Enfilade

2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Cleveland, 4-7 April 2013

Proposals due by 15 September 2012

The 2013 ASECS conference takes place in Cleveland, 4-7 April. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented by two panels chaired by Christopher Johns and Heather McPherson. In addition to these, a wide selection of sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members are also included below. A full list of panels is available here.

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Anne Schroder New Scholar’s Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Christopher M.S. Johns, 1112 Wildwind Ct., Nashville, TN 37209; Tel: (615) 516 9337; Christopher.Johns@vanderbilt.edu

Named in honor of the late Anne Schroder, this seminar will feature outstanding new research by emerging scholars.

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Interiors as Space and Image (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Heather McPherson, Dept. of Art and Art History, 113 HUM , 900 13th St. South, U. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294; Tel: (205) 934-4942, Fax: (205)-996-6986; hmcphers@uab.edu

In recent years scholars have reconsidered the significance of the eighteenth-century interior as a complex site of social interaction and nexus of display associated with daily life, exhibition practices, and conspicuous consumption. This session invites papers on eighteenth-century interiors as actual spaces experienced in multiple ways (socially, aesthetically, temporally, etc.) OR as represented in paintings, prints, or other art forms. Topics might include functions of different types of interior spaces, furnishings, decorative arts, display of artworks or other objects, etc. in any geographical area during the long eighteenth century.

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Exchange Networks and the Production of Knowledge (Cultural Studies Caucus)
Al Coppola, John Jay College, CUNY and Cristobal Silva, Columbia University; acoppola@jjay.cuny.edu and cs2889@columbia.edu

This panel seeks papers that inquire into and theorize the concept of exchange networks in the long eighteenth century. In particular, we would like to ask what eighteenth-century exchange networks look like, how they signify, and what specific cultural work they do. We seek a broad variety of approaches that might range from trans-oceanic and transnational commercial and scientific exchanges, to decidedly local and domestic communities that organize themselves around the production, transfer and transformation of knowledge across boundaries of many sorts. Furthermore, while we are certainly interested in textualexchanges, we welcome proposals that investigate ―non-textual‖ exchange networks of bodies, objects, practices, and performance. Questions panelists might address include how these networks constitute themselves, how they become legible, how they transport new ideas, practices, and concepts into the wider culture, and how they reconfigure—or reposition—political, national, geographic, administrative, professional, and domestic spaces. We are also particularly interested in papers that address the transformations and resistances that that knowledge undergoes when traversing networks of exchange, as well as the special problems that networks of exchange raise for epistemology, insofar as theoretical and conceptual systems could vary from community to community. Finally, proposals might address how the figure/trope of the exchange network shapes our own approach to and understanding of the eighteenth century. Anyone interested in proposing a paper should submit a 250-word abstract and a brief c.v. to both chairs.

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Publicity and the Public Sphere (Digital Humanities Caucus)

Tonya Howe, Marymount U., Dept. of Literature and Languages, 2807 North Glebe Road, Arlington VA 22207; Tel:
(703) 284-5762; Fax: (703) 284-3859; thowe@marymount.edu

[D]igital humanities is . . . a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years. –Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?”
The “social undertaking” of the digital humanities is, in some ways, a remarkably eighteenth-century set of practices. The intersection between print, modernity, publicity, and democratic engagement has long been of interest to scholars of the eighteenth century. What can digital humanities help us learn about the eighteenth-century public sphere and publicity? What can the digital humanities—its methodologies, its tools, its ethics, its politics—bring to the study of the eighteenth century? How does understanding eighteenth-century modes of publication and publicity help us analyze our own digital culture? This panel seeks theoretical, critical, and/or pedagogical responses to these broad questions broadly defined.

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The History and Future of Data Visualization (Digital Humanities Caucus)

Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, 686 Cherry St., Atlanta, GA 30332; Tel: (404) 894-1159; lauren.klein@lcc.gatech.edu

According to The New York Times, the “next big thing” for the humanities is data. But scholars of the eighteenth century have long recognized that era as the one in which taxonomical representation of data, and related forms of visual display, rose to the fore. This panel seeks papers that address the history and future of data visualization, broadly conceived. Topics may include: data-mining and visualization techniques applied to eighteenth-century texts; eighteenth-century ideas about—and approaches to—data, and related forms of display; creative uses and/or theorizations of digital tools for teaching and research.

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Life After the Hooding Ceremony (Roundtable) (Professionalization Panel Sponsored by the Graduate Student Caucus)

Katharine Zimolzak, Dept. of English, U. of Southern California, 404 Taper Hall of Humanities, 3501 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 9089-0354; Tel: (517) 740-7753; zimolzak@usc.edu

This roundtable seeks to engage faculty, current and former postdoctoral recipients, and other young career professionals in a conversation on the processes of professionalization after completion of the PhD degree. Participants may wish to speak about interview tactics, the changing faces of the job market, what looks good on a CV, the benefits of postdoctoral fellowships or assistant professorships, negotiating job acceptance, options for candidates with partners, or similar. Contributions might also include more holistic assessments or personal familiarity with the postdoctoral life, either from young scholars or those who have served on job search committees. We request that participants aim their remarks towards an audience consisting primarily of graduate students, and welcome thoughts on the cautions and rewards of various postdoctoral experiences within the larger scope of an academic career.

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Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Italian Studies Caucus)

Francesca Savoia, U. of Pittsburgh, Dept. of French and Italian, 1328 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; Tel: (412) 624-6265; Fax: (412) 624-6263; Savoia@pitt.edu

This session wants to explore the complex and rich interplay between the English and Italian cultures, paying particular attention to the role that wealthy grandtourists, itinerant scholars and artists, expatriates and foreign residents of both nationalities had in it. Papers may address one or more of the following suggested aspects:
• National prejudices
• Comparisons and contrasts
• The classics as cultural mediators
• The book market: editorial projects and policies (translations, adaptations, borrowings etc.)
• The creation, circulation and influence of cultural periodicals
• The emergence of women writers, artists, travelers and salonnières
• Personal journals and correspondences
• Teaching and studying Italian in England and English in Italy
• Literary canons and national identity
• Italy on the English stage / England on the Italian stage
• Italy-France-England: an unavoidable triangulation?

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Has the Age of Reason Become Unreasonable?: Contemporary Perspectives on Post Enlightenment Legacies‖ (New Lights Forum: Contemporary Perspectives on the Enlightenment)

Jennifer Vanderheyden, Marquette U., Tel: (508) 981-0495; Jennifer.vanderheyden@marquette.edu

In a recent speech at a symposium at the University of Missouri on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, retired Canadian General and Senator Romeo Dallaire made the following statement: “ambiguity and complexity are the norms in our world, in which deductive reasoning will be too slow.” How does the immediacy of global technology affect reason as it was defined and understood during the long Eighteenth Century? Do philosophical theories of the Eighteenth Century still resonate in this digitally advanced era on the one hand, and political and economic disorder on the other? This panel invites discussion of any Eighteenth century genre (philosophy, fiction and non-fiction, aesthetics, etc.), in terms of its legacy on contemporary thought.

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Scottishness, Britishness, and the Union (Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society)

Mark Towsey, Dept. History, U. of Liverpool, 9 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WZ, United Kingdom; Tel: +44 (0)151 794 2383; Fax: +44 (0)151 794 2366 (marked for the attention of Mark Towsey); towsey@liverpool.ac.uk

With a public referendum looming on the future of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, the question of Scottish participation in the United Kingdom has never been more topical – or more urgent. This interdisciplinary panel considers Scotland’s role in the making of the Union, exploring the various ways in which Scots sought actively to consolidate – or to resist – the new forms of British identity thrust upon them in the long eighteenth century. Topics might include, but are not limited to: Scottish settlement in England; textual and visual expressions of Scottishness and/or Britishness, along with their production and reception; material culture, food and drink; representations of the Scottish past; Scots and Empire; travel narratives and the Home Tour. Papers that explore English encounters with Scotland are equally welcome.

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Fruit, Vegetables, and Flowers: Art, Literature, Science, Religion, Philosophy, Cookery (South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)

Kevin L. Cope, Dept. of English, Louisiana State U., Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803; Tel: (225) 578-2864: Fax: (225) 751-3161; jovialintelligence@cox.net or encope@lsu.edu

Everyone with heart or at least appetite takes note of the occasions when characters in eighteenth-century works bite into a joint of mutton or down beef and ale. Less noticed but far more pervasive and possibly more inductive of health are the numerous appearances by the benefactions of the plant world, whether fruits, vegetables, or flowers. Those citizens of the botanical kingdom appears in every imaginable context, from still-life paintings to table garnishes to metaphorical renderings of cosmology to scenes in plays. This panel will welcome contributions on all aspects of the produce stall and its inhabitants and on all uses and artful renderings of the tasty and attractive gifts of the gardener’s hand.

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EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History (Roundtable) (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing [SHARP] and the Bibliography Society of America [BSA])

Eleanor F. Shevlin and Anna Battigelli, Shevlin: 2006 Columbia RD, NW, Apt. 42, Washington, DC 20009, Battigelli: English Dept.; SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY 12901; Tel: Shevlin: (202) 462-3105 or (610) 436-2463; Battigelli: (518) 643 7158; Fax: Shevlin: (610) 738-0516 Battigelli: (518) 564-2140; eshevlin@wcupa.edu and anna.battigelli@plattsburgh.edu

ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and its Burney 17th- and 18th-Century Newspaper Collection are transforming the landscape of eighteenth-century scholarship and teaching. While these commercial databases are well known for affording unprecedented access to early modern works, their full potential has yet to be realized. Aimed at advancing these tools’ usefulness, this roundtable seeks four to five ten-minute presentations that demonstrate ways in which these textabases can further work in book history and bibliography. Possible topics include using EEBO, ECCO, and/or Burney textbases to uncover, amend, or enhance information about the creation, production, circulation, or consumption of texts in the long eighteenth century; employing these tools to illustrate the importance of bibliographical knowledge and practices; applying their search capabilities to trace details about authors, printers, booksellers, paratextual elements, distribution networks, illustrations, translators (and translations), readers, pricing, and more; exploring the ways these digital tools are affecting or even reconfiguring the methodologies and research practices of book historians and bibliographers. Presentations that focus on EEBO Interactions (EI), a scholarly networking forum available to both EEBO subscribers and nonsubscribers, are especially welcomed. So too are examples of classroom exercises, course assignments, or advanced undergraduate or graduate seminars designed around one or more of these databases. Abstracts of 250-words should be emailed to Eleanor Shevlin (eshevlin@wcupa.edu) and Anna Battigelli (a.battigelli@att.net). Proposers need not be members of SHARP or BSA to submit, but panelists must be members of both ASECS and either BSA or SHARP in order to present. For questions about SHARP membership, please direct inquiries to Eleanor Shevlin at eshevlin@wcupa.edu. For questions about BSA membership, please direct inquiries to Catherine Parisian at catherine.parisian@uncp.edu.

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Innovative Course Design

ASECS, PO Box 7867, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109; Tel: (336) 727-4694; ASECS@wfu.edu

Proposals should be for a new approach to teaching a unit within a course on the eighteenth century, covering perhaps one to four weeks of instruction, or for an entire new course. For example, participants may offer a new approach to a specific work or theme, a comparison of two related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), an interdisciplinary approach to a particular social or historical event, new uses of instructional technology (e.g., web sites, internet resources and activities), or a new course that has never been taught or has been taught only very recently for the first time. Participants are encourage to include why books and topics were selected and how they worked. Applicants should submit five (5) copies of a 3-5 page proposal (double-spaced) and should focus sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit to be developed. Where relevant, a syllabus draft of the course should also be provided. Only submissions by ASECS members will be accepted. A $500 award will be presented to each of the participants, and they will be invited to submit a twelve-page account of the unit or course, with a syllabus or other supplementary materials for publication on the website.

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Eating and Drinking in the Eighteenth Century

Beverly Schneller, The U. of Baltimore, 1420 North Charles, Baltimore, MD 21201; Tel: (410) 837-5244; Fax: (410) 837-5249; bschneller@ubalt.edu

The session would examine literary as well as artistic and historical interest in eating and drinking in the eighteenth century. Though we all know Fielding’s use of food in Tom Jones, the period writers were also drawn to writing about coffee, chocolate, and beer, among other things as enjoyed both socially and medically. Papers about eating and drinking in any art form are welcome as are studies involving etiquette, religious prohibitions on foods, and cookbooks, etc.

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The Impact and Distribution of Paper Money in the Long Eighteenth Century

Amanda Lahikainen, History of Art and Architecture, Brown U., Providence, RI; Tel: (978) 590-8950; Amanda_lahikainen@brown.edu

“At present the state of their [French] treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation.” Burke continues his rant against the chimera of paper money in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by comparing British paper money favorably to the forced paper currencies of assignats and mandats stating “our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none.” The implementation of paper money, an idea now sufficiently naturalized, was a subject of heated debate in the eighteenth century. Several well documented cases, such as the forced currencies used during French Revolution and the British specie crisis of 1797, indicate how paper affected nearly every aspect of social life from the national debt to the production of satire. This panel seeks interdisciplinary papers that will analyze the use and reception of paper money over the long eighteenth century up to and including when European nations began issuing paper money as legal tender. Have historians paid equal attention to paper money as to coin? Has the visualization of debt and credit been sufficiently addressed in eighteenth-century studies? Has the conceptual link between self-consciousness and the modern notion of paper money posited by Slavoj Žižek been adequately investigated? Related submissions concerning bills of exchange, debt, credit, the global history of finance, and other forms of economic print culture are also welcome.

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Birding the Eighteenth Century: The Role of Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Culture, and Society

Brycchan Carey, Reader in English Literature, Dept. of English Literature and Creative Writing, Kingston U., Penrhyn Rd., Kingston-upon-Thames KT1 2EE, United Kingdom; Tel: +44 1767 651141, brycchan@brycchancarey.com

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the role of animals in eighteenth-century literature, society, and culture. This panel will deepen our understanding of human-animal interactions by exploring the role of birds in the period. Birds of various kinds had long held a place in literature and folklore, as well as on the dinner table, but, from the late seventeenth century onwards, natural philosophers such as Francis Willughby and John Ray began to develop the modern science of ornithology; work extended in the eighteenth century by scientists such as Brisson and Buffon. At the same time, birds continued to be represented in complex ways in literature. Famous examples include Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, Lawrence Sterne’s caged starling, Mrs. Throckmorton’s bullfinch, and, of course, the skylarks and nightingales of Romantic poetry. Explorers and colonists encountered and described new birds in distant lands—and also found the winter homes of familiar migratory birds, thus answering an age-old question about where birds disappeared to at certain times of year. This panel accordingly invites scholars working in literature, history, the history of science, art history, ecocriticism, and related disciplines to present research on any aspect of ornithological thought and culture in the long eighteenth century.

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Art within Art

Anne Betty Weinshenker, Dept. of Art and Design, Montclair State U., Montclair, NJ 07043; Tel: (973) 655-728; Fax: (973) 655-7833; weinshenkera@mail.montclair.edu

Many paintings and reliefs made in the eighteenth century portray paintings, statues, or objects of decorative art. This seminar is intended to focus on the purposes for the inclusion of such items and the interactions between them and the “host” works.

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The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

Brian Michael Norton, California State U., Dept. of English, P.O. Box 6848, Fullerton, CA 928434-6848; Tel: (657) 278-3460; Bnorton@fullerton.edu

The eighteenth century’s fascination with everyday life can be detected in a wide range of genres and cultural practices, including the novel, familiar essay, satire, drame bourgeois, biography, autobiography, genre painting, letter-writing and journalizing. This panel invites an interdisciplinary exploration of this new interest in the ordinary, focusing especially on issues of aesthetics: How did everyday life come to be seen as a worthy subject of aesthetic representation What were the privileged modes of narrativity or protocols of description used for these representations, and where did they come from? How, in turn did new aesthetic forms allow individuals to see and think about ordinary life in new ways?

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What’s Fame Got to Do with It? : Celebrity Studies and the Eighteenth Century (Roundtable)

Laura Engel, English Dept., Duquesne U., 600 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15282; Tel: (412 ) 396-1425; engell784@duq.edu

This roundtable seeks to explore the many ways in which the emerging interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies has had an impact on eighteenth-century scholarship and pedagogical practices. Short papers/presentations can address the benefits, drawbacks, politics, seductiveness, dangers, and/or productivity of working with celebrity studies in and out of the classroom. Panelists may also comment on the parameters, narratives, and theoretical frameworks involved in celebrity studies as a discipline.

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Constructing, Imagining, and Theorizing Landscapes in the Eighteenth Century

Yvonne Fuentes, 256 W. Ardenwood Dr., Baton Rouge, LA 70806; Tel: (225) 234-7717; yvonnefuentes@cox.net

This panel invites papers wishing to explore landscapes and gardens as imagined, constructed, represented, and theorized spaces and images. Whether as a utilitarian space dedicated to provide food for survival or as an extension of political, philosophical and aesthetic discourses, landscapes and gardens were a prevalent theme and trope throughout the eighteenth century. We invite papers on any of the following:
• Intersections between the land and the cultural construct
• Intersections between the land and ideology, aesthetics, social and political discourse
• Landscapes and other art forms
• Landscapes of the everyday and of the exotic
• Landscapes/gardens and subjectivity/objectivity
• Landscapes of utopia and of chaos

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Eighteenth-Century Art on Display

Andria Derstine, Curator of Collections and Curator of European & American Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, and Jon Seydl, The Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos, Jr., Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, 1500-1800, Cleveland Museum of Art; Andria.Derstine@oberlin.edu and JSeydl@clevelandart.org

From the Paris salons to Rome’s concorsi, and in art exhibitions elsewhere throughout Europe and the Americas as well as in both religious and private domestic settings, indoors and outside, the notion of display has been integral to the public perception of art. This session seeks papers that discuss display and exhibition during the long eighteenth century, or indeed, that raise contemporary issues relating to today’s museum installations of the art of the long eighteenth century. Potential topics include framing, installation, seeking to provide context, spectatorship, public reaction, etc. Papers dealing with any aspect of the broad diversity of artistic production in the long eighteenth century (sculpture, painting, decorative arts and domestic furnishings) are encouraged.

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The Sensational Eighteenth Century

Greta LaFleur, English Dept., U. of Hawai`i at Manoa, Kuykendall 402, 1733 Donaggho Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822; Tel: (215) 435-4008; gll@hawaii.edu

Scholars of eighteenth-century studies have long noted that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cultural inquiries into what it meant to be human, and to be conscious as a human, intensified and assumed new shape. Major shifts in the philosophy of epistemology around what humans could know and how they knew that they could know it, permeated popular discourse. Increasingly central to these scientific, philosophical and more popular meditations on the human and human consciousness was a renewed interest in the senses, and in the human as a sensate organism. This panel invites paper proposals that explore eighteenth-century representations and conceptualizations of the sensate human body. We will approach the history of sensation at its most capacious, understanding the figure of sensation as existing at a crucial intersection within contemporary cultural conversations around interiority. Because the category of the sensate or the sensational is inherently quite broad, this panel invites papers that may explore topics as diverse as the history of sound; the representation of pain; medical theories of the origins of physiological sensation; science and sensation; sensational fiction and print markets; passions; emotion; sympathy and moral philosophy; sensation and emergent notions of race; sensationalism and empiricism; and embodiment and consciousness.

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Biographies from Concept to Text (Roundtable)

Reed Benhamou, Indiana University, Bloomington, 441 Southern Dr., Lafayette, IN 47909; Tel: (765) 471-4592; benhamou@indiana.edu

A round-table allowing those who have written or are writing a biography to discuss what attracted them to the genre and to their subject, and how their view of both has been affected by the processes of research and narrative development. Given our ASECS umbrella, the subjects of these biographies (whether human, animal, or material object) must have accomplished their life-cycle during the long eighteenth century. Panelists will have up to 10 minutes to introduce their biographical projects, noting how they found their subjects (or how their subjects found them) and the problems and opportunities they anticipate or have encountered as they turn their research into narrative. To enhance conversation, laptops should remain in laps.

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Re-defining Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (Roundtable)

Jeff Strabone, 202 Baltic Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201; Tel: (347) 407-1012; jeff@strabone.com

The dates, definitions, and contents of Romanticism have been under new pressure since the rise of four-nations approaches in the 1990s. Where once Romanticism was widely held to begin in 1789, after the French Revolution or in reaction to Enlightenment, it is now common to see its emergence dated decades earlier. The eighteenth-century ballad revival, Macpherson’s works of Ossian, and Percy’s Reliques are mid-century events now widely regarded as Romantic. The genres and concepts of Romanticism commanding the most scholarly attention are likewise changing. In lieu of emphases on lyric poetry and the imagination, recent studies have focused new scrutiny on ballads, song collections, dialect poetry, medievalism, and national questions. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (2004) have argued for the nation as ‘the excluded category that bears Romantic value’. Maureen McLane (2008) has prophesied that ‘the partitions between eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism will not stand’. Murray Pittock (2008) has made the case for seeing Scots poet Allan Ramsay (fl. 1720s) as a Romantic.

This timely roundtable will consider the stakes of this ongoing transformation in the definition, periodization, and theorization of Romanticism. It will ask such questions as, Why has the starting point of Romanticism become such a forward-moving target? What does this shift mean for the study of the eighteenth century and the study of Romanticism? Is the long eighteenth century becoming a long Romantic century? Why have eighteenth-century scholars, more so than those of other periods, so readily adopted a four-nations approach? Why are we now constructing a more encompassing Romanticism? Alternatively, why had post-war Romantic canons omitted so many figures (e.g., Charlotte Smith, Macpherson, Burns) now readily acknowledged as Romantic? What new blind spots might we be creating? What other questions should we be asking? The roundtable will proceed by a series of five or six informal presentations, followed by discussion between the panelists and audience in a true roundtable format. Please send a proposal of up to 250 words and a c.v.

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Asian Encounters in the Eighteenth Century

Kristel Smentek, Dept. of Architecture, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 10-303c, Cambridge, MA 02139; Tel: (617) 253-5133; Fax: (617) 258-9455; smentek@mit.edu

It is by now well established that China and Japan loomed large in the eighteenth-century European imagination, and that Europe was equally fascinating to sectors of Chinese and Japanese society. This panel seeks to understand the dynamics of this mutual, crosscultural interest by attending to the bi-directional reception and translation of foreign ideas and motifs. It seeks, in particular, to move beyond chinoiserie, with its attendant assumptions of triviality and lack of intellectual curiosity, as the dominant frame for understanding Euro-American responses to Asian objects, philosophy, music and literature. Methodologically innovative papers that engage with the production and circulation of media including ceramics, textiles, mechanical instruments, prints and architectural designs are invited, as are studies of the collecting and display of foreign things; the writing and staging of operas and plays; and the roles of missionaries and merchants as cultural mediators. Papers that address Asian encounters with European cultural productions are especially encouraged.

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Collectors and Collecting

Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Dept. of Art and Art History, U. of Rhode Island, 105 Upper College Road-suite 1, Kingston, RI 02881; Tel: (401) 874-2773; wroworth@uri.edu

This session invites papers on any aspect of collecting practice, collectors, and/or types of private or public collections during the long eighteenth century. These include collections of artworks, antiquities, books, manuscripts, specimens of natural history, historical artifacts, or other objects. Papers might examine collectors’ motivations, how they arranged, catalogued, or displayed their collections, and the varied purposes different kinds of collections served such as developing historical or scientific knowledge, providing aesthetic pleasure, showing off social status, or promoting public improvement.

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Representing the Immaterial

Christopher Loar, Dept. of English, U. of California Davis, One Shields, Davis, CA 95616; Tel: (530) 574-2905; Fax: (530) 752-5013; cfloar@ucdavis.edu

How do literary texts or aesthetic objects imagine the relationship between the material and the immaterial? How are immaterial substances envisioned or imagined? Papers might consider treatments of immaterial things or of the nature of immaterial substances in novels, plays, poetry, sermons, natural philosophy, or the arts; topics might include the problem of representing the immaterial, studies of the mind, the nature of divinity or the soul, invisibility, or eighteenth-century theories of systematicity, among others. Interdisciplinary approaches are very much welcome, as are papers drawing from texts or traditions from the British Isles, the Americas, or the European continent. One-page proposals for fifteen-minute papers are solicited.

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Sacred Spaces and Spirituality in the Long Eighteenth Century

William Stargard, Dept. of Art History, Pine Manor College, 400 Heath St., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467; Tel: (617) 731-7070; Fax: (617-731-7199; stargarw@pmc.edu

This session focuses on how religious spirituality during the long eighteenth century (c. 1688 – 1815) was often shaped and defined by the architectural spaces of churches, temples, mosques, etc. Filippo Juvarra’s Basilica of Superga (near Turin) and Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Pantheon (Paris) are just two of the many examples from the long eighteenth century. How did the physical setting (including both the architectural design as well as the paintings, sculptures and decorations that might be contained within) provide a framework for spiritual concerns? To what degree was space an important element in the spirituality? Papers may address any religion or geographical location during the long eighteenth century. While attention will be focused on the art historical dimensions of sacred space and spirituality, papers addressing imagined spaces in literature and philosophy are also encouraged in this interdisciplinary session.

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Reading China during the Enlightenment

Daniel Purdy, German Dept., 406 Burrowes Building, Penn State University , University park, PA 16802; dlp14@psu.edu

Few Europeans in the early modern period travelled to China, yet there was a lively intellectual discussion about Chinese philosophy, its system of government and its art. This reception of China in northern Europe was guided by the many travelogues that were published by Europeans travelling to Asia. If German, French, Dutch and British intellectuals could not visit China, they could certainly interpret the images and texts brought back by Europeans to represent the Middle Kingdom. A second major strand of Europeans engaging with China was the aristocratic enthusiasm for Chinese commodities, for porcelain and painting. Inevitably these two approaches to China intersected with one another: the philosophical with the material. Within two generations, the perceptions of China were enmeshed in European politics as much as Asian. This panel will trace the development of theoretical statements about China’s social order, starting with Leibniz’s intense correspondence with Jesuits travelling to China, and his visions of China as an ideal society ruled by an emperor trained in Confucian ethics. We will consider how the Jesuit portrayals of Confucianism and the emperor shaped the concept of the Enlightened absolute ruler. To what extent did Leibniz and his disciple, Christian Wolff, interpret Jesuit travelogues as a model for ethical politics in Central Europe? We will then consider how the elite adoption of Chinoiserie style in the courts of Vienna, Dresden and Potsdam departed significantly from the ethical politics Leibniz and Wolff saw in China. How were material objects and paintings understood to embody an ideal of social harmony and beauty by the German court elite? How were precious Chinese commodities integrated into the rituals of the Absolutist court?

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Visual Animal Politics

Sarah R. Cohen, Fine Arts 216, U. at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222; Tel: (518) 229-6188; Fax: (518) 442-4807; scohen@albany.edu

This interdisciplinary session will address ways in which nonhuman animals were invested with political value in visual representations of the long eighteenth century. Papers may consider political attitudes toward animals themselves or uses to which animals were put to make political gestures. In what ways did nonhuman animals embody understandings of social rank among humans, or perhaps even degrees of humanity? What roles did animals play in the dynamics of human gendering? Given that the contemporary Animal Rights movement traces its roots to Jeremy Bentham’s declaration that animals visibly suffer, is there evidence in visual representation for such advocacy of animal wellbeing?

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Queer Mediations

Edward Kozaczka, 756 S. Carondelet St. #208, Los Angeles, CA 90057; Tel: (717) 448-8040; edward.kozaczka@gmail.com

In their provocative collection of essays, This is Enlightenment, Clifford Siskin and William Warner ask us to turn our attention away from what the Enlightenment is, an inquiry they suggest inevitably collapses back into issues of representation and ideological critique, and focus on the tools that were used to create forms in which the Enlightenment was transmitted. These tools, which Siskin and Warner call “mediations,” were crafted and implemented along a hierarchy: certain forms such as public houses, newspapers, and periodical essays enabled other forms of mediation, including magazines and encyclopedias. By the time Immanuel Kant had decided that his age was one of enlightenment, society had become saturated with these modes of transmission, which Siskin and Warner claim allowed the Enlightenment to successfully end itself. Thus, mediation is a concept with a history, and the Enlightenment, “an event in the history of mediation,” has a tangible birth, life, and death.

Critics debate this method for ignoring what is being mediated; indeed, for glossing over representation altogether in order to examine the “in what” the Enlightenment occurred. What this panel aims to consider, then, is how we can reconcile mediation as a methodology with schools of thought that emerged from cultural studies. In particular, queer theory, like Siskin’s and Warner’s method, is invested in returning us to the past so that we might question knowledge that we accept as irrefutable; and, queer scholars are particularly interested in examining the forms, or the “in what,” desire was produced, shaped, and foreclosed.

Therefore, this panel invites papers that examine the following questions: how might we conceive of queer mediations in the Enlightenment? Can a queer methodology still be useful if we shift the emphasis away from representation and toward formal technologies? What are the stakes, particularly for queer scholarship, of abandoning a cultural studies approach for one that focuses exclusively on the forms in which the Enlightenment—and eighteenth-century categories of gender and sexuality—emerged, traveled, and ended? What did queer modes of transmission and mediation look like, and how can they augment the histories of sexuality on which we currently rely for genealogies and taxonomies of ―modern‖ forms of desire? How did certain forms of mediation lead to queer ways of being and knowing? The panel is interdisciplinary and encourages submissions from various disciplines: literary studies, art history, music/musicology, history, “hard” sciences, performances studies, and any field in the social sciences.

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Boundaries, Borderlands, and Frontiers in Central and East Central Europe

Michael Yonan, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology, U. of Missouri–Columbia, 109 Pickard Hall, Columbia, MO 65211; Tel: (573) 882-6711; Fax: (573) 884-5269; yonanm@missouri.edu

The political realities that have shaped the cultures of Central and East Central Europe present unique problems to modern scholars interested in understanding the region’s eighteenth-century history. Its past political boundaries rarely match its modern ones, and frequent changes in perceived and actual borders complicate scholarly understanding of what were at the outset overlapping and fluid cultural spheres. The Banat, for example, was a clearly defined entity within the Habsburg Empire and the focus of sustained attention from the imperial court in Vienna. Today the Banat is split between the modern nations of Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, its Viennese connections still visible in local architecture and culture, but otherwise easy to overlook in the wake of post-
Enlightenment nationalist urgencies. Likewise, Poland’s eighteenth-century history is impossible to comprehend without recognizing its place within a commonwealth of two nations, Polish and Lithuanian, which included areas now in the modern nation of Ukraine. Viewed continentally, the entire region of Central and East Central Europe, a swathe of countries stretching from Germany to Romania and from Latvia to Bosnia, has been formulated as a single huge borderland, one that separates western Europe from a constantly shapeshifting eastern Other. This panel seeks papers that discuss the problem of understanding this region’s boundaries, frontiers, and borders in the eighteenth century. What happened at the boundaries of societies in this region? How did borders correlate or not correlate with cultures? And how do modern borders obscure or complicate our understanding of the area’s eighteenth-century history? Papers may examine political, economic, or social issues; art and architecture; literature and theater; or any aspect of culture generally.

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Cultural Counterpoints: Censors, Theatre, and the Arts in the Societies and Cultural Milieu of the Old and New Worlds

Gloria Eive and Madeline Sutherland-Meier, Eive: 1814 Marineview Dr., San Leandro, CA 94577; Sutherland-Meier: Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 1 University Station B3700 – The U. of Texas at Austin – Austin, TX 78712-1155; Tel: Eive: (510) 895-9118; Sutherland-Meier: (512) 471-4936; geive@silcon.com and madelinesm@austin.texas.edu

The activities of playwrights, musicians, artists, and writers were of immense interest and concern to both Church and State in the Old and New Worlds. The unremitting efforts of the Inquisition and various government officials to censor and dictate the content and character of public performances, publications, and the activities of playwrights, artists, and musicians created a tense interplay and counterpoint between creative efforts and political demands. Censorship affected a broad spectrum of creative activities and expression during the long eighteenth century, and papers from all disciplines are invited.

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Peace Treaties as Cultural Form

Douglas Fordham, U. of Virginia, McIntire Dept. of Art, PO Box 400130, Charlottesville, VA 22904; Tel: (434) 243-2285; fordham@virginia.edu

This interdisciplinary session will explore the quintessential diplomatic record of the eighteenth century, the peace treaty, as a site for cultural expression. How were peace treaties represented, celebrated, or ridiculed in theatre, the visual arts, music, dance, literature, satire, or festival? How were these representations constitutive of communities (regional, national, public, international, imperial, etc…) or exclusive in their terms (via gender, race, ethnicity, political standing, etc….)? What might a cultural history of ‘making peace’ contribute to our understanding of cosmopolitanism, national difference, imperial exchange, or Western identity?

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Eighteenth-Century Science and Art

Pam Lieske, Kent State U. at Trumbull, 4925 Parkway Dr., Garfield Hts, OH 44125; Tel: (216) 704-4045; plieske@kent.edu

This panel focuses on intersections between science and art during the long eighteenth century. Connections between any type of scientific and artistic genre or methodology are welcome. Of particular interest, however, are papers that highlight how specific cultural and material practices work to produce certain kinds of scientific art or artistic science as well as the cultural reception of these artifacts by eighteenth-century audiences.

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Chinoiserie Redux: Rethinking Theories and Methods for the Study of Globalization in the Eighteenth Century

Ryan Whyte, OCAD U. and Jenny Purtle, U. of Toronto; 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 1W1; Tel: (416) 977-6000; Fax: (416) 977-6006; rwhyte@faculty.ocadu.ca and jenny.purtle@utoronto.ca

Long considered a frivolous, if not racist, European reimagining of Chinese forms, eighteenth-century Chinoiserie presents challenges to assumptions about hierarchies of media and genres, authorship, and cultural exchange fundamental to multiple disciplines. Yet the scholarly apparatus for thinking about Chinoiserie fails to match the complexity of the phenomenon itself. As a corrective to the current state of scholarship, this panel seeks to explore new theoretical and methodological approaches to Chinoiserie. Such approaches might be articulated across a broad range of objects and texts to which the category of Chinoiserie may apply or relate—including, but not limited to objects such as Meissen porcelain, Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine, François Boucher’s paintings of “Chinese” subjects, and European dresses made with Chinese export silk. To understand the intellectual and material culture of the world in which Chinese and European objects coexisted, circulated, and cross-pollinated requires moving beyond thinking of Chinoiserie as a stylistic category defined by its association with the rococo, to a material phenomenon strongly shaped by Enlightenment thought. Indeed, Chinoiserie might be productively rethought as an engine of globalization in the eighteenth century. Consequently this panel will probe questions such as: How did Chinoiserie mediate contact between China and the rest of the world in the eighteenth century both by requiring contact with Chinese things, and by, simultaneously, transcending such contact in the local reinvention of Chinese forms, archetypes, styles, etc.? Is Chinoiserie fundamentally similar to or different from other forms of global artistic and cultural exchange of the period? What alternatives to prevailing notions of pastiche, hybridity, and cultural exchange might attend to the complex processes of selection, adaptation, and assimilation that produced Chinoiserie? What new theoretical models might address the confusion of authorship, styles, and sources that characterizes much Chinoiserie?

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Theory of Fashion in the Eighteenth Century

Timothy Campbell, Dept. of English, U. of Chicago; campbellt@uchicago.edu

While the proliferation of scholarly attention to material life in recent years has vastly and often ingeniously expanded our sense of the local and contingent significances of dress objects and representations, scholarly attention to the eighteenth century’s native theorization of fashion—as a central social force or phenomenon and as a distinctive idiom of cultural change—has sometimes receded in consequence. If fashion’s irresistible evolutions often mark for this period the limits of what can be explained about culture, the insistence with which eighteenth-century thought (not just its praxis) marks fashion’s power nevertheless requires further explanation. This session seeks papers interested in recovering the eighteenth-century theory of fashion as well as the fundamental logics that undergird it—both as a sophisticated knowledge of culture that is relevant to our historicist understanding of the period and as a significant, transdisciplinary resource for our present-day efforts to confront the elusive problem of how and why change happens. Please send abstracts of 300 words to Timothy Campbell.

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Absorption and the Arts: Assessing Michael Fried’s Legacy

Michael Thomas Taylor, Dept. of German, The U. of Calgary, GSEAS, Craigie Hall C205, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada; As of August 15th: Reed College, Dept. of German, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR, 97202-8199; Tel: (403) 837-8213; from June 30 to August 10, 2012 +49-162-192-4129; Fax: (403) 284-3810; mttaylor@ucalgary.ca. and Hector Reyes, Dept. of Art History, U. of California, Los Angeles; 100 Dodd Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095; Tel: (323) 529-3085; Fax: (323) 461-7119; hreyes@humnet.ucla.edu.

In 1980, the art historian Michael Fried identified “absorption,” a particular mode of authenticity and interiority, as a central concern of both eighteenth-century French art and criticism. This panel seeks to assess the legacy of “absorption” from an interdisciplinary perspective. We invite scholars from a broad range of disciplines to consider the impact of Fried’s theory in the context of the eighteenth century and its contemporary reception. Questions may include: To what extent does absorption help to explain the form of eighteenth-century theater? Is absorption meaningful in the context of literature and print cultures? Are there aspects or instances of absorption that have been overlooked in Fried’s narrative of painting’s development? What are the eighteenth-century intellectual roots of Fried’s own philosophical investments? Does Fried’s paradigm support a philosophical account of subjectivity that contrasts with crucial points of reference, beginning with German Idealism, from which Fried distinguishes his arguments, and which have served as one foundation for contemporary theories of public and private? What historical conditions or intellectual shifts made absorption a useful paradigm for the arts in the eighteenth century? What implications does Fried’s account have for wider social and political histories of the eighteenth century, especially given his reluctance to follow this path of inquiry? The motivation for this seminar is the thesis that developments in eighteenth-century studies since 1980 call for a re-evaluation of Fried’s seminal work, and that this re-evaluation might prove fruitful for modes of thought beyond his aesthetic history of eighteenth-century absorption.

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The Animal in Eighteenth-Century France

Lucien Nouis, New York U., Dept. of French, 13 University Place, 6th floor, New York, NY 10003; Tel: (212) 998-8700; Fax: (212) 995-3539; ln25@nyu.edu

In recent years, Derrida, Agamben, and many others have helped bring back the “enigma of animality” into the mainstream philosophical discourse after a rather extended period of neglect (as a measure of their success, the “animal” even came up at the French agrégation de philosophie in 2012). In the long story of the construction and reduction of this complex other—seen at times as an open, undecidable figure, a machine (Descartes), a potato (Kant), or in the best of cases as a responsibility (Rousseau)—the eighteenth century stands out as a particularly interesting moment, rich in hesitations and controversies. This panel especially welcomes papers in French or in English focusing on the ethical and political questions posed by the representation and conceptualization of the animal in philosophical, scientific, and literary texts.

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Culture and Violence Before the Revolution

Saul Anton, New School, 55 Bethune St., C915, New York, NY 10014; Tel: (917) 622-8040; antons@newschool.edu

The period of the French Revolution has long been recognized as a privileged moment in which sovereign violence and cultural production come together and erupt into new visions of civilization and history. Yet how is the relation between sovereignty, culture and violence understood in the decades leading up to the Revolution? Where are the contradictions and tensions that inhabit visions of Ancien Régime literature, the arts and Enlightenment thought that make the encounter between culture and violence unavoidable or necessary? What cultural image does violence give rise to and how does violence come to be understood as being a fundamental aspect of culture? How is violence—whether the sovereign violence of the state or private, individual violence—recuperated and “understood” in aesthetic or “spiritual” terms? Papers exploring these themes and issues across the broad field of eighteenth-century literature, thought and the arts are welcome.

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N.B. — An earlier version of this posting mistakenly included a session chaired by Heather Carroll and Lauren Puzier, on “Painted Gladiatrices: Women, Art and the Eighteenth-Century Social Arena.” That session is no longer slated for ASECS but will instead be part of next year’s AAH conference.