Enfilade

Annual SEASECS Meeting — ‘Science and the Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century’
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, 3-5 March 2011

Proposals due by 1 November 2010

The 37th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SEASECS) will be held 3-5 March 2011 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. The theme for the conference will be “Science and the Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The deadline for submission of paper proposals and full panels is 1 November 2010.

The eighteenth century has sometimes been seen in the history of science as a quiescent period between the great advances made by the likes of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz in the seventeenth century and Darwin in the nineteenth. As Roy Porter argues in The Cambridge History of Science (2003), however, the eighteenth century is an especially rich era of interdisciplinarity because of the prominence of humanists “in the dissemination of the sublime truths of the new science” (7). By the end of the century, Romantic artists began to reject the “truths” of science and to promote the arts as alternatives to rather than disseminators of science. Thus the eighteenth century represents a kind of golden era of cross-pollination before the arts and sciences were separated into distinct, sometimes opposing, disciplinary discourses. (more…)