Enfilade

Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Denver Art Museum (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, August 2010). The Hamilton building, by Daniel Libeskind, opened in October 2006. Works from the Berger Collection Educational Trust have been on long-term loan at DAM since 1996; in February of this year 65 works of British art from the trust—including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, George Stubbs, and Benjamin West—were donated to the museum. A selection will be on view beginning 3 March 2019 in Treasures of British Art: The Berger Collection, organized by Kathleen Stuart, curator of the Berger Collection at the DAM.

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From ASECS:

2019 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Denver, 21–23 March 2019

Proposals due by 15 September 2018

Proposals for papers to be presented at the 50th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, in Denver, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 September 2018. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by Christina Lindeman. A selection of additional sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members is included below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here.

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Anne Schroder New Scholars Session
Christina K. Lindeman (University of South Alabama), clindeman@southalabama.edu

This is an open session intended for advanced graduate students and early career scholars in the art and architectural history of the eighteenth century.

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Picturing the Stage (Theatre and Performance Studies Caucus)
Michael Burden (Oxford University), michael.burden@new.ox.ac.uk

What is the relationship between the moving action of live theatre and the static ‘pictures’ that both adorned the stage and visually represented it? How did eighteenth-century audiences (and how do modern scholars) ‘picture’ or imagine stage action? The stage, by definition, makes ‘pictures’. In an eighteenth-century theatre, the proscenium arch forms a picture frame through which the theatre-goer viewed the action, and onstage pictures, such as moveable scenery, added dimension to the play text. Offstage, meanwhile, theatrical pictures proliferated, especially images of performers, both in conventional portraits, in character, and as caricatures. Pictures were also used in support of the dramas themselves; one of the great publishing schemes of the eighteenth century, John Bell’s plays, was accompanied by a series of prints of performers ‘in character’. Capturing stage action on the page or canvas, however, was not an easy task and presents the artist with a series of challenges, and it presents us with versions of the same challenges in interpreting the results. We invite papers on any aspect of the topic and encourage participants to be creative in interpreting the title of the panel.

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Interfaces (Roundtable, Digital Humanities Caucus)
Mattie Burkert (Utah State University), mattie.burkert@usu.edu and Collin Jennings (Miami University Ohio), jenninc@miamioh.edu

Interfaces are thresholds that separate and mediate; they are surfaces through which users encounter tools, as well as protocols that allow different systems to interact. Interfaces are central to digital scholarly work, enabling the operations of databases, archives, and exhibitions that provide new forms of access to historical materials. Interface design often prioritizes ease of use, but recent critiques of search engines and social media platforms have shown how streamlined, user-friendly interfaces can obscure choices made about what is displayed and how. Humanities scholars have a role in these conversations, both in critiquing existing interfaces and in developing new approaches. How, we might ask, can we design interfaces that highlight principles like transparency and ambiguity without sacrificing usability? We invite proposals that explore interface models for digital projects, as well as ones that examine how eighteenth-century authors and illustrators engaged what we might anachronistically call interfaces. These could include experimental forms (Chambers’s “view of knowledge,” Priestley’s timeline) or reflections on the limits of such sites (Sterne’s blank page). How can we reconsider Enlightenment interfaces, and how do interfaces affect the way we produce knowledge in eighteenth-century studies? How might a focus on interface change the way we approach our materials?

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Forms of Empire (Roundtable, Race and Empire Caucus)
Sunil Agnani (University of Illinois-Chicago), jukim@fordham.edu

Some recent scholarship on literary and aesthetic form has been framed as a corrective to critical overemphasis on historical, political, and cultural contexts. This panel asks, however, whether paying attention to a particular historical subject—namely, empire—actually precludes the study of form. After all, eighteenth-century writers and artists depicting empire experimented with genres ranging from travel narrative to porcelain ware. The administration of empire also depended heavily on forms like illustrations and maps. This roundtable thus seeks brief papers on the relationship between aesthetics and empire. Papers on diverse forms and geographical locales are welcome. Also welcome are papers that address the problems involved in aestheticizing the types of exploitation that constituted eighteenth-century empire. What were the limits of such a project in the eighteenth century, and what are the limits of the project of considering both aesthetics and empire today? Note: this roundtable will be a companion session to the Race and Empire Caucus’s other roundtable on “Forms of Resistance.” To encourage dialogue across sessions, organizers will ask participants in one roundtable to serve as respondents for the other. Papers will be circulated in advance.

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Ireland, Scotland, and the Sublime Landscape (Irish Caucus)
Michael Griffin (University of Limerick), Michael.J.Griffin@ul.ie

In 1739 Susanna Drury’s painting The Giant’s Causeway offered a glimpse of a sublime aesthetic in landscape painting in Ireland. Dr. Johnson’s description of the subject of Drury’s painting as “worth seeing, but not worth going to see” suggests, in spite of its dismissive tone, a domesticated appreciation for the wild Irish landscape. There has been a significant recent interest in the influence of Scotland and Ireland in and on the evolution of a Romantic aesthetic. To this panel we invite papers which discuss the influence of Irish and Scottish culture, not just on the culture of the Romantic period traditionally defined (1789–1830) but going back to an earlier moment when ideas of sublimity were being applied in innovative ways: to the representation of landscape in Ireland and Scotland, but also to representations by Irish and Scottish writers and artists of sublime landscapes more generally. A core consideration will be the extent to which sublimity in landscape complimented or complicated national and/or regional enlightenments. Proposals can be interdisciplinary, and we would welcome considerations of painters alongside literature and aesthetics. Please send a 300-word abstract for a 20-minute paper, along with a 50-word biographical note.

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The Black Legend (Ibero-America Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Catherine Jaffe (Texas State University), cj10@txstate.edu and Karen Stolley (Emory University), kstolle@emory.edu

The Black Legend, the negative opinion of Spaniards and the Spanish Empire as cruel and intolerant, first emerged in response to accounts of Spanish abuses during the sixteenth-century conquest period and lived on in the eighteenth century in the context of evolving imperial, religious and commercial rivalries. How was the Black Legend envisioned, represented, fictionalized, historicized, critiqued, perpetuated, deployed, debated, dramatized, or denounced, in the transatlantic world during the long eighteenth century, and/or in eighteenth-century studies? We invite 15-minute papers from all fields—literature, history, art history, music, political theory, etc.—that offer fresh perspectives on the Black Legend in the eighteenth century.

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Queer Female Networks (Roundtable, Aphra Behn Society)
Jade Higa (University of Hawaii), jadehiga@hawaii.edu

In her poem, “To my Excellent Lucasia, On Our Friendship,” Katherine Philips writes, “thou art all that I can prize, / My joy, my life, my rest.” Restoration era poems of love between women by writers such as Philips establish and emphasize the importance of female networks throughout the eighteenth century. From 1660 to 1830, women supported each other in politics, art, literature, the theater, and more. In these networking relationships, women also developed strong attachments to one another that many scholars have recognized as at least homosocial if not homoerotic. This roundtable will further the conversation surrounding these queer female networks of the long eighteenth-century. Questions might include but are not limited to: What did specific queer female networks accomplish? How do these female networks complicate the false homo/hetero binary? How are implications of queerness a necessary element of these female networks? Proposals on these questions, on specific female relationships, or on any other subject related to queer female networks are welcome.

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Community Colleges and the Eighteenth Century (Roundtable)
Chloe Northrop (Tarrant County College), chloe.northrop@tccd.edu

Due to the growth of community colleges in America, many graduate students and early career scholars are finding employment opportunities in these institutions. In the past, community colleges have been on the sidelines of the conventional academic hierarchy. While the focus of community colleges mainly surrounds teaching survey level courses, the purpose of this roundtable will be to examine how scholars of the eighteenth century remain connected to the academic world of their respective disciplines. Furthermore, this roundtable will also focus on methods of instruction that incorporates the eighteenth century into classrooms. These presentations will illuminate both the barriers and opportunities present in the community college setting. We welcome proposals from all disciplines connected with community colleges and from full time and adjunct professors.

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The Lives of the Plants
Katie Sagal (Cornell College), aksagal@gmail.com

With the recent rise in critical plant studies as a vector for understanding the relationship between humans and nature, it is worth reflecting in 2019 on how eighteenth-century thinkers understood the relationship between humanity and vegetality. Where the conventional narrative of man’s inevitable and triumphal dominion over nature has long since been disrupted by early eco-criticism (like Carolyn Merchant’s landmark book The Death of Nature), this panel hopes to continue to rethink the possible intersections between people and plants in the Enlightenment. This panel thus proposes to think both about and beyond traditional narratives of taxonomizers, explorers, and collectors to sort through the complex and complicated nodes between humans (always a part of nature) and plant life (always a part of the human experience). We might also think specifically about the “lives of the plants” in ways that are separate from and not reliant upon human intervention. Papers might cover any aspect of the relationship between humans and plants in the eighteenth century, encompassing critical perspectives on medicine, science, pornography, fiction, poetry, visual arts, and so on.

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Women and Whiteness
Katharine Jensen (Louisiana State University), kjensen@lsu.edu

Inspired by Sue Lanser’s 2018 Presidential Address, this panel seeks multiple approaches to the racial/racist/class assumptions informing representations of women and whiteness in the eighteenth century. Whether literary, historical, or visual, the papers might consider: Are women portrayed and privileged as white to counter what were perceived as threats by people of color? Is this privileging linked to class as well, or instead, and why? Are women of color ever portrayed as ‘white’ and why? How do representations of women and whiteness do political work to enlist readers’ or viewers’ emotions and to what end?

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Scholarship across the Aisle: Establishing Meaningful Scholarly Relationships outside of One’s Linguistic/Cultural Tradition (Roundtable)
Logan J. Connors (University of Miami), logan.connors@miami.edu and Jason H. Pearl (Florida International University), jpearl@fiu.edu

In honor of the organization’s 50th anniversary, this roundtable seeks to reflect upon the disciplinary boundaries that are caused by specific linguistic and cultural traditions and posit new methods for crossing the divides that continue to characterize eighteenth-century studies. We seek a diverse group of scholars with different theoretical approaches and areas of specialization. Participants are encouraged to consider the following questions: what structures prevent us from engaging with scholars outside of our national/linguistic traditions? What can we do to make ASECS more welcoming to people working in areas outside British literature (the most dominant specialization inside the organization)? What can we do to facilitate more interaction among scholars of different fields? It’s common to talk of ‘the global eighteenth century’ and the value of interdisciplinarity— and yet we separate ourselves by subspecialty every year. What would it take for us to work beyond those boundaries and create meaningful interactions (conferences, colloquia, seminars, workshops, etc.) that allow us to learn more from each other?

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Repurposing
Lauren DiSalvo (Dixie State University), lauren.disalvo@dixie.edu and Sarah Sylvester Williams (Independent Scholar), sarahjswilliams@gmail.com

Objects have long been recycled, reused, and repurposed. In the eighteenth century Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and her children repurposed Mughal paintings for display in gilt boiserie; Chinese porcelain was embellished with gilt handles, rims, and stands; and artists outfitted Roman statues with fully restored limbs and attributes during the Grand Tour. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which materials, ideas, motifs, and subjects were repurposed during the long eighteenth century. We would welcome papers that address the literal reuse of materials, such as old canvases, paper, textiles, etc; the adoption and reuse of visual or literary motifs, tropes, or processes; or the repurposing of a traditional subject for new ends. Submissions from any eighteenth-century discipline are welcome, and topics that are interdisciplinary or global in scope are particularly encouraged.

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Art, Literature, and Medicine in Italy
Francesca Savoia (University of Pittsburgh), savoia@pitt.edu

In the eighteenth-century—in Italy as in the rest of Europe—doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed an integrated educated elite. A wide range of literary and figurative works testify to a close interplay of medicine, art and literature in this period. Painters, poets, novelists and dramatists—both men and women—drew on medical language and learning for their models of human nature and picked on themes emerging from scientific debates (on the treatment of diseases, the role of diet and lifestyle on health, the action of emotions, the dialectic of body and mind, whether reading and writing were themselves therapeutic or harmful etc.). This session seeks contributions that explore the reception, influence, and representation of medical theories and practices in Italian art and literature of the long eighteenth century.

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The Landscape Garden: In England and Beyond
Janet R. White (University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Architecture), janet.white@unlv.edu

The eighteenth-century landscape garden has been called England’s most enduring contribution to design of the built environment. This interdisciplinary session invites historians, landscape architects, architects and others to discuss the landscape garden’s impact in England, beyond England, and beyond the eighteenth century. Topics might include such areas as selection and design of follies and pavilions, selection and distribution of plant materials, theoretical underpinnings in the Picturesque, differences between English and Continental examples of the phenomenon, women’s contributions to the design of the garden, travelers’ accounts of garden visits, or manifestations of the landscape garden in later centuries.

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Gesturing toward the Antique
Monica Anke Hahn (Community College of Philadelphia), mhahn@ccp.edu and Craig Hanson (Calvin College), CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com

More than three decades on from the publication of Haskell and Penny’s seminal work, Taste and the Antique—an extended edition of which is slated for publication in 2019—this panel seeks to broaden, expand, and trouble the examination of classicizing poses and gestures in the eighteenth century. How might a borrowed pose elucidate themes of performativity, ephemerality, portraiture, or satire? What were the commercial, intellectual, poetic, or social stakes of such gestures? How did such evocations of antiquity function within larger aesthetic frameworks—whether a collection, a decorative arts program, or some other stratum of visual culture? We welcome proposals from a wide range of approaches with the goal of complicating and re-evaluating straightforward stylistic narratives, aiming to avoid making too little or too much of the antique along the way.

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Fashioning Power and the Power(s) of Fashion
Jennifer Buckley (University of York), jennifer.buckley@york.ac.uk and Benjamin Jackson (Queen Mary, University of London), b.l.t.jackson@qmul.ac.uk

This session seeks to redress the imbalance in our current understanding of the relationship between fashion, material culture, and gender. It desires to push beyond a notion of female fashion, with all its connotations, to consider how fashion was used by both sexes to simultaneously homogenise and destabilise traditional power relations. From architecture to clothing, books to consumer goods, the manifestations of power, commerce, and even colonialism, are imbued in the material world of the past. These materialisations of power are too often obliquely and uncritically accepted as part of a narrative of clear, delineated power structures. Addressing the relationship between print and material cultures, this panel seeks to re-expose the intricate nuances of power that permeated the eighteenth-century material world. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to: letterpress printing and the manufacture of printed polemics; bespoke handcrafting and handicrafts; architectural plans; trade cards, magazines and periodicals; taste and politesse; the correlation of texts and textiles.

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Small Things
Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), chloe.wigstonsmith@york.ac.uk and Beth Fowkes Tobin (University of Georgia), btobin@uga.edu

This panel invites papers that address the scale of material objects, in particular the smaller things that have received less critical attention than larger, substantial goods. We are interested in how the scale of things shapes the cultural and / or literary significance of objects and what size might illuminate more broadly about the value and meanings of material culture. Do small things merit different kinds of attention across genres or types of media? How does monetary value, labor, and time affect perceptions of the minute? What is the place of the small in scholarly conversations about material culture across humanities disciplines? This panel will serve as a starting point for discussion of the same theme at an interdisciplinary conference to be held June 6–7, 2019 at the University of York (organized by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin).

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Bon Appétit: Dining in the Eighteenth Century
Joanna M. Gohmann (The Walters Art Museum), jgohmann@thewalters.org

In the mid-eighteenth century, chefs began to delight aristocratic taste buds with nouvelle cuisine, a style of French cookery that gradually spread across mainland Europe and transformed food from nourishment into pleasurable, intellectual entertainment. In addition to foodstuff, the material landscape of eating—tablescapes, dining rooms, dishes, furniture, cookbooks etc.—became more complex, specialized, and pleasurable. Porcelain dinner services expanded, cookbooks included more categories of food, dining tables were marketed in a variety of shapes with surprising features, and dining rooms were increasingly elaborate. What cultural work did these transformations in food preparation and consumption achieve? Responding to such publications as E.C. Spary’s Eating the Enlightenment (2012) and Krikorian’s Les rois à table (2011), exhibitions like Winterthur Museum’s Dining by Design (2018), and popular blogs like The History Kitchen, this panel seeks to explore how eighteenth-century consumers understood the century’s new dining practices in relation to the century’s intellectual, social, political and even religious trends. This panel hopes to address the many ways in which individuals encountered these changes in culinary and dining practices—be it through text, visual art, material culture of the table, etc.—and invites participants from all disciplines and areas of specialization.

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Between Art and Labor: Craft in the Global Eighteenth Century
Cassidy Picken (Capilano University), cass.picken@gmail.com

Handicraft is a generative concept within at least two hierarchies of enlightenment thought. Within the realm of political economy, handicrafts are positioned midway between the foraged goods of hunter-gatherers and the manufactured wares of commercial society; within aesthetics, craftwork mediates between the drudgery of labor and the free play of the liberal arts. This panel explores the rise of craftwork as a distinct cultural category during the long eighteenth century. Shifting from accounts of craft that emphasize its ‘traditional’ status, we are interested in artisanal practices that emerged at the interstices of the eighteenth century’s global empires. How might we account for the relationship between the disciplinary formations mentioned above, and the actual practices of making that emerged at the frontiers (external and internal) of mercantile capitalism? What forms of knowledge and intimacy were grounded in the craftwork of women, the enslaved, creoles, indigenous communities, peasants, and domestics? How did poets, novelists, artists, philosophers, and scientists conceive of their crafts in relation to the field of labor?

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Trailing Spouses of the Enlightenment: In the Shadow of the Luminary?
Rori Bloom (University of Florida), ribloom@ufl.edu and Margaret Butler (University of Florida), mbutler@arts.ufl.edu

While the wedding scene continued to provide a happy ending to classical comedies in eighteenth-century theater, the real institution of marriage was undergoing important transformations off the stage and the page. By offering material resources, social connections, emotional support or intellectual stimulation, spouses in creative partnerships made valuable contributions to eighteenth-century culture. This interdisciplinary panel seeks to examine the spousal relationship in the context of cultural creation in the Enlightenment. At certain times, one spouse remained in the shadows to allow the other to shine as a writer, musician or painter, while at others the two shared the limelight, attracting public attention in different ways. Whether as enabler, impresario, teacher, collaborator, the spouses of Enlightenment figures often shaped each other’s careers. In this session, we are not asking whether we would have had Sade without Renée or Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun without Jean Baptiste Pierre Lebrun. Instead, we wish to reexamine assumptions about traditional roles in famous pairs to better understand the impact of creative partnerships on eighteenth-century culture.

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The Colors of Race
Jennifer Chuong (Harvard University), jennifer_chuong@harvard.edu and Oliver Wunsch (Harvard Art Museums), owunsch@gmail.com

Scholars in a variety of disciplines have argued that over the course of the eighteenth century, nascent racial categories began to coalesce around visual distinctions, skin color chief among them. The range of disciplinary perspectives on the topic reflects the many ways that color could be mobilized in the service of human difference, whether through the materials of the artist, the theories of the natural philosopher, or the lexicon of the writer. This panel provides an opportunity to bring together research in these different areas and to explore possible interactions among them. In doing so, we aim to initiate a larger conversation about the relationship between race and visuality in the eighteenth century. We welcome papers that explore the various practices through which color took on racial significance in this period, and we especially invite proposals that address the use of color in more than one setting (e.g. in multiple media, across fields, or for different audiences).

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‘This Unnatural Rebellion’: The Jacobite Rising of 1745
Phineas Dowling (Auburn University), pwd0002@auburn.edu

This panel seeks papers on literary, artistic, and material culture of the long eighteenth century with the goal of exploring the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and its ramifications—whether artistic, cultural, national, martial, political, etc. Topics might include, but are not limited to, the literary culture of the Jacobites (or anti-Jacobites); material culture of the Jacobites; cultural memory of the ’45; representations of the conflict and its participants; depictions or commentary of key figures or events; the political or social aftermath or ramifications of the rebellion; contextualization of the Rising and/or its impact; creative expressions in any medium of the contemporary or memorial experiences of participants and/or onlookers.

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Producers, Creators, Designers: Women Artists
Lindsay Dunn (Texas Christian University), l.m.dunn@tcu.edu and Franny Brock (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), mfbrock@live.unc.edu

This panel seeks proposals that consider women’s roles as producers, creators, and designers of art objects, buildings, and interior spaces in the long eighteenth century. We invite papers that further knowledge of women’s artistic production, and indeed, even reclaim their achievements. This panel will continue the conversation on women’s roles, a subject taken up most recently by the exhibition, Becoming a Woman In the Age of Enlightenment: French Art from the Horvitz Collection, curated by Melissa Hyde and the late Mary D. Sheriff. This exhibition, the first to focus specifically on representations of women from a broad range of ages and conditions, sheds light on the philosophical and cultural debates surrounding womanhood in this period. The dominant ideology assigned women to limited roles due to long-held beliefs about gender difference derived from Christianity and scientific and medical tracts. As a result, historians have often relegated women’s involvement in the art world to historical footnote or anecdote, despite a rich tradition of female creativity. Possible topics for this panel include investigations of women artists’ little-known objects and spaces, hierarchies of genre and their gendered implications, the role of women in the Academy, programs of commissioning, and collaborations with colleagues.

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Innovative Course Design Competition
asecsoffice@gmail.com

ASECS invites proposals for a new course on eighteenth-century studies, or a new unit (1–4 weeks of instruction) within a course on the eighteenth century. Proposals may address a specific theme, compare related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), take an interdisciplinary approach to a social or historical event, or suggest new uses for instructional technology. The unit/course should have never been taught or have been taught very recently for the first time. Applicants should submit a 750–1500 word proposal that focuses sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit/course. The proposal should indicate why particular texts and topics were selected and (if possible) how they worked; ideally, a syllabus will be provided. The competition is open to current members of ASECS. Up to three proposals will be selected for presentation on the Innovative Course Design session at the Annual Meeting; a $500 award will be presented to each of the participants, who also will be invited to submit a twelve-page account of the unit/course, a syllabus, and supplementary materials, for publication on the ASECS website.

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Social Network Analysis (Roundtable)
Jennifer Golightly (Colorado College), jgolightly@coloradocollege.edu

This roundtable will showcase digital projects using social network analysis for better understanding networks of texts, ideas, and/or people over the course of the long eighteenth century. The scope of the roundtable is broad in the hopes of providing fresh ideas about using social network analysis for the study of history and texts. What are the advantages of using this particular approach? What are the limitations? Which tools are most useable for conducting such analysis in the humanities?

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Print Room Pedagogies: Teaching the Eighteenth Century in the Print Room
Hope Saska (CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder), hope.saska@colorado.edu