapidly growing cities.

Please include a short bio in the “notes” section on the submission form.
Keywords: Britain/British/England/English, Disability Studies, Health and Medicine, Race and Empire, Visual Culture/Studies

Eighteenth-Century Cats! [ID 68]
Chair: Taylin Nelson, ASECS Graduate and Early Career Caucus, Rice University, tpn2@rice.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

What is an Internet-based conference without addressing the Internet’s favorite topic: cats!? This panel seeks papers interested in exploring eighteenth-century cats in their many facets and figurations. Cats abound during this period: from big cats in the natural histories, moralizing cats in fables and children’s stories, mysterious and symbolic cats in the art of Fragonard or Chardin, to real-life cats in the lives of Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole.

Cats posed a challenge to Enlightenment thinking and represented diverse modes of existence during the period. It was Rousseau who claimed “the cat, enemy of all constraint, [a]s useful for characterising liberty.” From cultural perspectives, cats could represent a variety of topics, such as: domesticated pets, objects of torture, experimentation, and amusement, materially useful mousers, symbolic free agents, as street food, muses of philosophy and poetry, or dangerous predators from the “New World.” This open-ended panel challenges panelists to tackle topics such as, but not limited to:

• Cats and Gender (associations with women and children, old maid tropes, sexuality and fertility, female subjectivity/objectivity)
• Cats and revolution (liberty, slavery, obedience, domestication, freedom versus torture)
• Cats and labor (skills, jobs, use-value, luxury versus labor, class)
• Cats and Science (vivisection and other experiments such as Lunardi’s balloon flight)
• Cats and the Atlantic World (predators, mousers on ships, posing threats/aids to colonists)
• Cats as vermin (massacres or street clearings)
• Thomas Gray’s On the Death of a Favourite Cat and any other artistic iterations of the poem
• Cats in fables (morality, education, kindness, pain, religion, transmutation)
• Author cats (Walpole, Johnson, Christopher Smart, and so on)

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Childhood/Children/Youth, Cultural Studies, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Material Culture

Eighteenth-Century Heritage Repertoires and the Decolonizing Mandate [ID 142]
Co-Chairs: Caroline Gleason-Mercer, Northwestern University, caroline.gleasonmercier@northwestern.edu; and Keary Watts, k.watts@northwestern.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Historical repertoires of the long eighteenth century (1650-1830), including those from theatre, opera, dance, material culture, and quotidian social practices, absorbed and enacted the profound contradictions of slavery, capitalism, imperialism, ethnic conflict, environmental change, and a host of other hegemonic discourses. Sometimes a “decolonizing” critique is already at the forefront of these historical repertoires, offering a critique of (or counter-position to) the values and consequences, human costs, and mores of multi-vectoral colonialism. For example, Handel’s Tamerlano (1719) challenges orientalist stereotypes of Sultanic despotism. And sometimes, a creative work’s engagement with “decolonizing” strategies occurs through contemporary intervention to recode elements for performance like Against the Grain Theatre’s 2020 production of Messiah/Complex. This panel seeks papers from scholars and theatre-makers that discuss reperforming eighteenth-century repertoires in the twenty-first century with an eye toward issues of decoloniality. How does performance reactivate eighteenth-century repertoires to signify through and against legacies of colonialism, serving to resonate with current injustices and foster subaltern perspectives in the twenty-first century? Accepted papers will also be invited to submit their work to an edited collection on decolonizing heritage repertoires.

Keywords: Culture/Globalization, Disability Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Music, Performance

Embodiment, Action and Interactions in the German Eighteenth-century [ID 75]
Co-Chairs: Grazia Pulvirenti, Warburg Institute, grapulvir@gmail.com, Paola Del Zoppo, University Urbino, paola.delzoppo@uniurb.it 

Discussant: Renata Gambino, University of Catania, renatagambino@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

Recent studies in the neurocognitive sciences have acknowledged the theory of 4E cognition as the most promising epistemological framework for cognitive literary studies. The term 4E cognition was initially coined by Shaun Gallagher and has evolved over the past two decades, building on the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to explore the nature of the mind as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Cognition is not confined solely to the mind but takes place through diverse processes and structures that involve the body, the environment, actions, and extensions beyond the boundaries of the brain.

This turn has introduced new epistemological paradigms concerning cognition and the significant role of human relationships and interactions in shaping knowledge and intersubjectivity. The importance of bodily interaction has been emphasized by Vittorio Gallese and Ugo Morelli in their recently published study titled “”What Does It Mean to Be Human? Body, Brain, and Relationships for Living in the Present.”” (Milano, Raffello Cortina, 2024).

Building on the premises of the 4E Cognition paradigm and of Gallese’s concept of intersubjectivity, this panel aims to explore the themes of action and interaction. We will examine how the concept of bodily involvement and its interactions with other bodies has been a foundational idea in anthropological, aesthetic, and scientific discourses since the German eighteenth century, during which a new holistic concept of the “Ganzer Mensch” (Whole Man) emerged. By revisiting these historical perspectives, the panel seeks to bridge contemporary neurocognitive research with historical and cultural understandings of human cognition, emotions and interaction.”      

Keywords: Cognitive Sciences

Empiricism and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination: Hume’s Skepticism [ID 144]
Chair: Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine, elizabeth.neiman@maine.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

From Locke onward, moral philosophers turned the experiential methods introduced by Francis Bacon to the new “science of man.” Locke’s identification of memory as central to sense-based perceptions sparked an evolving conversation about the role that human imagination plays in knowledge construction. This panel focuses on this conversation, and in light of recent and competing reassessments of David Hume’s famous skepticism about the limits of human knowledge in A Treatise of Human Nature (e.g. Donald Ainslie 2015, Jacquelyn Taylor 2015; Rocknak 2012). Papers should draw from Hume studies so as to provide new perspectives on how writers over the long-eighteenth century further develop, rethink, reorient, dissent from, or otherwise engage Hume’s reflections on such topics as (but not necessarily limited to) self-knowledge, the self/other relationship, memory, sympathy, reason, the imagination, and the passions. How might new insights in Hume studies enhance or redirect conversational turns in eighteenth-century studies today?

Keyword: Philosophy

Forms and Meanings: *Poesis* as the Making of Books and Poems in the Productions of Alexander Pope [ID 105]
Chair: Michael Suarez, University of Virginia, michael.suarez@virginia.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

For Pope, poesis was most often a bivalent endeavor: making poems and making books were inextricably linked. Hence, Pope was attentive to all aspects of his text, at all its stages.  The 1717 *Works* the most obvious case in point, exemplifies the pattern and practice of virtually every stage of Pope’s career. A few examples confirm this truth. The first work we have, the manuscript of the Pastorals (c.1704–6) is a carefully designed booklet modeled on a printed book, with none of the freedom of embellishment a manuscript would permit, despite the fact that it was intended for manuscript circulation. The only surviving proof sheets marked by Pope, from the quarto and folio Iliad (now in the Arsenal, Paris) show, in addition to some late substantive changes, numerous alterations to so-called ‘accidentals’: capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.  The manuscript of An Essay on Criticism provides us with probably the sole example of surviving printer’s copy from Pope’s publications. Pope provides a print-imitation of the dropped-head and initial capital, and the text is marked up for italics. He instructed the printer John Watts, how to lay out the text. ‘End the first page here’, he wrote, and ‘Leave the space of a line blank here’. Attending to the relationships between forms and meanings in Pope’s writings, papers in this session will discuss how Pope’s attention to book-making and mise-en-page influence how we might best read, interpret, and/or edit Pope’s writings. Papers might engage with posthumous editions (viz., Warburton, Elwin & Courthope, Twickenham); with theories of reading, bibliography, book history, and/or scholarly editing; or with the digital (or C21 print) delivery of Pope’s multivalent and deeply resonant texts.

Keywords: Author/Authorship, Books/Publishing, Britain/England, Editing, Print Culture

France-Asia (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies) [ID: 69]
Chair: Jennifer Tsien, jst8e@virginia.edu, University of Virginia

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites reflections on the exchanges between France and Asia in the long eighteenth century. Speakers are invited to engage with the role of mediation in the philosophes’ engagement with Asia. French gens de lettres often relied on Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of China and its history, for example. In what ways did writers’ use of secondhand knowledge create an “imaginary” of Asia? How do the exchanges between France and Asia give shape to contested notions of “civilization” and ”empire”? We seek to spotlight lesser-known figures such as Arcade Huang, who was the creator of the first French-Chinese dictionary, in addition to canonical French writers’  representations of Asia, such as the ones found in Voltaire’s plays and dialogues. 

We invite papers that approach the France-Asia connection through a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words.

Keywords: France/French

Fun with Educational Games: Their Development and Importance in the Long 18th Century [ID 147]
Co-chairs: Ilaria Ampollini, Università degli Studi di Milano ilaria.ampollini@unimi.it, and Jan Blaschak, Wayne State University, eb7549@wayne.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

If you want to learn something, have fun with it. If you want to teach something, make it fun. We now know enough about our neurology to understand that our long-standing impulse to include play in the educational process is both insightful and effective. Authors such as Ellenor Fenn, as well as her London publishers John Marshall and John Newbery were some of the first to take that impulse and make educational games. Earlier the Carving Cards, the Arithmetical Cards and the Mechanics and Geometry Cards by James and Joseph Moxon could be used both to play and to learn about the respective subjects. This panel will investigate the development of educational games throughout the long 18th century, from pedagogical and marketing perspectives as well as other impacts. The session will focus on educational games by exploring their creators (some of whom were teachers) and publishers, the audiences to which they were addressed, and the places (i.e., homes, schools, instrument makers’ shops) where they circulated. Particular attention will be paid to the materiality of these wonderful educational tools, the practices they involved and the visual representations they conveyed. Here are some possible approaches:

• Connections to contemporary marketing practices, authorial impact, and agency
• How games embodied and developed contemporary ideas of cognitive development, (working from our discussions in last year’s “Enacting Education” panel)
• How games embodied and developed contemporary pedagogical ideas and practices
• Connections to specific author’s development or marketing success
• Connections to the development of specific tropes/genres and illustrations in children’s literature
• Connections to the development of English grammar and its teaching
• Connections to the circulation of scientific knowledge, its teaching, and its visual representation 

Keywords: Authors/Authorship, Books, Children/Childhood/Youth, Games, Pedagogy, Print Culture, Visual Culture

Gifts from Flowers: Pollen, Fruit, Honey, Vegetables, Bouquets, Ceremonies, and More (South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) [ID 83]
Chair: Kevin Cope, Louisiana State University, encope@lsu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Floral elements abound in long eighteenth-century culture. Still life paintings include or feature flowers; speculators plunge into the tulip market; posies and bouquets ornament every ceremony. Scientific concern for flowers reached a high pitch, whether in Thomas Jefferson’s pea-breeding program or among the growing ranks of botanical illustrators. Poets from John Philips to William Cowper celebrated all the members of the blooming tribe; travelers, fiction writers, and even musicians encounter or deploy the denizens of the vase. This panel is open to papers on all aspects of flower culture and activity, whether flowers themselves in art, literature, science, or philosophy or whether flowers as producers or sources of other cherished materials, whether the fruits and vegetables that swell from the bloom or the sweetening honey that competed with new-world sugar or even the icons that adorn heraldic devices. Papers from all disciplines, whether art history or botany or literature, are welcome.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Cultural Studies, Europe, North America, Visual Culture/Studies

Iconic 18th-Century Characters on Page and Stage [ID 125]
Chair: Veronica Litt, Cape Breton University, veronica_litt@cbu.ca, veronicalitt@gmail.com; and Nevena Martinovic, Queens University (nm91@queensu.ca; nevenamartinovic2014@gmail.com)

Weekend: April 4/5

Inspired by ASECS 2024’s staged reading of George Colman the Elder’s Polly Honeycombe (1760) and its charming eponymous lead, this panel explores literary characters who resonated with audiences to such a degree that they took on lives of their own, provoking additional narratives and paratheatrical/textual materials.

Papers may discuss characters like Polly Peachum of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Tony Lumpkin of She Stoops to Conquer (1773), both of whom were so popular as to inspire sequels: Polly (1729) and Tony Lumpkin in Town (1778). Alternatively, presentations may explore the experiences of actors whose trademark characters subsumed their public personas such as Mary Robinson, whose nickname Perdita emerged from her portrayal of the heroine in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611).

While this panel focuses on the eighteenth century, the period’s fascination with expanding beloved characters’ narratives continues to the present day. Every decade of new media brings new adaptations of canonical novels, genre-bent remakes of past favourites, or prequels explaining villains’ origin stories. What can the eighteenth century tell us about contemporary audiences’ desires and requirements regarding iconic characters? If we do not dismiss these reprisals and renovations as audience pandering and capitalism’s dearth of creativity, what might we uncover?

Keywords: Books/Publishing, Cultural Studies, Performance, Print Culture, Visual Culture/Studies

Hygge: The Visual and Material Culture of Coziness and Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century [ID 150]
Chair: Kaitlin Grimes, Flagler College, KGrimes@flagler.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Hygge, a Dano-Norwegian word, evokes the notions of comfortability and coziness that comes from the creation of a relaxing environment with specific creature comforts. Think of thick socks, a warm and fluffy blanket, a soft fire, a lovely cup filled with tea, and a good book all of which illustrate the simple and quiet pleasures of life away from the outside world. As we conference remotely, let us think about how those in the eighteenth century brought themselves comfort, both in childhood and adulthood. How did they create a cozy environment at home after a long day? What material objects did they turn to during the cold winters or the hot summers? And how was this idea depicted in eighteenth-century visual culture? Potential topics for this panel could include: blankets/textiles, fireplaces, tea and or coffee sets/services, beds/furniture, books (as a physical object), clothing, foodstuffs, children’s toy, interior decoration, family traditions, etc. This panel invites papers from all disciplines and as well as papers outside the potential topics listed above. Please submit an abstract of 250 words.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture, Material Culture, Visual Culture

Justice, Equality and Fairness in the Francophone Eighteenth Century [ID 127]
Co-Chairs: Masano Yamashita, University of Colorado Boulder, masano.yamashita@colorado.edu, Yann Robert, University of Illinois Chicago, yrobert@uic.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Historians such as Tyler Stovall and Darrin McMahon have recently pointed to the emergence of universalist discourses on equality in a time of chattel slavery. This panel invites contributions that examine the multifaceted components of equality in the French-speaking eighteenth century. Looking to the traditions of moral equality and innovations in legal equality, we encourage papers that track the evolution in definitions of equality (for instance, égalité de droit vs égalité de fait) and the reimagining of a commons. Legislators, writers and moralists reflected on possible remedies to problems of injustice: some debated the role that charity could play in alleviating challenges faced by those lacking resources, while others sought to replace private charity with robust government reforms that could ensure greater equality through plans of redistributive justice.

Problems of justice were also linked to careful attempts in differentiating various types of poverty: the undeserving poor were considered distinct from the able-bodied and “idle” poor.  We are interested in papers that explore topoi of bienfaisance, religious alms, the aristocratic culture of conspicuous donation, Enlightenment notions of compassion, and the role of equality in the French Revolution.

We welcome approaches from all disciplines, including but not limited to literature, history, philosophy, art history, and legal studies.

Papers in French or English are welcome.

Keywords: Atlantic World, Economy, France/French, History, Politics

Land as Method [Society of Early Americanists] [ID 72]
Chair: Katarina O’Briain, York University, kobriain@yorku.ca

Weekend: April 4-5

“Property by itself,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is subject to use and consumption and therefore diminishes constantly. The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.” Drawn from Arendt’s discussion of Thomas Hobbes and late-seventeenth-century political philosophy, these lines describe a prominent mode of extractive thinking that continues to make its presence felt strongly today. But what other modes of thinking about or relating to the land exist across the long eighteenth century, and what sorts of methods might allow eighteenth-century scholars to trace alternate affective relations to land in the period? How might eighteenth-century studies learn from the work of Indigenous anticolonialism, which, Glen Coulthard writes, “is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land — a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms”? In addition, how might eighteenth-century studies learn from the work of scholars like Katherine McKittrick and Kathryn Yusoff in Black studies, who urge us to see how Black geographies can extend sites of fugitive opposition to slavery? And what are the responsibilities and limitations to thinking about such questions in the context of an academic conference which this year will be convened online? These questions are meant to be taken broadly as invitations to consider what it means to think about land and method — and land as something other than property or possession — in the long eighteenth century.

Keywords: Black Atlantic, Culture/Globalization, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies

‘Local’ Culture and Resistance in the Long-Eighteenth Century World [ID 123]
Chair: Harvey Shepherd, The Courtauld Institute of Art, hshepherd@courtauld.ac.uk, harveyshepherd@hotmail.co.uk

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites proposals from scholars studying ‘local’ culture as both a site and a tool of active resistance to conquest and cultural assimilation during the long-eighteenth century. The period of 1660-1830 is characterised by the emergence of national identities both in Europe and beyond, and the increase of colonial activity around the globe. These macrohistorical trends resulted in part from many understudied instances of interaction and erasure occurring at a regional level, often in border territories, coastlines, and newly-conquered areas. This discussion aims to complicate the distinction between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ histories of the eighteenth century by considering ‘the local’ as a sphere of resistance to the emergent globalisation of the early modern period. Panellists will consider the ways in which markers of ‘local’ cultural distinction – present in material and visual cultures, linguistics, writing, religious beliefs, or other expressions of identity – were mobilised as active tools of resistance to colonisation or the formation of modern nation states. In addition to considering the stakes involved in utilising ‘local’ identity as a form of resistance, the question of what constitutes our understanding of the term ‘local’ in the eighteenth century is itself a subject which presenters may choose to focus on.

 The panel welcomes submissions from scholars working in all areas of the humanities, and aims to stimulate conversation across disciplinary distinctions. Similarly, the discussion is not limited to any one geographical space, and papers are invited which examine any aspect of ‘local’ cultural resistance occurring across the eighteenth-century world.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Cultural Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies, Material Culture, Race and Empire

Mozart’s Operas on the Global Stage (sponsored by the Mozart Society of America) [ID 59]
Chair: Lily Kass, Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, lkass1@jhu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

From Don Giovanni in Mexico City in 1827, to Pamina Devi, a 2007 Cambodian-American adaptation of The Magic Flute, to a 2019 Rome production of Idomeneo featuring refugees from across the Mediterranean among the supernumeraries, the phenomenon of Mozart’s operas on the global stage is of increasing interest to scholars of Mozart reception and transnational opera studies. Productions range from traditionalist to translated to radically reimagined; yet all “unsettle” (Levin 2010) Mozart and his music through their complex negotiations of local, national, and transnational politics and poetics. Memory, identity, and genre are frequently at play in such operatic interventions, offering new perspectives on the composer’s legendary characters and melodies and troubling claims for Mozart’s “universality.”

This session will explore Mozart’s operas in production, translation, and adaptation outside the countries and languages of their premieres, with special focus on the Global South. We welcome papers that consider case studies in transnational and transcultural approaches to text, character, plot, instrumentation, production, vocal style, reception, etc., as well as their implications for operatic cosmopolitanism, nationalism, imperialism, exoticism, and hybridity.

Keywords: Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Music, Performance, Translation, Mozart

Music and Medicine in Britain (sponsored by the North American British Music Studies Association [NABMSA]) [ID 90]
Chair: Lidia Chang, Colorado College, lchang2023@coloradocollege.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites papers that explore the confluence of musical culture and medical knowledge in Britain during the long eighteenth century, considering the ways in which music theory and praxis were often intertwined with medical practices, theories, and cultural perceptions of health and illness during this period. This panel seeks proposals that illuminate the multifaceted connections between eighteenth-century British musical culture and understanding of the body, and consider how the interplay between these fields shaped contemporary understandings of both health and art, inviting reflections on the enduring impact of these early interactions on modern medical and musical practices.

Keywords: Britain/British/England/English, Cultural Studies, Music, Health and Medicine, Performance

Navigating Oceania in the Eighteenth Century: Exploration, Encounter, and Exchange [ID 66]     
Chair: Stan Booth, University of Winchester, stan.booth@winchester.ac.uk

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel aims to explore the rich tapestry of exploration, encounter, and exchange in Oceania during the eighteenth century. The vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, known as Oceania, was a vibrant crossroads of indigenous cultures and European expeditions, fostering dynamic interactions that reshaped the region’s historical trajectory. By examining these interactions, this panel seeks to illuminate the complexities and nuances of Oceania’s eighteenth-century history. Topics could include the mapping of Oceania and navigation, indigenous perspectives and responses to European contact, cultural exchange, transformation of societies, trade, politics and Empire amongst the many areas that will hopefully be discussed. By bringing together these diverse perspectives, the panel will provide a comprehensive and multi-faceted exploration of Oceania in the eighteenth century. It aims to foster a deeper understanding of the historical processes that shaped the region and to highlight the significance of Oceania in the global historical narrative of the eighteenth century.

Keywords: Britain/England, Cultural Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies, Race and Empire   

New Approaches to Rape Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 110]
Co-Chairs: Jolene Zigarovich, University of Northern Iowa, jzigarov@gmail.com, Doreen Thierauf, North Carolina Wesleyan University, dthierauf@ncwu.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

To reflect new strategies of addressing rape, this panel seeks to bring together writing by scholars of art, literature, history, feminist studies, and legal studies to engage current movements against sexual violence and assess how we approach gender-based violence in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Moving beyond the legal implications of Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale’s claim that rape was a charge ‘easily to be made and hard to be proved’, a context detailed at length by Gregory Durston (JECS 2005;2006), we invite contributions that consider rape from feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer perspectives with the goal to foster solidarity and transform the analysis of sexual violence in eighteenth-century studies. 

The wide circulation of the #MeToo movement in online spaces since 2017 has renewed scholarly interest in eighteenth-century sexual violence and leads us to call for revisions of older methodological approaches. We take our cue from Erin Spampinato who, writing in differences (2021), deprioritizes ‘adjudicative’ methods of approaching rape in literature—that is, scholars’ legalistic weighing of characters’ motivation and criminal conduct. Supporting Spampinato’s wider definition of rape, the panel chairs particularly welcome talks on gender-based violence in nonheterosexual, queer, colonial, and working-class contexts to destabilize traditional critical approaches that center literary and historical representations of middle-class heterosexual violence.

Keywords: Britain/England, Gender/Sexuality Studies, History/Historiography                    

New Perspectives on Maria von Herbert’s 1791-94 Correspondence with Immanuel Kant [ID 111]
Chair: Trip McCrossin, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, trip@mccrossin.org

Weekend: April 4/5

Maria von Herbert’s 1791-94 correspondence with Immanuel Kant—arising out of her despair and suicidal ideation, coupled with her commitment to his philosophical perspective, including his famously uncompromising prohibition of suicide—has enjoyed increasingly careful attention in the roughly forty years now since Beverley Brown and Rae Langton’s invitations to this effect, in the mid-eighties and early-nineties—most recently as the subject of the annual Kant Reading Party at the University of St Andrews, in July and August of 2023, out of which a volume of new translations and critical materials will soon emerge. Von Herbert and Kant’s struggle is fascinating for occurring in the first place, for its ongoing substance, and for its eventual “healthy soul” resolution. It is also, epistolary in nature, never intended for public consumption, not a little challenging to interpret. Hence the four decades of increasingly careful attention it has enjoyed. On the eve of the fifth, the proposed session would both take stock and look forward, evaluate existing perspectives and explore new ones, not only from the point of the history of philosophy, including the history of women philosophers, but from a more broadly historical point of view, including an essential backdrop, which is the social and political history of suicide in the eighteenth century.     

Keywords: Economy, History/Historiography, Philosophy, Politics, Religion/Faith, Suicide, Women, Morality                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Novel Humor and Humorous Novels [North West Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (NWSECS)] [ID 153]
Chair: Marvin Lansverk, Montana State University, emeritus, Lansverk@montana.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

What humor was and what it became were constantly evolving throughout our period, eventually with specific cultural associations of certain types with the English language, temperament, and character. This panel explores the changes in understanding, theorizing, and enacting humor in the English novel in the long eighteenth-century. Comparative approaches, applications of modern theory, examinations of eighteenth-century understandings of humor, are all welcome in this wide ranging panel.

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory, Cultural Studies

‘Over The Hills and Far Away’: Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer Through Space and Time [ID 103]
Co-Chairs: Jason Shaffer, US Naval Academy, tshaffer@usna.edu, Caitlin Hubbard, Yale University, caitlin.hubbard@yale.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The year 2024-25 celebrates the 220th anniversary of Irish playwright George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer debuting on the London stage. Premiering in a time of Continental great-powers warfare and written by a veteran of the British military recruiting effort, the play has proven at least as popular outside the metropole as it did within it over the subsequent years. Set in Shrewsbury and featuring the still-evolving technology of moving scenery, The Recruiting Officer provided a “provincial” experience to London audiences, the British Isles writ large, and Britain’s far-flung colonies. Herein the British metropole is conjured and constituted–to paraphrase Kathleen Wilson–by the provinces it mocks.

The play has proven more agile than other Restoration comedies, finding great success in the North American colonies as well as the Caribbean, and also becoming the first play staged in Australia–a production depicted in Brendan Keneally’s novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good. Never losing context in eras adjacent to global warfare, the play was adapted after World War II by Bertolt Brecht and has also since seen several new editions and revivals.

This panel invites any paper that wishes to discuss The Recruiting Officer or its adaptations, with a particular emphasis on the remarkable reach across space and time displayed by this play as both a unique cultural object and as part of a set of genres (C18 British plays, Restoration comedies, war literature) that ebb and flow in popularity with time and the geopolitical environment of the Anglophone world (and occasionally beyond).         

Keywords: Atlantic World, Britain/England, Performance       

Paradoxes and the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 148]
Chair: Kaushik Tekur, Binghamton University, ktekurv1@binghamton.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel aims to address the role that ‘paradox’ plays in our understanding of the eighteenth century. From Kant’s antinomy, to Hegel’s dialectics, to Marx’s dialectical materialism, to Derrida’s différance, to Spivak’s planetarity, paradox has continued to play various roles in ‘modern’ thought. The eighteenth century specifically serves as a unique ground to study the implications of containing difference – often unsuccessfully – through various modes such as periodization, literary forms, identity, and academic disciplines, among others. Scholars of the eighteenth century have deftly employed the many iterations of paradox within critical and literary theory to better understand the period and its peoples. As Elizabeth S. Anker notes, contradictions, aporia, ambiguity, opacity, singularity, complexity, irony, and dialectics – above all, have become ubiquitous tools of critical scholarship in the last few decades, if not centuries.

Different versions of the paradox have been crucial to our scholarship of this period and in understanding the dynamics of gender, race, class, and the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ itself. Focusing on different paradoxes we identify in the eighteenth century, and the deployment of paradox in our own reading methods of the period, the panel invites abstracts addressing but not limited to:

1. The ways in which we see the eighteenth century itself grapple with its emerging paradoxes
2. How the cultural texts and conversations of the period fashion and deal with paradoxes
3. What the affordances and limitations of paradox being central to our various scholarly approaches to the period are

Keywords: Class, Critical Theory/Theory, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, Race and Empire

Plants and Revolution [ID 107]
Co-Chairs: Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, batsakiy@doaks.org; Romita Ray, Syracuse University, rray@syr.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The eighteenth century saw a revolution in plant-human relationships fueled by the vast increase in the circulation of specimens and plant commodities, the application of Linnaean taxonomy, the invention of new transportation technologies, and the expansion of the plantation system. These practices rendered plants inert, transferable, and scalable in ways that transformed ecosystems and communities at unprecedented scale. Worn (cotton), imbibed (tobacco), eaten (sugar), and drunk (tea, coffee, and chocolate), plants constructed sensory and sentient worlds. The period also saw the beginning of the romance of coal: the adoption of fossil fuels—photosynthetic energy stored through geological processes that spanned millions of years—to power the Industrial Revolution. In keeping with the current historical interest in more-than-human agents, and the “plant turn” in the humanities, this panel welcomes papers that explore eighteenth-century intellectual, social, visual, material, and political transformations through the lens of plants. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

—Linnaean taxonomy and its applications

—Plantation narratives of resilience and resistance

—Horticultural experimentation and transformation

—Plants in political discourse and plants as political agents

—Race and gender in botanical education

—Plants in visual and material culture”        

Keywords: Plants, Classification, Revolution

                                                                                                                                                                             

Polemics, Press, and Taking Things Personally [ID 133]
Chair: Sarah PHILLIPS, Sorbonne Université/the Voltaire Foundation (University of Oxford), sarahleannephillips@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

“Si l’on n’est pas sensible, on n’est jamais sublime.” This aphorism, frequently attributed to Voltaire, originates from the award-winning poem, Le Poète, written by the French journalist Jean-François de La Harpe. Voltaire quotes this line back to the future editor of the Mercure in a letter addressed to him in 1766.

The quote may be seen to reflect Voltaire’s own complex relationship with the press and his acute sensitivity to public criticism. Voltaire’s volatile behaviour toward journalists highlights broader themes of personal engagement with and sensitivity to public commentary in the eighteenth century. The period saw a dramatic expansion in print culture, with newspapers and periodicals becoming central to public discourse. Authors faced unprecedented levels of scrutiny, and their responses to criticism influenced their work and public personas.

This panel aims to explore the intersection of literary criticism, personal sensitivity and the press in the long eighteenth century. We invite scholars to investigate how authors from France, Britain, and beyond engaged with and responded to critiques in the press. Topics may include the development and impact of newspapers and periodicals, the role of literary critics, case studies of individual authors’ reactions to criticism, and the broader cultural implications of personal sensitivity to public critique.

We welcome submissions from postgraduate students, early career scholars, and established academics. The panel will consist of 20-30 minute presentations and aims to provide a detailed understanding of the personal dimensions of literary criticism and press interactions during the eighteenth century.

Keywords: Print Culture, Other (specify below)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Popular Science in Eighteenth-Century London: Enlightenment, Entertainment, Education, and Dissent [ID 65]
Chair: Chris Mounsey, University of Winchester, chris.mounsey@winchester.ac.uk

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel will investigate the vibrant world of popular science in eighteenth-century London, a period marked by the flourishing of public interest in scientific inquiry and discovery. It will explore how science became an integral part of the cultural and intellectual fabric of London, intersecting with enlightenment ideals, entertainment, education, and religious dissent. By examining various facets of popular science, this panel aims to shed light on the ways in which science was communicated to and consumed by the public during this transformative era, including the complex relationship between science and religion. Suggested topics for inclusion could be Public lectures and demonstrations, scientific societies, the role of print culture in popularizing science, the various roles of women and the roles of religion and dissent as potential topics among many others that permeated this exciting period of discovery. By bringing together these diverse perspectives, the panel will provide a comprehensive overview of the landscape of popular science in eighteenth-century London. It aims to foster a deeper understanding of how science was woven into the cultural, social, and religious fabric of the period, highlighting the interplay between enlightenment, entertainment, education, and dissent, and the enduring legacy of this vibrant scientific culture.    

Keywords: Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Print Culture, Religion/Faith, Science                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Representations of Eighteenth-Century Natural Disasters [ID 47]
Chair: Pamela Phillips, University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras, pamela.phillips1@upr.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 was one of the many natural disasters that rocked the eighteenth century. Previous tremors were felt in 1700 in the Pacific Northwest, and the streets of London shook in 1750. Mount Vesuvius erupted six times over the course of the century, and the intensity of the 1780 Great Hurricane probably reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Writers documented the real events in fiction and non-fiction genres, and some were inspired to invent imaginary disasters. The visual arts recorded the events, which also left their mark on the history of music. The representation of natural disasters in different artistic mediums offers insight into the exploration and explication of the calamities. In addition to generating an active spiritual and secular dialogue, eighteenth-century natural disasters also shaped national narratives. The eighteenth-century representation and response to natural disasters is an essential chapter in environmental history and the current reflection on climate concerns.

This panel invites papers that examine the different dimensions of the investigation of eighteenth-century natural disasters. Case studies on different geographies and varied forms of cultural expression will create a broad comparative framework to enrich the dialogue between eighteenth-century studies and environmental/disaster studies.

Please submit 250-word abstracts and include a bio in the “notes” section.

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Visual Culture/Studies, Literature, Natural disasters

Revolutionary Agendas [ID 139]
Co-Chairs: Mark Boonshoft, VMI, markboonshoft@gmail.com, Robert Paulett, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, rpaulet@siue.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This session will lay the groundwork for establishing an interest group in ASECS on 18th Century Revolutions. The co-chairs – a more traditional political historian and an ethnohistorian with a background in archaeology and material culture studies – aim to bring together distant corners of the field in this series of interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse panels. 

Interested scholars are invited to apply to one of the two main areas of this series:

• New Directions, featuring early career scholars working on both the traditional North-Atlantic Age of Revolutions and the Global South/Pacific worlds, which have been comparatively understudied
• State of the Field, featuring mid-career and established scholars working on the Age of Revolutions, revolution in the Pacific World, and revolutions in Indigenous polities

Abstracts should include the proposed topic of presentation; please indicate which of the areas you are applying to as well. Please direct questions to the co-chairs.         

Keywords: Atlantic World, History/Historiography, Politics                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Rousseau and the Imagination (sponsored by the Rousseau Society) [ID 60]
Chair: Masano Yamashita, University of Colorado Boulder, masano.yamashita@colorado.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel seeks papers exploring the role played by the imagination in Rousseau’s oeuvre.

Possible topics include the interrelation between the imagination and world-making, the connection between images and concepts, and the articulation of imagination and temporality.

Proposals can be in French or in English.
Keywords: Aesthetics, Critical Theory/Theory, France/French, Philosophy, Politics

Samuel Johnson and Women Writers (sponsored by the Samuel Johnson Society of the West) [ID 146]
Chair: Daniel Timothy Erwin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, timothy.erwin@unlv.edu

 Weekend: April 4/5

Samuel Johnson was an active patron of several female colleagues working in the new print culture of the eighteenth century. The earliest was Elizabeth Carter, the bluestocking classicist and translator of Epictetus. Their friendship began at the Gentleman’s Magazine, where he published an epigram in her honor, and was renewed when she gave him two essays for the Rambler. Johnson’s attachment to Hester Thrale was among the most important of his life, especially during the composition of the Lives of the Poets.  Their long correspondence with its confidential tone and convulsive final break reflects an intense psychological bond, as does her generous tribute in the Anecdotes of Johnson. Among younger writers Johnson mentored Frances Burney, whose letters and diaries included acute observations of Johnson and a fond farewell, and in whose style critics have long since seen his influence. Johnson had immense respect for Charlotte Lennox and collaborated with her on several publications, and so on.  With these writers and others, he consistently helped women to bring their intellectual gifts to full expression. Our SJSW panel invites new insights on the topic of Johnson and the woman writer. Any interpretive perspective is welcome.

Sea Changes: Formations and Transformations Around Bodies of Water (sponsored by the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) [ID 91]
Co-chairs: Brett Wilson, College of William and Mary, bdwils@wm.edu; and Elena Deanda-Camacho, Washington College, edeanda2@washcoll.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Coasts, seas, and oceans delineate boundaries but also afford spaces of contact, coexistence, and conflict. This panel seeks contributions addressing trading, trafficking, and trailing in the 18th century, particularly in trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic contexts. Papers might address streams of people, knowledge, metropolitan-colonial relations; archipelagic and hemispheric approaches, and related topics.
Keywords: Black Atlantic, Caribbean, Economy, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Race and Empire

Screening and Streaming: What Happens When Performance of the Eighteenth Century Goes Virtual (Theatre and Performance Studies) [ID 86]
Chair: Amanda Moehlenpah, Colgate University, amoehlenpah@colgate.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Early modern definitions of “the virtual” implied an almost other-worldly tour de force, a supernatural power that was operational in and through human society and the human body. Although the digital nature of contemporary conceptions of the virtual belies miraculous involvement, the impact that virtual performance can and does have on both performers and spectators nevertheless is keenly felt. In the re-performance of eighteenth-century texts, the tension between material mechanism and transcendental effect comes to the forefront.

This panel invites papers, which will explore this tension in its productions and power. What are the many implications of virtual performances of the eighteenth century? What is gained? What is lost? Is the impact predetermined? If so, how? What are the tools and techniques of this effective and/or affective space, which is the virtual performance of a/the past? And what is impacted? The text? The bodies performing? The spectators? The space itself?

Presenters may consider hypothetical or actual virtual performances of eighteenth-century texts, with performance writ broadly: including, but not limited to, spoken theater, musical spectacle, dance, games, fine art or material culture exhibitions, etc. In the event of numerous proposals for contributions, this panel may be adjusted to adopt a roundtable format so as to incorporate as many ideas as possible.
Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Cultural Studies, Film/Television/Media, Games, Performance

Sending a Woman to Do What an Army Could Not: Women in Long Eighteenth-Century Asia [ID 46]
Chair: Samara Cahill, University of North Texas, samara.cahill@unt.edu

Weekend: March 28-29

Inspired by the multi-layered relationships among women portrayed in Hiroyuki Sanada et al’s 2024 adaptation of *Shogun*, James Clavell’s 1975 novel of early modern Japan, this panel invites papers on any aspect of women’s representation, experience, and relationships in long eighteenth-century Asia. Gender is both a mechanism of power and a method of symbolizing power dynamics that greatly influences the production of social institutions, privileges, and expectations. The issue of gender attained unprecedented prominence in early modern Asia, as the regulation and depreciation of women, which had long been shared and practiced, was fundamentally shaken by substantial social, political, and cultural transformations of the period. This panel asks literary scholars, historians, and art historians to investigate how social perceptions of gender were shaped and reshaped in diverse Asian cultures during the long eighteenth century. Please submit abstracts of approx. 250 words.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Asia, Gender/Sexuality Studies, History/Historiography, Visual Culture/Studies

Smollett and Science (sponsored by the Science Studies Caucus) [ID 80]
Chair: Laura Miller, University of West Georgia, lmiller@westga.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This session re-evaluates Tobias Smollett’s engagement with scientific thought. As a writer, translator, settler, and medical practitioner, Smollett’s work has long been identified as multidisciplinary in its influences and its effects. Recent digital projects on the popularization of eighteenth-century books among readers (Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online, Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830) provide further evidence of his ubiquity in eighteenth-century culture. Hundreds of thousands of library records show Smollett’s books–including his fiction, his travels, and his translations–among the eighteenth century’s most frequently-borrowed works, even long after their dates of publication. With this new information in mind, our panel will evaluate how Smollett’s work revises our understandings of scientific popularization, the medical humanities, the Scottish Enlightenment, and eighteenth-century culture.  Considerations of maritime labor, impressment, trade, and/or piracy in the context of science and mercantilism, imperialism, and global information-gathering are also welcome.
Keywords: Health and Medicine, History/Historiography, Science

Textual Temporalities: Bibliographic Time in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America) [ID 61]
Chair: Emily Spunaugle, Oakland University, espunaugle@gmail.com

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites papers that explore the relationship between bibliography and time, each in its broadest sense. 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. Papers might investigate: books that mark the passage of time (almanacs, annals, breviaries, log books, diaries, etc.); “man-” or labor-hours of textual production; the textual artifact and or in crip time; the material transience or longevity of ephemera; chronologies—realized or abandoned—of editions; and other “timely” interrogations of textual inscription, production, dissemination, and preservation, both metaphorical and actual. 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 espunaugle@gmail.com.
Keywords: Authorship, Material Culture, Print Culture, Visual Culture/Studies, Bibliography

The Aesthetics of Chance, Risk, and Contingency in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 119]
Co-Chairs: Joseph Litts, Princeton University, jlitts@princeton.edu, Erin Hein, University of Delaware, erinhein@udel.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Being an artist is—and has been—risky business. Increased attention to and anxiety about uncertainty coincides with a period of increased transit, globalization, and industrialization from around 1650 to 1850. Fires and shipwrecks upended workshops and destroyed finished artworks, while open art markets led to financial instability. New and old media behaved unpredictably: marble cracked, oil paints did not cure, printmaking inks and acids went rogue, early photography capriciously captured and lost images. How did artists negotiate the unexpected? Amidst growing global trade, makers struggled to understand and manipulate new materials and subject matter. Printing errors paradoxically increased the value of impressions in Paris art markets. British and Dutch painters depicted maritime disasters for merchants whose treacherous voyages put lives and their own profits at stake. Artists from Giovanni Battista Piranesi to Alexander Cozens encouraged looking to random blots, tangled lines, and stains for inspiration. How did artists, collectors, and artworks convert chance, failures, mistakes, and risk into profits of all kinds?

Modern insurance, the stock market, and art itself converted loss into reward. For example, even the catastrophic financial losses of the South Sea Bubble became profitable for satirical artists who capitalized on the sudden inversion of fortune. Building on recent scholarship by Nina Dubin, Meredith Martin, and Madeleine Viljoen, as well as Charlotte Guichard and Matthew Hunter, how were artists visualizing and participating in systems of uncertainty? And how were art objects entangled in these networks? Attention to chance, risk, loss, and profit unsettles the fixedness of eighteenth century history and aesthetics.

While this panel takes the Atlantic as its point of departure, we encourage contributions on a broad geographic range of materials and makers. We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages.    

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Atlantic World, Labor/Business, Race and Empire, Visual Culture/Studies

The Art of Balance: Concepts of Equality and Democracy in Art and Visual Culture of the long 18th Century (sponsored by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts) [ID 78]
Co-Chairs: Iris Brahms, Universität Tübingen, iris.brahms@fu-berlin.de; and Elisabeth Fritz, Freie Universität Berlin, elisabeth.fritz@fu-berlin.de

Weekend: March 28/29

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. 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, or the goal of levelling extreme economic and financial differences, an idealistic balance that ultimately paved the way for new concepts of societal order, respectively democracy.

There is no glossing over the fact that a certain degree of difference and hierarchy to guarantee the aesthetically “harmonic” order and balance was a persistent and prevailing ideal of the 18th century. Just as much, while aspiring for a newly balanced order within society, the dynamics of the socio-cultural developments of this period kept contributing to ongoing social injustices such as slavery or gender inequality. We decisively want 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 enter a fruitful debate and to develop a critical methodological approach, when we ask in which ways and to which ends 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/Visual Culture, Critical Theory/Theory, Cultural Studies, Politics

The Art of the Table: Dining and Desire in the Early Modern Period [ID 138]
Chair: Esther Gabel, Washington University in Saint Louis, esther.gabel@wustl.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The early modern period saw a substantial shift in the preparation and presentation of food. Focus shifted from spice to ingredient, from captured to cultivated. New culinary techniques required new implements, and new methods of serving led to innovative porcelain and silver designs. Dining became more intimate, yet more elegant. Colonial drinks were the height of fashion.

This panel seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the complexities of ‘setting the table’ in the early modern period. Potential topics include (but are not limited to): print, cooks and cookbooks; porcelain and the art of presentation; the garnish; gardening; indulgence and intimacy in the dining room; food in art, or food as art; butter and sugar; and food or fiction (or melons made of sausage).

Please submit abstracts (200 word maximum) for 15-20 minute papers. Include current academic affiliation in the “notes” section of submission form.  

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture      

The Author’s Den: The Spaces and Objects of Inspiration and Creativity [ID 48]     
Chair: Francesca Saggini, Università degli Studi della Tuscia, fsaggini@unitus.it

Weekend: March 28/29

From grottoes to summerhouses, from desks to seashells, from man-made spaces to natural places, it is time to celebrate and enliven the life of the Author by looking at the spaces and objects that have inspired them and nurtured their creativity. These may include, but are by no means limited to, writing tools, rooms, houses and other dwellings, objects of sentimental value or beauty, gardens, ornaments, good spirits that preside over the genius loci, including favourite pets. Recognising that questions of creativity and inspiration have long been at the centre of heated, and at times discrediting, debate, the session will seek to identify new and interconnecting avenues in material heuristics, authorship studies, the history of writing, literary studies, creative writing, and anthropological approaches. It is hoped that the session will address a range of topics from across the long eighteenth century and take a cross-media approach (e.g., portraits or other artworks depicting the author at work). We would particularly like to see papers which consider national traditions beyond the Anglosphere.  

Keywords: Author Studies, Creativity, Cultural Studies, Material Culture, Transmedia, Space Studies

The Dead Hand of the Law: Wills in the Early Novel [ID 129]
Chair: Jacob Biel, University of Chicago, biel@uchicago.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

“Where would the novelist of the period be without the disinheriting will, the manipulated will, the secreted will, and all kinds of wills in every style of obliteration and in every stage of destruction? Why, he would be nearly as bereft of staple stock in trade as if he had lost the lovelorn maiden, the tender-hearted soldier, or the grand old ‘hall of my ancestors.’” (Nathan Newmark, review of Mr. Meeson’s Will 1889). So writes a late-Victorian critic, for whom the last will and testament has become as hackneyed a plot device as any.

18th-century legal scholars often romanticize the Gothic antiquity of property law. This makes the role of last will and testaments in the novel seem retrograde. Wills guarantee or interrupt the smooth transition of property from generation to generation. Yet the ability freely to devise property through a will was, in fact, a relatively new legal mechanism. Before the last will and testament became an option for some, landowners had very little control over who inherited their property. The freeing up of real property was of great importance to the establishment of capitalism both domestically in Britain and in its expanding empire. This panel will examine the importance of the last will and testament to the early novel. Possible topics may include: the narratology of inheritance, the relationship of violence to property in the novel, the will’s role in delineating subgenres of novelistic fiction, and the genre of the will itself.”      

Keywords: Author/Authorship, Britain/England, Economy      

The Diasporic Eighteenth-Century (sponsored by the Graduate Student and Early Career Scholars Caucus (GECC)) [ID 43]
Chair: Shruti Jain, Graduate and Early Career Caucus, sjain15@binghamton.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel addresses the emerging diasporic consciousness that accompanied the movement of people and changes in ecologies in the eighteenth century. Extending last year’s two-part roundtable “Eighteenth Century in Motion” to the question of Diaspora, participants are invited to consider questions including but not limited to:

While the ‘diasporic eighteenth century’ offers proliferating instances of movement, what are some ways to simultaneously consider communities and people subjected to increased physical, discursive, and representational confinement?

What are some circumatlantic relations that the diasporic eighteenth century allows us to consider?

What new knowledge and perspectives can digital humanities offer to expand our understanding of the diasporic eighteenth century?

What alterations to ecology and geography accompany the alterations of demography across the seas in the eighteenth century?

Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory, Digital Humanities, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies, Race and Empire

The Historical Geographies of the Churrigueresque in the Iberian World [ID 145]
Co-chairs: Luis Gordo Peláez, California State University, Fresno, luisgordopelaez@csufresno.edu; and Cody Barteet, UWO, cbarteet@uwo.ca

Weekend: April 4/5

Spanish art historiography of the late 1700s (Llaguno and Ceán Bermúdez), favored Juan de Herrera’s 16th-century classical architecture and Bourbon-era architects Ventura Rodríguez and Juan de Villanueva. The latter architects were credited with restoring canonical models and shaping a national artistic identity by some historical and modern writers. This narrative castigates other ornamental architectural styles that developed after the mid-1600s, that were described as decorative fantasies and their designers, like Hurtado, Churriguera, and Ribera, labeled as “heretics.” In juxtaposition, the early 1900s American architects viewed Spanish architecture linearly, recognizing that Herrera’s work was in response to existing ornamental styles (like the Plateresque), and his “pure Classicism” gave way to Churriguera’s ornamental creations. While vilified in Spain, Churriguera was celebrated in America, and Herrera criticized for adopting an “unrooted” style deemed “out of key with the Spanish character,” unlike the ornamental styles that preceded or post-dated including the Churrigueresque. Few modern scholars have reconsidered this historiography by analyzing the exuberant aesthetic dominating Hispanic architecture in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The Churrigueresque and its transoceanic interpretations remain understudied in English scholarship. This panel aims to further examine the Churrigueresque through textual analyses and studies of its relationship to the Hispanic world’s built environment, including architectural, sculptural, and ephemeral elements. Proposals may address various aspects:

• Churrigueresque historiography and taxonomy, including the influence of other “decorative fantasies” or styles
• Influence of other cultures and their technologies
• Intersection of race and built environment, sensorial studies, and digital humanities
• Center and Periphery Methodologies concerning the Churrigueresque in the broader Iberian world

By exploring these topics, the panel seeks to deepen understanding of the Churrigueresque style and its significance in early modern Spanish and Spanish American architecture.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture, Atlantic World, Europe, Latin America

The Past of Eighteenth-Century Studies [ID 44]  
Chair: Thomas Leonard-Roy, Università di Sassari, tleonardroy@uniss.it

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel welcomes papers that explore the history of eighteenth-century studies, across disciplines and geographic areas. When and what are the origins of our field, and who were its founders and shapers? What are the key episodes in its intellectual, institutional, or personal history? What have we overlooked or misunderstood about its past? By returning to the formative years of the field, this panel seeks to understand in what ways “the eighteenth century” is a product of the scholar’s time, biography, and beliefs. Topics might include (re)assessments of either major or forgotten works of eighteenth-century studies; findings from the archives of the academic field (e.g. institutional records of universities, personal papers of scholars, or working papers of editorial “factories”); studies of past trends or methods; or arguments about how the field has changed, and how it remains the same. Graduate students and first-time presenters are encouraged to apply.          

Keywords: Cultural Studies, Editing, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, History/Historiography, Language/Languages, Research       

The Tri-Centennial of the Concert Spirituel (1725-1790): The Past and Future of Public Concerts (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music) [ID 89]
Chair: Drew Edward Davies, Northwestern University, dedavies@northwestern.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The concert series known as the Concert Spirituel began operations in Paris in 1725 and became one of the most significant venues for public performances of instrumental and vocal music in France, if not Europe as a whole, until its cessation during the Revolution. This session explores the role of the Concert Spirituel as a location of cultural exchange particularly but not exclusively between France, Italy, Bohemia, and the German speaking lands, and on the tercentenary of its founding, considers the institution’s role in developing the modern concept of the classical music concert based upon public taste and private funding.
Keywords: Europe, France/French, Music, Performance

The Unliterary Eighteenth Century [ID 132]
Chair: Nicola Parsons, University of Sydney, nicola.parsons@sydney.edu.au

Weekend: April 4/5

In The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century (2020), Gillian Russell demonstrates the value of attending to the proximately, rather than definitively, literary as genres of their own. This panel invites consideration of eighteenth-century texts that, despite their popularity and cultural centrality in their own time, have been marginalised because of their resistance to contemporary categories of literary genre, and, whatever else they might be called, are rarely if ever considered to be literary. Such texts might include: commonplace books; tourist guidebooks; theatre bills and broadsides; visiting cards and advertising material; catalogues; newspaper and occasional poetry. How might we better understand and appreciate the impact of these texts on eighteenth-century culture? How do they invite, and how might they resist methods of close reading? What does eighteenth-century literary studies do with the disjunction between contemporary definitions of our discipline, based around “literature” as a category, and what “literature” was understood as being in the eighteenth century? This panel welcomes papers that offer, via the “unliterary”, new methods in literary studies, and new forms of interdisciplinary engagement with history and cultural studies. 

Keywords: Books/Publishing, Cultural Studies, Print Culture, Literary studies

The Uses of Melancholy, Pity, and other Feelings of Crisis [ID 136]     
Co-Chairs: Angelina Del Balzo, Utah Valley University, angelinadelbalzo@gmail.com, Jonathan Williams, Bilkent University, jonathanwilliams@bilkent.edu.tr

Weekend: March 28/29

As Samuel Johnson was fleeing “the black dog,” other eighteenth-century readers and audiences were drawn to works of art that would make them feel pity or melancholy. James Thomson’s speaker in The Seasons invokes a “Philosophic Melancholy” that opens the speaker to a universal love of humanity. In the theater, Aaron Hill believed the communal experience of pity through tragedy served a civic function in cultivating emotions that would “teach a languid nation how to feel,” as he wrote in the preface to his smash hit The Tragedy of Zara. Throughout the century, writers grappled with the social, philosophical, and aesthetic uses of melancholy, pity, and other feelings that might emerge out of individual or social crises. This panel invites proposals that consider the ways that Anglophone eighteenth-century thinkers and artists considered melancholy, pity, sadness, and other “negative” emotions as productive forces or desirable ends in themselves. What didactic purposes do these feelings of crisis serve? What is the difference between sadness and despair in the period? Who gets to have productive or constructive negative feelings? Are there limits to how these feelings of crisis might be mobilized?   

Keywords: Aesthetics, Britain/England, Critical Theory/Theory, Philosophy

Theatre and the Press [ID 141]
Chair: Chelsea Phillips, Villanova University, chelsea.phillips@villanova.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Theatre and the press have long had a complex relationship and in the eighteenth century, concepts such as journalistic integrity and neutrality were far from guiding lights. Partisan puffs, thinly veiled attacks, and self-aggrandizing reviews pepper the theatrical “paragraphs” of the daily and weekly papers, sitting alongside the advertisements and official communications from the theatres themselves. But these sources, biased as they are, offer valuable insight into the workings and daily life of theatrical institutions and their personnel. This panel seeks to explore the relationship between theatres and the press in the period. Papers might, among other possibilities, explore big-picture questions about theatre and media; offer specific case studies; or meditate on historiographical challenges. Papers from any geographical context are welcome.  

Keywords: Books/Publishing, History/Historiography, Performance, Print Culture  

Theatre Critique [ID 151]
Chair: Terry F. Robinson, University of Toronto, terry.robinson@utoronto.ca

Weekend: March 28/29

Modern theatre criticism was born in the eighteenth century. Alongside the rise of stage performance as the dominant form of public entertainment grew a literary-media industry dedicated to assessing it. This panel seeks proposals for papers on theatre criticism as it flourished in newspaper and journal reviews, in literary prefaces and essays, in actor biographies, books on the theatre, and publications by individual critics—from Richard Steele and Aaron Hill through Elizabeth Inchbald and William Hazlitt. Topics may include but are not limited to critical culture and critical self-positioning, commercialism, content and aims, reception, and form and style.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Britain/England, Cultural Studies, Print Culture, Performance, Theatre

Theorizing the Fan (sponsored by the Theatre and Performance Studies Caucus) [ID 85]
Chair: Jane Wessel, US Naval Academy, wessel@usna.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Although the terms “fan” and “fandom” were not yet used during the eighteenth century, the theatre world certainly saw many of the practices that we now associate with fandoms. Theatrical publics were not passive consumers; they participated in the construction of knowledge about their favorite actors and actresses. Theatregoers collected prints, playbills and other ephemera; made scrapbooks and extra-illustrated books; recirculated the theatrical gossip in the news media; and reproduced actors’ performance styles at spouting clubs. But while scholars often use the term “fan,” less often do we turn to fan studies and media studies to theorize what “fan” and “fandom” might mean when applied to the earlier periods. This panel seeks a variety of approaches to how we might study the eighteenth century’s theatre fans. What sort of archives can we use to understand fannish practices? How did the types of media available to eighteenth-century audiences shape their participation in fan cultures? How does the rise of modern celebrity correlate to the rise of the fan? How did audiences form community around their shared enthusiasm? And how might we productively draw on fan studies to understand eighteenth-century fan cultures?
Keywords: Cultural Studies, Performance, Fan studies

Time Machine: Fictions of the Future, Fictions of the Past [ID 63]
Co-Chairs: Sarah Benharrech, University of Maryland, sbenharr@umd.edu, Andrew Billing, Macalester College, abilling@macalester.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel invites contributions on early modern works that perform “time travel” by means of fictional or speculative voyages that either anticipate the future, or that “retrograde” into the past, including but not limited to early works of science fiction or counter-factual or conjectural genetic histories. SF works characteristically construct a “novum” that Istvan Csicsery-Ronay defines in his Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, following Bloch and Suvin, as the work’s “central imaginary novelty,” that is, the “radically new inventions, discoveries or social relations” around which the fictional narrative centers. However, we might also apply this concept of a “novum” to counter-factual and historical works that recount a radically different version of the past, or that purport to excavate lost origins. François Hartog’s concepts of presentism and other “regimes of historicity” can help elucidate how these works represent ways of relating to the past, present and future. Narratives that use time to create a sense of spatial distance, for instance fictions of “primitivism”, are also relevant. Characteristic of early modern “time machine” narratives, then, are “uchronic” works that link reflections on time and the development of technology and science to social and political analysis. Topics may include technology, science, medicine, gender, sexualities, human-animal relations or human-machine interfaces, robotics, artificial and non-human intelligence, ideology, and utopias and dystopias.

This panel hopes to bring together researchers working in various disciplines and geographical areas. Please include a short bio with the abstract proposal in French or English.

Keywords: Future, Science Fiction, Technology, Time Travel, Utopia
   

Trade Folios, Nationhood, and European Expansion [ID 152]
Chair: Elizabeth Bobo, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, elizabeth.bobo@louisiana.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

“The World’s a Book in Folio, printed all / With God’s great Works in letters Capitall” (6).
Du Bartas His Divine Weekes and Workes, tr. Joshua Sylvester (1611).

Jerome McGann’s invitation to consider how bibliographic codes contribute to the meanings of literary works inspires this panel on format, size, and the many value-added features of which trade folios were made. The goal is to better understand the variety of ways the folio format functioned as a code for publishers, buyers, and readers. Contributions may be informed by previous scholarship, such as Steven Galbraith’s classifications: “folios of economy,” “folios of luxury,” and “folios of necessity”; Francis Connor’s recommendation that scholars reject the temptation to infer a generalized code applicable to all trade folio production and instead attend to the nuances of each specific book in question; and Michael Suarez’s reading the sumptuous Commentaries of Caesar (1712) to show how Jacob Tonson appropriated foreign book trade skills and labor to create a book celebrating English military victory and winning praise as an exemplar of Englishness in printing. Trade folios are generally thought to be inherently important, monumental, durable, comprehensive, prestigious, luxurious, elitist, heavy, cumbersome, stationary, and impractical for daily use. In revealing the ways one book or group of books conforms to or dispels any of these preconceptions, papers in this panel may provide better understandings of how big books represented or contributed to the anxieties, desires, and ambitions that accompanied English and European constructions of nationhood and geographical expansion.

Keywords: Atlantic World, Books/Publishing, Britain/England, Print Culture

Transing the Transatlantic (sponsored by the Queer and Trans Caucus) [ID 73]
Co-chairs: Shelby Johnson, Oklahoma State University, shelby.l.johnson@okstate.edu; and Smith Yarberry, Northwestern University, n5t3r3@u.northwestern.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites papers that explore the “transness” of the transatlantic world—that examine performances of gender non-conformity mobilized and perhaps even enabled by colonial histories of movement, immigration, and displacement. How can we continue to invigorate queer and trans studies by engaging with interventions from Black and Indigenous studies, as well as research in the interconnections between settler colonialism, imperialism, and cis-heteronormativity? Where and when do eighteenth-century categories of social identity, legal recognition, and/or taxonomy become fungible, either upholding or upending loyalties to the nation? And how might eighteenth-century studies, in particular, take up the complicated histories of gender, sexuality, and race in new ways as a means of broadening our engagement with the transatlantic world?

Keywords: Atlantic World, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Queer, Trans

‘Trifles’ in Anti-Slavery Writing, Equiano and Beyond [ID 108]
Chair: Adam Beach, Ball State University, arbeach@bsu.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

John Bugg’s 2013 article on the “trifle” in Olaudah Equiano’s “The Interesting Narrative” brought significant critical attention to the role of the short and largely unexplained digressions and anecdotes in his text.  Bugg’s insights have been taken up by a number of other scholars, most notably Habiba Ibrahim’s reading (in “Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life,” NYU Press, 2021) of the brief “Equiano girl” episode in which Equiano was tricked into meeting a woman he believed was his missing sister.  Bugg and Ibrahim bring to life these unimportant or unexplained moments in the text, unpacking their symbolic and narrative import.  I invite new work on the “trifle” as a narrative device in anti-slavery writing both in Equiano’s text and in others.  What kind of work do these short but symbolically loaded episodes perform in anti-slavery writing? How does the effectiveness of the “trifle” compare to other modes of address in anti-slavery writing?  In what other ways can we analyze the symbolic, rhetorical, or narratological function of this device?  

Keywords: Anti-Slavery Literature

Unnatural Nature: How to Believe in Monsters and Enlightenment [ID 45]     
Chair: Michael Lynn, Purdue University Northwest, mlynn@pnw.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

The long eighteenth century witnessed a series of significant events in the history of monsters from reports of vampirism beginning the late 17th century, to debates about ghosts, werewolves in the Gévaudan, and merpeople, among many others. Extraordinary creatures continued to flourish alongside the burgeoning culture of Enlightenment with people moving seamlessly from their conviction regarding the importance of rationality to their belief in things later considered irrational.  This panel examines the long history of wondrous beings with an eye toward exploring the porous nature of the boundaries separating the natural, unnatural, supernatural, and preternatural.  How could people simultaneously believe in the rational Enlightenment and accept creatures steeped in the supernatural.  What did it mean to demonstrate belief in the irrational or to embrace things generally dismissed by purveyors of enlightened thought?  What is the relationship between the esoteric and the rational?  Can someone who claims to be enlightened also believe in magic or the wondrous?    

Keywords: Europe, Medicine, North America, Science, Monsters        

Unsettling Scottish Studies (sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society) [ID 88]
Chair: JoEllen DeLucia, Central Michigan University, deluc1jm@cmich.edu; and Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, leith@sfu.ca

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites proposals that chart new directions in Scottish Studies. Proposals that engage with Scottish history, literature, philosophy, art, or music and their relationship to settler colonialism, indigenous studies, the transatlantic slave trade, and environmental studies are particularly welcome. This panel hopes to foster new conversations across disciplines about Scottish studies and its future.
Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies, Philosophy, Race and Empire

Virtual Defoe (sponsored by the Daniel Defoe Society) [ID 87]
Chair: Katherine Ellison, Illinois State University, keellis@ilstu.edu 

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel invites all scholars of Defoe and his contemporaries to contemplate the concept of the virtual from multiple perspectives. The virtual is a problem-solving concept, and Defoe was a driven solver of problems economic, political, social, and literary. The virtual is also an imagined space, an alternative, allowing us to think about the history of alterity: alternative ways of being, alternative sexualities and identities, alternative bodies and spaces. Pierre Lèvy approaches the virtual as potential, using the example of a seed: the seed is not a tree, but the “tree is virtually present in the seed.” As the seed develops, it faces problems, like bad soil, unfavorable climate, fire, or human intervention, and those problems shape the tree’s development. 18th-century literary forms – and characters and plots — work in similar ways in that they are forms shaped by obstacles. David Mcinnis offers yet another approach. He considers scholarship itself as “an exercise in virtual reality,” challenging the scholarly practice of studying only surviving texts and pushing us to “sense” the gaps, the missing works and authors, the topics not discussed.

Panelists could consider questions like: What problems did Defoe and his contemporaries seek to address through imagined spaces? What alterities do we find in the period and its writings? What are the problems that shaped specific forms, like the heroic couplet or the novel, which could invite close reading? How might the virtual allow us to rethink forms, conventions, plots, characters, or systems? If we look between Defoe’s works and other works of the 18th century, what might we find? What are the gaps in Defoe’s writings or other authors’ writings?
Keywords: Critical Theory/Theory, Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies

Wealth, Poverty, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (sponsored by the Irish Studies Caucus) [ID 50]
Chair: Scott Breuninger, Virginia Commonwealth University, breuningersc@vcu.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

During the eighteenth century, the Irish economy faced a number of internal and external challenges that hampered the growth of national wealth. This condition was acerbated by the social inequalities codified into the legal system governing the island, as well as the related problems of concentrated wealth and endemic poverty. These issues shaped popular and literary understandings of civility, sociability, and associational life within Ireland and helped frame how those across the Irish Sea viewed the Irish. Furthermore, the position of Ireland in the emerging British Empire, especially following the 1707 Act of Union, also called into question the nature of Irish identity and community.

This panel welcomes papers that explore the nature of wealth and poverty within the social, literary, economic, and/or political contexts of eighteenth-century Ireland. Proposals that address the nature of Irish identity and notions of Irish civility and sociability within the broader contexts of the eighteenth century European and Atlantic worlds are particularly encouraged.
Keywords: Atlantic World, Britain/British/England/English, Economy, Europe, Labor/Business

When We Were Young: Coming-of-Age Stories in Eighteenth-Century France [ID 101]      
Chair: Benjamin Hoffmann, The Ohio State University, hoffmann.312@osu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This panel focuses on the fictional, theoretical, and autobiographical writings of eighteenth-century French authors who examined youth as a period marked by exploration, growth, angst, aspirations, and struggles. Participants will delve into works that explore the transition from childhood to adulthood and highlight the feelings of uncertainty and rebellion that often accompany this stage of life. We will analyze how eighteenth-century French writers depict the complex process of maturing and the confrontation of young people with societal expectations. Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the difficulty inherent in growing up in eighteenth-century France and to consider how these narratives can resonate with our students’ experiences today. While papers about canonical authors such as Rousseau, Marivaux, Prévost, or Casanova are welcome, we also hope to discuss the work of less well-known writers, particularly those who offer a feminine perspective on the journey to adulthood. To propose a paper, please submit a 250-word abstract and include a bio in the “notes” section.

Keywords: France/French                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Women Artists: Emulation, Collaboration, Innovation [ID 99]
Chair: Christina Lindeman, University of South Alabama, clindeman@southalabama.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

In recent years, scholars have focused increased attention on women artists in the long eighteenth century. From watershed exhibitions including Making Her Mark in North America and Geniale Frauen in Europe, to publications on women artists by Spies-Gans (2022), Strobel (2023), and Quinn (2024). Taking advantage of this new research and artworks emerging on the market opens more opportunities to study women artists in various geographical areas and working in multifarious mediums. This panel seeks papers proposing new perspectives on women artists engaged in emulation, collaboration, and innovation from diverse regions and cultural settings.

Emulation was understood as a virtuous practice that led to innovation. However, as Laura Auricchio noted in her research on Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, that emulation was “necessary for female artists’ careers but dangerous for their reputations.” Emulating artworks deemed inappropriate could potentially damage a woman’s social standing even being judged unnatural. Moreover, a woman could be deemed a “copyist” and lacking the intellectual breadth for history painting. How did women artists engage with artworks from the historical past or their contemporaries?

Taking collaboration as a focus, this panel invites new pathways to analyze the dynamic and gendered relationships in the studio. Papers that address how women collaborated with other artists, whether family members or contemporaries, are welcomed. How did women assert themselves in collaborative professional relationships? In what instances did collaborative working relationships run counter to established gender roles? How was the division of labor and responsibilities divided?

Finally, where can we see women innovating? Which women artists invented new methods of making art? How did they engage the materiality of their art by, for example, creating new formulas in pigments, brushes, pastels, or paper? How did women artists engage with natural philosophy and/or laboratory practices in the studio?

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Material Culture              

Poster Sessions

Poster Session: Teaching the Eighteenth Century (Pedagogy Caucus) [ID 79]
Chair: Linda Troost, Washington & Jefferson College, ltroost@washjeff.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

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 (8-10 minutes) will be followed by time for conversation. As we are online this year, posters will be digital and may be replaced by concise slide decks. (Instructions on preparing posters will be supplied.)
Keywords: Pedagogy

Roundtables

RT: 25 Years of Italian Eighteenth-Century Women and Gender Studies [ID: 52]
Chair: Francesca Savoia, savoia@pitt.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

On June 25, 1678, in Padua, thirty-two-year-old Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was proclaimed Magistra et Doctrix Philosophiae in front of a large public of faculty, administrators, Venetian senators, students, and foreign visitors. As the first woman to receive an academic degree in Europe, her fame widened the scope of potential female accomplishments, giving rise to a surge of Italian women’s artistic, scientific and literary endeavors in the eighteenth century. The enhanced visibility of women on the social and cultural scene, alongside their roles as cultural mediators, led contemporaries to refer to the period as “The Century of Women.” On June 25, 2019, the University of Padua inaugurated the Elena Cornaro Center, an institute aimed at spreading awareness on gender issues in academia and in society. In the past 25 years, many scholars of the Italian eighteenth-century from various disciplines, including ASECS Italian Studies Caucus members, have highlighted the contributions of Italian women to the sphere of knowledge and sociability in the long European eighteenth century.

Considering the 50th anniversary celebration of the ASECS Women Caucus, this round table would like to invite contributions from colleagues in any field that take stock of and illustrate the progress made in the past 25 years, as well as highlight the continuing challenges in eighteenth-century Italian women studies. 

Keywords: Cultural Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Italy/Italian, Material Culture, Italian Women

RT: A Feminist of the Past for the Present: Louise Dupin in the Classroom [ID 104]
Chair: Angela Hunter, University of Arkansas – Little Rock, anhunter@ualr.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The reconstruction, translation, and edition of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women, the most in-depth, least-known feminist treatise of eighteenth-century France offers a rich opportunity to demonstrate to students that the work of history is ongoing, that the questions they bring to it can reshape it, and that, as Dupin recognized, education is the arena in which authoritative narratives are formed. This panel invites submissions for papers discussing the teaching of this newly available text in the undergraduate or graduate classroom, in any discipline or curriculum (e.g., philosophy, literature, history, political science, art history, interdisciplinary programs). Papers may reflect experience teaching Dupin or ideas about how to do so in the future. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: syllabi (how would the inclusion of any part of the Work on Women in an existing course change its narrative arc or develop its goals?); pairings (which other texts might allow students to grapple productively with problems explored in Dupin’s work?); assignments (student transcription or translation of manuscripts, creative options, group projects, essay topics, etc.). Comparisons with feminist writers from other countries are welcome as is the consideration of Dupin’s Work for exploring contemporary issues.         

Keywords: France/French, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Pedagogy, Philosophy 

RT: A History of Our Own: Stories from ASECS’s Queer and Trans Caucus (sponsored by the Queer and Trans Caucus) [ID 64]
Chair: Katherine Binhammer, University of Alberta, kb1@ualberta.ca

Weekend: March 28/29

The 2024 conference marked the 30th Anniversary of the caucus’s first officially sponsored panel. Founded as the Gay and Lesbian Caucus at ASECS the previous year, the caucus has been active since 1994, expanding from one to two panels in 2006, and changing its name to the Queer and Trans caucus in 2021. This panel invites past co-chairs, presenters, and attendees to offer short reflections on the history of the caucus and its importance both to the field of gender and sexuality studies and to individual scholarly lives. Given the absence of a document archive and the loss of past members who held our collective history, it is crucial that we begin a queer archive of our own. All stories from our colorful past are welcome: the good and the bad; the professional and the personal; the political and the intellectual. What are your most memorable moments? What has the caucus meant to you?

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies, History/Historiography, Queer/Trans

RT: Advocating for Eighteenth-Century Studies [ID 113]
Chair: Melissa Schoenberger, College of the Holy Cross, mschoenb@holycross.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Despite the vibrant work of its scholars, the field of eighteenth-century studies often needs defending at the institutional level. This roundtable invites commentary on advocating for eighteenth-century studies: how might we make the case for resources in a moment when historical thinking is not always of the highest priority for institutional decision makers? How can we ensure that courses grounded in this period continue to be included in major and minor curricula? What strategies or approaches have worked best? What can we learn from attempts that did not succeed? Also welcome are ideas for new programs or other structures that might thrive in various institutional contexts. The roundtable will include 4–5 short presentations (5–7 minutes), followed by extensive time for discussion.        

Keywords: Advocacy, Advice, Curriculum

RT: Aggressive Regressions?: The Politics of Reenacting the Past [ID 154]
Chair: Nicole Mansfield Wright, University of Colorado, Boulder, Nicole.Wright@Colorado.Edu

Weekend: April 4/5

What political messages are intentionally–or inadvertently–conveyed by reenactments or expressions of nostalgia for eighteenth-century practices? In The Year of Living Constitutionally (2024), author A. J. Jacobs intimidates passers-by as he wanders around New York City brandishing an “eighteenth-century musket.” Revolutionary War reenactors spend abundantly and devote their vacation days to simulating long-ago battles. In New Orleans, hundreds of Black and Indigenous artists and volunteers reenacted a 1811 rebellion of enslaved people. On the grounds of former plantations, guides use controversial techniques to immerse participants in the past. TikTok “tradwives” make money and headlines as they extoll the pleasures of domesticity. This roundtable invites “flash talk” presentations (around 7-12 minutes each) on the methods and political and social meanings of current ways of hearkening back to the long eighteenth century. Proposals by a variety of scholars (including adjunct scholars, independent scholars, and graduate students) are welcome.

RT: Celebrate! The Women’s Caucus Turns 50! (Presidential-sponsored session) [ID 93]
Chair: Alison Conway, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, alison.conway@ubc.ca

Weekend: March 28/29

This session will discuss eighteenth-century women celebrating themselves, others, and the idea of celebration as a form of affirmation. What kinds of affirmations advanced the artistic and social goals of women in the eighteenth century? What forms of celebration promoted community and care among women? Who knew how to throw a good party?

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies

RT: Child Abuse, Exploitation, and Protection
Chair: Valentina Tikoff, DePaul University, vtikoff@depaul.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Eighteenth-century legal culture rarely defined what might have constituted unacceptable or abusive treatment of children and youth—whether children in their parental homes; pupils, boarders, or students at educational establishments; or apprentices, domestic servants, and other young workers in places of employment; or children and youth in other settings and circumstances. Yet we should be wary of inferring from this prescriptive legal lacunae either apathy or lack of any restraints. This roundtable seeks to explore eighteenth-century notions of child abuse and exploitation not only as a manifestation of patriarchal power structures, philosophical precepts, moral commitments, and the objects of protection campaigns, but also as the lived experience of children and youth in the eighteenth century.

This roundtable seeks participants interested in addressing the challenges of exploring this issue. Instead of full papers, short contributions are sought that highlight this issue and creative responses to its study and exploration, as the basis of a productive conversation among participants and with the audience. The roundtable seeks to bring together scholars who approach this issue from a variety of disciplines in diverse geographic and linguistic contexts, working on different types of populations and using diverse source materials. Contributions that explore gendered and intersectional aspects of this topic are especially invited.

Keywords: Atlantic World, Childhood, Gender/Sexuality

RT: Digital Scholarship We Should Be Using [ID 100]
Chair: Hilary Havens, University of Tennessee, hhavens1@utk.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Within the past twenty years, there has been a proliferation of digital scholarship devoted to the eighteenth century.  While some of it has been collected on public humanities websites like 18thConnect and The 18th-Century Common, much of it is not usually shared or available in a centralized location.  This roundtable will fulfill a role similar to those aggregative websites by inviting creators of digital scholarship, including editions and resources, to discuss their projects and research questions.  Applicants to this panel should provide short descriptions (with links, if available) of their projects and research aims.  Open-access projects are especially encouraged. 

The session will take full advantage of the virtual conference format: panelists will provide walkthroughs of their digital resources as they discuss their research goals.  Panelists will provide links to their projects in advance so that participants can use the resources in their future teaching and research.  After the project overviews, we will discuss – among other things – how audience members can become digital scholarship creators; tensions between digital scholarship creation and hiring, tenure, and promotion requirements; and how digital scholarship can be more widely used and shared.

Keywords: Digital Humanities, Editing, Research                       

RT: Disability and the Practices of Care (sponsored by the Disability Studies Caucus) [ID 56]
Co-Chairs: Paul Kelleher, Emory University, pkelleh@emory.edu; and Lesley Thulin (UCLA) lthulin@g.ucla.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

This roundtable on disability and caregiving/care work in the long eighteenth century takes its inspiration from Talia Schaffer’s brilliant investigation of “communities of care” in Victorian fiction. As Schaffer pointedly argues, “Forget the pleasant platitudes of care. Think of care as a practice—a difficult, often unpleasant, almost always underpaid, sometimes ineffective practice, but nonetheless an activity that defined the lives of nineteenth-century subjects, particularly female subjects, and that I assert helps define our lives today.” Moving backward in time, how are we to understand the form and function of care work in the eighteenth century? How was care represented and practiced—and what gaps or discrepancies arose between imagined and enacted forms of care? What particular forms of care were oriented toward cognitive or physical disability? What differences existed between care work oriented toward disability and care work oriented toward illness (short-term or chronic)? More broadly, when we foreground the practices of care, what new things might we recognize about the lives and identities of eighteenth-century individuals, friend groups, family networks, and social and political entities?

We invite short papers (5-7 minutes) that explore these questions from a range of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary angles. Please include a short bio in the “notes” section of the submissions form.

Keywords: Disability Studies, Health and Medicine, Care Ethics

RT: Eighteenth-Century Futures (sponsored by the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) [ID 70]
Chair: Sören Hammerschmidt, GateWay Community College, soren.hammerschmidt@gatewaycc.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Following the conference theme of WSECS 2024, we welcome proposals (250 words) from all disciplines and irrespective of prior participation in WSECS events. Potential topics on the theme of “Eighteenth-Century Futures” could include: eighteenth-century/Romantic ideas of the future; early science fiction; concepts of periodization; the future of eighteenth-century studies; technological change then and now; eighteenth-century prophecy, forecasting, and prognosis; the eighteenth century’s role in the present.

Keywords: Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization

RT: Examining the ‘Publisher Function’ in the Long Eighteenth Century (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP)) [ID 57]
Chair: Eleanor Shevlin, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, eshevlin@wcupa.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Studies of eighteenth-century of booksellers/publishers such as Edmund Curll, Robert Dodsley, Joseph Johnson as well as those on the Continent and elsewhere have offered much insight into the role of publishers and the circles in which they operated, fostered, and supported. Yet, more work needs to be done on this component of textual production.

This roundtable will focus on work that explores the creation of books or other textual forms from the standpoint of booksellers/publishers in fresh ways. Papers might wish to explore a bookseller/publisher in terms of an individual title or series, or they might consider the ways in which a bookseller/publisher worked to promote or advance a particular genre or genres through attention to textual categories, market forces, or other relevant factors. Proposals could examine the ways in a bookseller/publisher’s advertisements are suggestive of their editorial practices. Papers that address method and history in thinking more carefully about the “publisher function”—including the ways a publisher’s hand in the creative production of a work alters conceptions of authorship or the “author function”—are especially welcome. So, too, are papers from the non-Anglo-world.

While one need not be a member of SHARP to propose a paper, all presenters must be current SHARP members at the time of the conference. Proposals or abstracts of 250-words are sought. Questions? Eleanor Shevlin (eshevlin@wcupa.edu)

Keywords: Authorship, Labor/Business, Material Culture, Print Culture, Publishers/Booksellers

RT: Feminist Praxis: A Roundtable Discussion on Connection and Care (sponsored by the Women’s Caucus) [ID 97]
Co-Chairs: Ashley Bender, Texas Women’s University, abender@twu.edu; and Elizabeth Porter, Hostos Community College-CUNY, eporter@hostos.cuny.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

What is the work of thinking and living together in the moment? Moving beyond a traditional “mentoring is important” panel, this panel considers the ways that we can employ intersectional feminist praxis to address the holistic needs of academics as humans in the world with lives and needs and goals that extend beyond institutional boundaries. How can we build support networks that feed and celebrate in ways that fill our cups rather than depleting them? This panel encourages submissions that draw from theoretical perspectives but that focus particularly on practice and application. The goal of the conversation is for panelists to engage with audience members to develop a shared resource that documents methods folks can apply in their own contexts and perhaps build new, and strengthen existing, networks.

Keywords: Administration, Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Service

RT: Gone Too Soon: Sunsetting and Transitioning Digital Projects (sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus) [ID 96]
Chair: Talia Perry, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, talia.perry@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

When a digital humanities project can no longer continue to live sustainably in its current form, what happens next? While we can attempt to build in features of longevity from a project’s conception, and initiate protocols of preservation at any point in the life of a digital work, not all projects have the privilege of this kind of foresight. This panel seeks examples of the often ad-hoc (and perhaps especially triage) decommissioning of DH work, working towards a discussion of methodologies and workflows that were successful, or not, in projects that required either complete sunsetting, or the transitioning of a project into a wholly different format (digital or otherwise).

Keywords: Digital Humanities, Editing, Labor/Business, Archives

RT: ‘Haywood Studies’ at a Quarter Century (sponsored by the Eliza Haywood Society) [ID 161]
Chair: Catherine Ingrassia, Virginia Commonwealth University, cingrass@vcu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

What does it mean to talk about “Haywood Studies” at a quarter century?  Over the last two decades, scholars have worked to more fully understand Haywood’s contribution and to place her work within a necessarily revised literary history. Foundational bibliographic work, a political biography, and the increased number of primary texts available in print and digital editions have laid a strong basis for scholarship.  Although Haywood Studies has expanded with increasing complexity, too many vestiges of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and reductive generalizations persist in the presentation of Haywood–in scholarship and within the classroom. 

This roundtable seeks to complicate the understanding of her life and work, foreground the most innovative and important concerns about Haywood, and expand the contexts in which we read her diverse texts. To that end, the roundtable would seek innovative (perhaps radical) interventions that extend the texts under examination, introduce new critical perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies, and provide fresh points of entry to Haywood Studies. The virtual modality offers a more inclusive opportunity for participation by graduate students, international scholars, and independent scholars; the roundtable format seeks 5-7 original, diverse, and challenging questions or assertions about Haywood (strictly limited to 5 minutes each, for 25-35 minutes provided by presenters) that would facilitate a robust discussion. Prior to, and following, the session and conference, supplemental materials would also be available for participants (both presenters and audience members) to anticipate and continue the conversation in a revitalized environment.

Keywords: Authorship, Atlantic World, Britain/British/England/English, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Print Culture

RT: Homosocial Bonds, Queer Desire, and Male Friendship in Jane Austen [ID 102]
Chair: Ula Klein, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, kleinu@uwosh.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Female friendships and sisterly relations have often been at the heart of discussions of Austen’s novels, while discussions of Austenian masculinity frequently focus on how such masculinities contribute to the romantic heterosexual partnerships. And yet, male friendships and relationships are critical to Austen’s world and her novels. While the example of Darcy and Bingley in Pride and Prejudice is arguably the most well-known male friendship in Austen’s novels, her other books also explore male homosocial bonds, partnerships, and friendships. Persuasion features the strong bonds between men in the Navy via the three-way friendship of Wentworth, Harville and Benwick in contrast to the betrayal of friendship between Mr. Smith and Mr. Elliot. Betrayed male friendship or brotherhood is a constant theme in Austen’s novels, whether it is Wickham’s betrayal of Darcy and his family, or one man scooping up the romantic interest of the other, as when Isabella Thorpe of Northanger Abbey ends her engagement to James Morland in order to pursue Henry Tilney’s brother, or when Lucy Steele chooses Robert Ferrars over his brother and her long-term fiancé Edward. Relationships between men are just as critical to Austen’s novels as female friendships or male-female relationships. This roundtable solicits presentations that delve into these relations, exploring the homosocial and/or queer valences between men in Austen’s oeuvre. What does love between men look like in Austen’s novels? How does it compare to or affect the female-female bonds or male-female romances that are often at the core of each novel? Finally, what’s queer between men in Austen?

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies, Austen, Homosocial, Men

RT: Labor, Service, & Digitization Projects (sponsored by the Graduate Student and Early Career Scholars Caucus (GECC)) [ID 42]
Chair: Taylin Nelson, ASECS Graduate and Early Career Caucus, Rice University, tpn2@rice.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

The roundtable addresses the field of 18th-century-centered digital humanities and digitization projects through the lens of labor, service, and alt-ac career prospects. Extending out of previous ASECS panels on Transkribus-a-thons, challenges in digitization, and collaborative work in DH, this roundtable proposes to focus more closely on these issues in specifically graduate and early career contexts, to ask questions such as “What are the skills required for digitization projects?” and “Do networking/alt-ac skills building opportunities in digitization outweigh the labor demands?

This roundtable seeks to have discussions surrounding digitization projects, and the nature of labor in such service-oriented projects, and welcomes topics ranging from but not limited to:

• The rise of meta-data and digitization projects in eighteenth-century studies
• Opportunities for alt-ac career paths and skills development
• DH projects that pave the future for academia
• Questions of labor, service requirements, and care when it comes to inputting metadata, interfacing, and digitizing for larger grant-funded projects
• The problems of crowd-sourcing free labor in DH projects (for example, with the Bentham Project)
• “Publish or Perish” mindset versus collaborative, student-centered engagement with DH tools and project “publications”

Keywords: Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent, Digital Humanities, Labor/Business, Service

RT: Law and Language (New Lights Forum) [ID 160]
Chair: Adam Schoene, McGill University, adam.schoene@mail.mcgill.ca 

Weekend: April 4/5

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, in which he interrogates the possibilities and limitations of the law and its relationship with language and literature, developing a way of thinking about the creative activities of mind and imagination that he situates at the heart of both law and language. In his foreword to a recent edition of the work, he remarks of its enduring significance: “I think in fact that it may be of wider relevance now than when it was first published, for its central concern is with integrity—integrity of the law, of language, of the individual person—at a time when integrity itself sometimes seems to be threatened as a value.” This roundtable seeks to examine the intersection of law and language across different cultures in the context of eighteenth-century studies, exploring past and ongoing resonance. How might creative intersections of law and language drive innovation in ideas and form and potentially serve to shape or challenge the contours of different structures of power?

Keywords: Language, Law, Global/World/Any Country, Interdisciplinary, Politics

RT: Material Methods [ID 118]
Chair: Sal Nicolazzo, UC Davis, snicolazzo@ucdavis.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

We have long known that the eighteenth century was profoundly shaped by both materials and theories of materiality itself. From metallurgy to textiles, from ceramics to foods, scholars of eighteenth-century literature, the arts, history, economy, and governance have contributed to a rich and multifaceted understanding of how specific materials both acquired profound socio-cultural meaning and shaped human and ecological relations through their material properties.

This roundtable seeks to convene an interdisciplinary discussion of material methods for understanding the eighteenth century in the present. What kind of knowledge-production is entailed in cooking, fermenting, sewing, sculpting, binding, printing, growing, harvesting, or amalgamating the materials either represented or elided in the primary sources more traditionally employed in our disciplines for historical inquiry? How might we engage methodologically with contemporary artists like Candice Lin, Kara Walker, and Joscelyn Gardner, who devise artistic methods for reanimating eighteenth-century materials and histories? How might material methods transform, rather than simply re-enact, the material histories that shaped the eighteenth century, or push us to find terms other than “the eighteenth century” for understanding the temporalities of our research or teaching? What material methods are necessary for engaging transformatively with the planetary material “duress” (Ann Stoler) of eighteenth-century capitalism and empire in which we all live?

A wide array of formats, genres, and creative interpretations of the topic are welcomed, as is creative engagement with the unique affordances of the virtual format.
Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Material Culture, Print Culture                                     

RT: Moving to the “Dark Side?” Transitioning from Academics to Administration (sponsored by the Irish Caucus) [ID 58]
Chair: Scott Breuninger, Virginia Commonwealth University, breuningersc@vcu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

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, Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent, Service

RT: New Approaches to the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Italy [ID 131]
Chair: Sabrina Ferri, Independent Scholar, sabrinaferri@icloud.com, azalais00@yahoo.com

Weekend: March 28/29

In line with scholarship that ties the rise of the novel to structural aspects of modernity, the supposedly belated spread of the novel in eighteenth-century Italy has been tied to a delay in the advent of modernity, especially in terms of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of the nation-state. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the transnational nature of the origins of the novel, to the hybridity intrinsic to the genre, and to the fundamental role that translation played in shaping and propagating the novel horizontally rather than vertically. This roundtable invites contributions that address any of the following questions through interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches:

• The hybridity of the Italian novel and its connections to and merging with other fictional and non-fictional genres, such as theater, memoires, and travel journals;
• Translations, adaptations, and appropriations of foreign novels;
• Intertextual relationships between novels by canonical and non-canonical authors;
• Questions of authorship, readership, and aspects of the book trade;
• The emergence of novelistic genres specific to the period and their characteristics.

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words.
Keywords: Italy/Italian, Translation, Transnational Novel                                                                                                                                

RT: Regional 18th-Century Societies: Best Practices for Sustainability and Success (sponsored by the Southeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies [SEASECS] [ID 81]
Chair: Patty Hamilton, Union University, phamilto@uu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

Finding yourself at the helm of an all-volunteer, non-profit scholarly society can be . . . daunting. You find out very quickly what you don’t know. (All the things.) Even if your predecessors leave you notes and a to-do calendar to guide you through the maze of tasks to be done, questions and challenges can arise for which you may not be prepared. And time is always short because of your “regular” academic work (never mind the demands of your personal life). How in the world can you learn on the fly be an effective leader? What’s a President/Vice-President/Secretary/ Treasurer of an ASECS regional society to do?

This roundtable seeks your best practices for running a regional society to share with officers of other regional societies. What nuggets of wisdom can you share that would help all ASECS affiliates not just survive but thrive? Topics might include practical concerns, such as how to manage banking as a virtual organization; getting and keeping non-profit status; recordkeeping and audit trails; Internet security and dealing with phishing/scams; communicating with members effectively across multiple platforms; preserving institutional memory; and recruiting and retaining members. Or topics might focus on the theoretical: What is essential to keeping a regional society going? What is mission-critical? How can regionals help ASECS and how can ASECS help regionals? How can regionals effectively advocate for eighteenth-century studies as universities downsize and enrollments shrink?

Proposals should focus on a specific topic or question that can be addressed in a 7-10 minute talk.

Keywords: Administration, Regional Societies, Affiliates

RT: Remaking Christopher Smart [ID 156]
Chair: Fraser Easton, University of Waterloo, easton@uwaterloo.ca

Weekend: March 28-29

How influential is Christopher Smart? How queer is Smart? Building on the just-published collection of essays on “Christopher Smart Now” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 57.4 (Summer 2024), this roundtable solicits short (10 minute) considerations of Smart’s significance for other writers, and/or his marginalized, divergent, or “odd” linguistic energies and interests.

Frances Burney, Robert Browning, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton—the list of writers fundamentally shaped by Smart, as traced by Karina Williamson and others, is long. Neurodivergent, queer-adjacent, animal-centric, religiously dissident, gender-variant, Smart the religious poet was also a professional writer, proto-pantomime dame (Mary Midnight), and promoter (and adopter) of iconic female voices (“Mary’s key”). The off-centre energy that Smart brings to his religious poetry is not limited to the enthusiastic tradition traced in Jubilate Agno by Clement Hawes or the Gothic music that Jayne Lewis finds in Smart’s Psalm 119. Indeed, Smart’s “sound reasoning” and linguistic enquiry are coextensive with the energies unleashed by his confinement and social denigration. This impactful energy stands against the influential dictum, articulated most recently by Geoffry Hartman in his posthumous essay “Trauma and Literature: The Case of Christopher Smart” (in Eighteenth-Century Studies 57.4), that Smart “is that exceptional poet whose major original work never got into the canon” and whose “influence” is thus limited to a brief efflorescence “two centuries later” (p. 532).

For this roundtable, participants are invited to consider Smart’s significance for another writer drawn from any period and national tradition, to attend to Smart’s writing through the lenses of disability studies, queer, trans, and gender theory, transhumanist and ecocritical approaches, or colonial and imperial studies, or to take up any other topic remaking this exciting author.

Keywords: Ecocritical, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Influence, Language, Queer, Trans

RT: Roy Porter and his Legacy (sponsored by the Science Studies Caucus) [ID 82]
Chair: Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University, Anita.Guerrini@oregonstate.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Before his untimely death in 2002, Roy Porter was undoubtedly the best-known historian in Britain, putting the “long eighteenth century” at the center of the history of science and medicine and of history writ large. His incredible productivity encompassed not only science and medicine, but sexuality, madness, and urban history. His notion of “history from below” transformed the history of medicine in particular. Moreover, in his editorship of countless volumes of essays as well as the journal History of Science, he greatly influenced the direction of historiography. A quarter of a century on, this roundtable aims to reassess his work and his legacy, and discuss how the fields he so influenced have moved on without him.
Keywords: Health and Medicine, History/Historiography, Science

RT: Saisir le moment: Performance, Orality, and Composition in the Eighteenth-Century Francosphere (sponsored by the (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies/Société d’études françaises du XVIIIe siècle [SECFS]) [ID 98]
Chair: Logan Connors, University of Miami, logan.connors@miami.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This interdisciplinary roundtable will address issues of performance, ephemerality, and improvisation in the eighteenth-century French-speaking world. Proposals for short presentations on the role of performance, orality, composition, and/or spontaneity in theatre, dance, music, literature, the visual arts, political action, philosophy, and in other media/activities/disciplines are welcome. Participants may present in French or in English. Early-career and independent scholars are especially welcome to apply.

Keywords: France/French, Music, Performance

RT: South-South Connections in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Race & Empire Caucus) [ID 95]
Co-chairs: Jeremy Chow, Bucknell University, j.chow@bucknell.edu, Mona Narain, Texas Christian University, m.narain@tcu.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

The term “Connections” in the “Global South” has emerged to represent challenges to and efforts to decenter the dominance of the western hemisphere’s economies, nations, and geographic locations that have benefited from the exploitations of early modern empires and neo-imperialisms. “South-South Connections” evoke these exchanges and also exemplify recent efforts to establish new forms of economic, political, environmental, and cultural alliances within the Global South.

This panel extends and continues conversations begun in “The Eighteenth-Century Global South” (ASECS 2024) to consider the following questions: How might we excavate and re-conceptualize South-South connections of the long eighteenth-century, broadly conceived? How might we realign approaches to Eighteenth-Century Studies from South-South viewpoints and as a by-product, decenter western empires and the Global North?

We particularly encourage contributions highlighting connections between and from the perspectives of the Global South in any humanistic discipline from faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, and intellectuals from other learned institutions.

Keywords: Africa, Asia, Latin America, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Race and Empire

RT: Teaching the Eighteenth Century with AI [ID 115]
Co-Chairs: Rachel Gevlin, Virginia Commonwealth University, gevlinra@vcu.edu, Bridget Donnelly, Middle Tennessee State University, bridget.donnelly@mtsu.edu  

Weekend: April 4/5 

This roundtable invites submissions that explore productive uses of AI in the classroom. Given the growing ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) and the challenges they increasingly pose for educators in the humanities, we seek proposals that highlight innovative ways to incorporate this technology into our teaching. How might AI be put to use in building students’ close reading capabilities, developing their editorial skills, helping students brainstorm ideas, or expanding the possibilities for creative projects? What in-class assignments, discussion formats, or group projects might marshal AI in the service of expanding students’ reading, writing, and critical thinking? And what specific eighteenth-century texts, authors, and/or social or political concerns anticipate the ethical issues raised by the advent of AI in ways that will resonate with students? We hope this roundtable will produce answers to these questions that offer tangible teaching solutions for ASECS members across academic disciplines and types of institutions.

As an increasing number of ASECS members’ primary teaching responsibilities fall outside of the eighteenth century (general education, composition, foreign language instruction, etc.), we welcome submissions that apply to any courses, though we are particularly excited about ideas that might have broad applications for teaching eighteenth-century materials. Given the online format of ASECS in 2025, we are especially interested in submissions that plan to make use of the digital setting to demonstrate and/or workshop AI tools with session participants.

Keywords: Digital Humanities, Pedagogy 

RT: Teaching Race & Empire in 2025 (sponsored by the Race & Empire Caucus) [ID 94]
Chair: Jeremy Chow, Bucknell University, j.chow@bucknell.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

Each faculty member faces unique challenges when it comes to teaching race and empire depending on the type and location of their institutions, their student demographics, and their own background and training. This roundtable invites participants to share a single primary or secondary text that they integrate into their pedagogy and approaches they use to tailor it to their context. These could include but are not limited to place-based learning activities, strategies for working within legislative or institutional restrictions on classroom content, teaching race and empire at primarily white institutions, and connecting the past with the present. The selected texts will be made available to all interested parties (via Google folder) in anticipation of the roundtable. Presentations will be limited to 5 minutes to foster a robust discussion among speakers and audience members about what it means to teach race and empire in today’s various classrooms.
Keywords: Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Pedagogy, Politics, Race and Empire

RT: The Beaumarchais Manuscript Collection : Implications for 18th-century Research (sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation) [ID 128]
Chair: Gregory Brown, Department of History, UNLV, gregory.brown@unlv.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

In October 2023, the Bibliothèque nationale de France received a gift of the personal papers of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Much of the 20,000-manuscript page collection has not been previously available to scholars literary manuscripts, including letters, financial papers, drafts of memoranda and legal documents. The collection constitutes the largest corpus of new material for 18th-century scholarship in generations. As the BNF works to progressively catalog the collection, this round-table will assess the implications for 18th-century research in a range of disciplines including literature, theater studies, musicology, social history, and history of ideas and for specialists in French, English, Spanish and colonial America. The collection holds significant potential as well for analysis in manuscript studies, correspondence studies, social network analysis, genetic criticism, authorship and digital humanities. As it happens, the round-table will fall on the 250th anniversary of the premiere of “Barbier de Séville,” adding further currency to this round-table.

Keywords: Atlantic World, Author/Authorship, Digital Humanities, History/Historiography, Manuscript Studies

RT: The ‘Low-Brow’ Eighteenth Century [ID 106]
Co-Chairs: Lillian Lu, UC San Diego, llu71@ucla.edu, Miranda Hoegberg, UCLA, mhoegberg@g.ucla.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

The globally popular reality TV series, Love Island (UK), which has spawned companion series worldwide, is known for–besides its raunchy games and gimmicks–its sheer length: each season is over 50 episodes, chronicling the nearly day-to-day life of hot influencer-types as they try to “find love” in a villa for eight weeks. The length, the episodic beats, and the occasional plot meandering–not to mention the love triangles and sexual intrigue–make this series structurally reminiscent of the eighteenth-century novel. This roundtable invites papers that explore the connection between the “low brow” products of popular culture like reality television and eighteenth-century narrative: How might we challenge or embrace the notion of the “low brow” in our studies of the eighteenth century? How do eighteenth-century novels or other media challenge, embrace, eschew, or construct the “low brow”? How are romantic narratives  structured within these works, contemporary and eighteenth-century? Is the “low brow” related to the means of production?  That is, can we connect the relatively swift and formulaic reality genre with the interchangeable picaresque elements that comprise Grub Street hack-writing?       

Keywords: Britain/England, Cultural Studies, Film/Television/Media, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Visual Culture/Studies                                                                                                                                                                                   

RT: The Eighteenth Century on Film and Television [ID 122]
Chair: Steven Thomas, Wagner College, steven.thomas@wagner.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

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 round table invites new scholarly perspectives on how film and television (both new and old) engage with the eighteenth century.  

Keywords: Film/Television/Media                                                                                                                                                                             

RT: The Funny Eighteenth Century [ID 67]
Chair: Danielle Bobker, Concordia University, danielle.bobker@concordia.ca      

Weekend: March 28/29

What makes you laugh in the writing, art, music, or performance of this period and why? What role does humor play in your critical or pedagogical practice? There are infinite reasons to resist and think critically about historical efforts to elicit amusement. However, rather than focusing on the cruelty of laughter, this round table opens up a discussion of the funniest bits in eighteenth-century cultures, and how and why they matter.

Keywords: Humor Studies                                                                                                                                                                         

RT: The Legacies of Morris Eaves [ID 116]
Co-Chairs: Wayne Ripley, Winona State University, wripley@winona.edu; Tom Hothem, University of California, Merced; thothem@ucmerced.edu.

Weekend: March 28/29

This panel invites participants to reflect on the life and work of the William Blake and Romanticism scholar Morris Eaves, who passed away in the spring of 2024. Eaves was the co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and a co-founder of the William Blake Archive as well as the author of books and articles on Blake, art history, technologies of visual reproduction, digital humanities, and editorial theory.

Eaves opened new interdisciplinary vistas of scholarly inquiry that were attuned to the relationship of print production, visual culture, and changing modes of technology. His book The Counter-Arts Conspiracy:  Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992) positioned Blake in a variety of interrelated contexts—aesthetic, chalcographic, technological, religious, economic, and political—to show that Blake was engaged with debates that were both central to the eighteenth century and, as it happens, newly pertinent to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Eaves similarly understood how changes in technology demanded, in his phrase, a new “editorial settlement.” By helping to create and maintain the Blake Archive, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, Eaves posited a new model of the scholarly edition for the digital age and helped to advance the idea of the digital humanities.

Contributors to this panel are welcome to explore any aspect of Eaves’s thought in relation to the eighteenth century, and/or to offer personal reflections. We appeal especially to Eaves’s students, colleagues, and readers in asking participants to examine our field’s current interdisciplinary trajectory in relief of given work(s) from the Age of Blake. Participants should engage cultural production as rigorously and specifically as possible, certainly in the spirit with which Eaves approached such work.

Please submit abstracts of roughly 300 words.

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Digital Humanities, Editing, Material Culture, Visual Culture/Studies                                                                                                                                                                                         

RT: Virtual Intimacies: A Casanovian Approach to Senses, Distances, and Protheses [ID 62]
Chair: Yvonne Fuentes, University of West Georgia, yfuentes@westga.edu         

Discussant: Elena Deanda-Camacho, Washington College, edeanda2@washcoll.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

2025 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Casanova, whose Memoirs’s sixth volume is titled “Spanish Passions.”  2025 also marks ASECS’s adventure into a series of periodical and wholly virtual conferences, in which a system of complicity, implied interactions, and implicit understandings must be established. We invite abstracts exploring the ideas of virtual intimacies, as they can be read in Casanova’s Memoirs. Related topics such as: seduction versus action, potentiality versus actuality; simulated spaces rather than physical boundaries; or media and mediations rather than closeness or intimacy, are welcome; as well as contributions focusing in the Ibero-American, Italian, and French contexts from a trans-national perspective.   

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Italy/Italian, Performance, Virtuality, Spanish-American                              

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

SpS: Adam Smith Problems [ID 134]
Chair: F.E. Guerra-Pujol, University of Central Florida; Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Puerto Rico, fegp@ucf.edu

Weekend: April 4/5

There is more than one “Adam Smith Problem.”

This session is devoted to the open questions involving the life and work of the great 18-century philosopher-economist Adam Smith. 

Keywords: Author/Authorship, Books/Publishing, Britain/England, Caribbean, Class, Economy, France/French, History/Historiography, Labor/Business, Language/Languages, North America, Pedagogy, Performance, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Empire

 

Sps, Preformed Session: Afterlives: Historical Memory and Representation of Notable Women in the Eighteenth Century [Women’s Studies Group: 1558–1837] [ID 117]
Chair: Karen Griscom, Community College of Rhode Island and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, karen.griscom@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

Preformed Session (no further submissions accepted)

Presenters:

• Valerie Schutte, Independent Researcher
• Maria Grazia Dongu, University of Cagliari
• Megumi Ohsumi, University of Oxford

This panel, presented by members of the Women’s Studies Group: 1558–1837, delves into the afterlives of historical figures, focusing on how their narratives were remembered, interpreted, and represented in the eighteenth century. In her groundbreaking study, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (2000), Devoney Looser emphasizes the eighteenth century as a period of significant change in history writing. Like Faith Beasley in Revising Memory, Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (1990), Looser advocates for a broad definition of history writing and recognizes early women historians in their various engagements with writing history. Building on scholars such as Looser, Misty Krueger’s 2015 essay on Jane Austen’s early History of England (1791) and her teenaged marginalia in the family library’s histories positions Austen’s engagement with Stuart history within the tradition of martyrology and vindication literature, highlighting her enthusiasm to redeem historical figures such as Mary Queen of Scots. Using eighteenth-century news stories and visual culture as evidence, Natalee Garrett’s 2022 article on the press’s responses to Queen Charlotte over six decades examines the queen’s public image as an ideal mother as just one aspect of her complex contemporary reception. The eighteenth century witnessed a transformative period in history writing. Scholarship over the past two decades reveals how central women writers and subjects were to history writing. Each paper in this WSG panel on historical memory and representation of notable women in the eighteenth century examines the complex ways in which the legacies of influential women were reshaped through various forms of historical memory and representation during this period.

The Women’s Studies Group: 1558–1837, founded in the early 1980s in the UK and now an international collective, brings together scholars interested in women’s and gender studies from the early modern era through the long eighteenth century.

Keywords: Gender/Sexuality Studies, Afterlives, Reception, History

SpS, Preformed Session: British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 74]
Chair: Melissa J. Ganz, Marquette University, melissa.ganz@marquette.edu, melissa.j.ganz@gmail.com

Weekend: April 4/5

Preformed sessions (no further submissions accepted)

Participants:

• Andrew Bricker
• David Alff
• Suzanna Geiser
• Simon Simon
• Anne Frey
• Nicole Mansfield Wright

This special session will serve as a book launch for an edited volume that will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. The volume, British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, shows how legal developments of the period shaped and were shaped by imaginative writing while highlighting the contributions of eighteenth-century studies to the law-and-literature enterprise. The session will begin with introductory remarks by the volume editor who will serve as session chair. Six of the contributors will then give brief (5-7 minute) overviews of the key claims and interventions of their essays. The presentations will be followed by Q&A and discussion with the audience, whose participation is warmly welcomed.

Participants include Andrew Bricker (on satire and libel law), David Alff (on legal conflicts over early railways), Suzanna Geiser (on Henry Fielding and legal ethics), Simon Simon (on the changing form and precedential value of the legal decision), Anne Frey (on common law and cultural difference in Sir Walter Scott’s fiction), and Nicole Mansfield Wright (on recent appropriations of eighteenth-century literature and legal norms by the Christian right). There will be opportunities to discuss methodological approaches and new directions in the field as well as to answer questions about the process of developing and publishing an edited volume.

Keywords: Books/Publishing, Britain/England, History/Historiography, Research, Other (specify below) 

SpS: Cliquetis Sounds, Smoke Smells, and Other Sensory Experiences in 18th-Century Places of Work [ID 124]
Co-Chairs: Andrew Kettler, University of South Carolina, KETTLERA@mailbox.sc.edu

Preformed Session (no further submissions accepted)

Weekend: April 4/5

Presenters:

• Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University, “Not a Matter of Taste: Interspecies Food Welfare in the Eighteenth Century”
• Mario Grassi, Yale University and University of Padua, “‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’: Workplaces, Sensory Overstimulation, and Public Order in 18th c. Italy”
• Mylène Pardoen, CNRS, “Bretez : les dessous froufroutant du Paris de la fin du XVIIIe siècle”
• Hannah Morand, Yale University, “Seeing Efficiency by Integrating Engineering and Architecture in the Saltworkers’ Experience at Arc-et-Senans, 1775-1804”

In 1755, poet John Dalton vividly captured the tumultuous sounds and sights of industrialization, describing coal mines as “sulph’rous damps” filled with “subterranean thunders,” and miners emerging “from the dark mansions of despair / Welcome once more to light and air.” These descriptions reflected concerns about factories’ transformative impact on the landscape, labor, and society. Two decades later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau voiced similar worries about the industrialization of the Swiss countryside, disturbed not by explosive sounds, but by a low “cliquetis” that interrupted his rêveries during a walk in the Alps, as a factory intruded upon his experience of the “natural” world.

From repetitive factory noises to new and overwhelming smells, tastes and sights, eighteenth-century workers experienced significant changes in their sensory environment. While sensory history has often focused on a nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, our panel seeks to move away from these later bells and smells and focus on the eighteenth century. Archival records reflect the concerns of Dalton and Rousseau, highlighting mechanisation, altered working hours, repetitive motions, changing diets, evolving infrastructure, and new production processes. Although these writers were alarmed by changing landscapes, other narratives reveal consistent and familiar sensory aspects in workplaces, challenging the notion of radical transformation across production sites.

Using sensory experiences as a foundation, our panel seeks to deepen our historical understanding of eighteenth-century workplaces by presenting labourers’ experiences through their touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell. This approach enables a nuanced examination of workers’ experiences amidst spatial and environmental changes. Additionally, we aim to link these physical experiences to critical issues like workplace hierarchies, exploitation, environmental changes, and workers’ physical and mental health. Ultimately, we intend to uncover the intricate interplay between sensory experiences, social dynamics, and environmental transformations in eighteenth-century workplaces.

Keywords: History/Historiography, Material Culture, Sensory, Industrial, Labour             

Sps: Creoles and Criollos: Visibility of Colonial Subjects and Cultures in Florida and Louisiana [ID 112]
Chair: Elizabeth Lewis, University of Mary Washington, elewis@umw.edu

Preformed Session (no further submissions accepted)

Weekend: April 4/5

This session explores the intersections and divergences of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French creole and Spanish criollo cultures in the southern U.S. While linguistically and culturally separate, our consideration of the concepts of creole and criollo in their eighteenth and early nineteenth century contexts seeks to explore the ways that European, indigenous, and African cultures were and are visible in this region.

Keywords: Africa, France/French, Language/Languages, Latin America, North America    

SpS: Digital Personography: A Hands-on Workshop/Edit-a-thon [Workshop] (Digital Humanities Caucus) [ID 92]
Co-chairs: Cassidy Holahan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, cassidy.holahan@unlv.edu, Sabrina Durso, The Ohio State University, durso.19@buckeyemail.osu.edu

Weekend: March 28/29

This workshop on digital personography will focus on linking to and collaborating on open data sources like Wikipedia and other biographical websites to teach the process to participants in a hands-on environment. The ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus invites proposals from either scholars with experience editing or linking to Wikipedia or other open source databases or from scholars with plans for expanding on a particular biographical entry for an eighteenth-century individual.

Participant volunteers will lead the workshop attendees in discussing best linking and editing practices and in editing biographies of eighteenth-century historical and literary figures to collaboratively create, in real time, more historically accurate portrayals of eighteenth-century individuals for the public. Although the Edit-A-Thon during the session will be relatively short, we will also set a goal for the number of entries to be created or expanded over the course of the entire conference.

Keywords: Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent, Digital Humanities, Editing, Pedagogy, Biography

SpS, Book Session: Histories of Science: Rhetoric, Reception, Embodiment, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century [ID 140]
Chair: Danielle Spratt, danielle.spratt@csun.edu, California State University, Northridge danielle.spratt@gmail.com

Weekend: March 28/29

This special two-part book session invites historians of science as well as contributors from the forthcoming collection Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (UVAP, 2024, ed. David Alff and Danielle Spratt) to have a critical discussion of how the volume’s essays offer new, renewed, or alternative ways to theorize and historicize the eighteenth century and contextualize urgent issues of the present: the climate crisis, governmental interventions regarding gender and sexual identity and reproductive justice, the legacies and ongoing impact of western colonialism, and the ongoing importance of amplifying indigenous and non-Western knowledges. The first session will invite contributors to provide a brief overview of their chapters along with a provocation related to one or more of the topics above, and the second session will invite fellow contributors and/or respondents to address and expand on the topics of the first session, with the goal of discussing next steps and the future of the field of eighteenth-century histories of science.        

Keywords: Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Indigeneity/Indigenous Studies, Medicine, Race and Empire, Science

SpS, Preformed Book Session: Reconsidering an 18th-century African Man of Letters: The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho [ID 135]
Chair: Nicole Aljoe, Northeastern University, n.aljoe@northeastern.edu

Preformed Session (no further submissions accepted)

Weekend: March 28/29

The forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho, edited by Nicole N. Aljoe and Kristina Huang will be the first extensive collection of essays exclusively dedicated to the teaching and promoting of academic discussions of Charles Ignatius Sancho, his work, and his legacy. Sancho has long been cited and anthologized in work centering on late-18th century London, the early novel, Sentiment, slavery and abolition, transatlantic literature, early Black authorship in the English-speaking world, and the history of Africans and people of African descent in Britain. Despite Sancho’s presence across these various fields of study, there is only one slim volume of essays centering on Sancho: the National Portrait Gallery’s set of five short essays in 1997, titled Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, published on the occasion of an exhibition in the same year. This roundtable aims to build on recent archival and cultural studies work that reconsiders the life, work, and social contexts of 18th-century Black British letter writer Charles Ignatius Sancho. Contributors from the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho will facilitate conversations about Sancho and his world, as well as his impact on print and visual culture, literary genre, and politics, as well as music and theatre in order to highlight the diverse possibilities of engagements with this Georgian polymath.

Keywords: Author/Authorship, Britain/England, Cultural Studies, Print Culture, Race and Empire     

SpS, Preformed Session: Theatronomics: The Business of Theatre, 1732-1809 [ID 137]
Chair: David O’Shaughnessy, University of Galway, david.oshaughnessy@universityofgalway.ie

Preformed Session (no further submissions accepted)

Weekend: March 28/29

Participants: 

• Jennifer Buckley, University of Galway
• Heather Ladd, University of Galway
• Leslie Ritchie, Queen’s University, Canada
• Leo Shipp, University of Galway
• David Taylor, University of Oxford

This roundtable will explore new possibilities open to theatre historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the Theatronomics database. This project, funded by the European Research Council, will launch an open access database shortly after ASECS 2025 that will present a searchable and sortable wealth of financial information related to the commercial operations of Theatres Royal Covent Garden and Drury Lane. The database offers a granular breakdown of millions of pounds of income and expenditure, allowing an unprecedented insight into the business of theatre in our period. Speakers will include researchers who have worked on the project and those who have had advance access to the database and the session will illuminate how the database might be used by researchers.

Keywords: Britain/England, Digital Humanities, Labor/Business, Material Culture, Performance