Proposals for papers should be sent directly to the seminar chairs no later than May 10, 2016.
You should also let the session chair know of any audio-visual needs and special scheduling requests.

Exile and Influence: French Culture in Restoration England
Katherine Mannheimer, University of Rochester (katherine.mannheiner@rochester.edu)
While cultural currents have always crossed the English Channel in both directions, the Restoration of the British Monarchy in 1660 presents a key moment at which to examine the French influence in Britain. In the theatre, the use of actresses was perhaps the most visible innovation that owed to Charles II’s time spent in Paris, but the French stage also affected English drama stylistically, thematically, and formally: writers of comedy imitated Moliere, while writers of tragedy looked to the French neoclassicists and their emphasis on Aristotelian theory. But the impact of the court’s French exile was not limited to the theatre, of course: translations from the French became increasingly popular; French poets and novelists changed the direction of English verse and fiction. This panel will examine the French influence on Restoration literature across multiple genres -- considering the ways in which English writers adapted French sources in drama, fiction, and poetry, but also criticism, philosophy, and other forms.

Translation, Transmission, Transgression, and Tradition: Samuel Johnson
Anthony W. Lee, University of Maryland (lee.tony181@gmail.com) 
On one hand, Samuel Johnson can be seen as one of the great transmitters of tradition in literary history. Classical antiquity, Hebraism and Christianity, and the humanism of early modern Europe constitute the fountainheads of the tradition that Johnson’s own work seeks to join and renew—they are, indeed, the reservoir of classic “truth,” the “general magazine of literature” that Johnson spent his entire life assimilating and transmitting. In Adventurer 53 Johnson forthrightly asserts his allegiance to this tradition, to “the authors of antiquity … whose works have been the delight of ages, and transmitted as the great inheritance of mankind from one generation to another.” But, provocatively, each of these allusive currents is compounded by further intertextual complications that extend, elaborate, and at times defy and transgress the authority that their transmission solicits.

We would expect no less a complexity from a figure as inexhaustibly great as Johnson. But accounts of him as an arch conservative, John Bull Tory obfuscate this complexity. The monumental centripetal figure, Mr. Rambler, the Dictionary Johnson, also exhibited centrifugal forces that shake this apparent immobility. He possessed and at times was possessed by deep and disruptive energies—emotions that once nearly led him to instigate a riot at a failed firecracker demonstration, to raise a toast at an Oxford table to the “next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies,” and to remark “there is a remedy … against tyranny,” the people “will and cut off his [the king’s] head.” Should we not expect, then, to find evidence of such transgressiveness informing his productions as a translator, lexicographer, editor, biographer, poet, and literary critic?

This panel embraces both sides of the polarity, the traditional and the transgressive Johnson. It seeks to harvest essays that account for his central role as a preserver and transmitter of European culture in such works as The Rambler, The Dictionary, and The Lives of the Poets, while also gauging and accounting for the revolutionary impulses and disruptive energies that inhabit the seemingly marmoreal superficies of his poetry and prose. Please email a 300-500 word abstract plus a brief (1-2 pp.) current vita.

The Eighteenth-Century British Novel in North America
Albert Rivero, Marquette University (albert.rivero@marquette.edu) 
An edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded was published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1742-4, thus making Richardson’s hugely popular work the first English novel printed in North America. Abridgements of Pamela, sometimes illustrated with cuts, also appeared in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in such smaller towns as Worcester (Massachusetts), Norristown (Pennsylvania), and Fairhaven (Vermont). Other novels were also transmitted or translated to the colonies in various forms and formats. This panel aims to examine this transatlantic commerce.

Studies Abroad: Educational Exchanges in the Long Eighteenth Century
Ann A. Huse, John Jay College (ahuse@jjay.cuny.edu) 
In the seventeenth century, the universities at Oxford and Cambridge began offering tutorials in French and Italian literature. Like the expansion of the curriculum to include modern as well as ancient languages, the rising popularity of the Grand Tour during this period exposed British students to cultural and religious difference. At the same time, religious wars on the Continent sent Huguenots to England in search of positions as dancing masters and language tutors. Please submit CVs and 250-word abstracts on such cultural exchanges in educational tracts--or in literary, artistic or historiographical works used for pedagogical purposes--by May 1. Papers on areas beyond the British Isles are welcomed.

The Globe, the World, and Worldliness: Planetary Formations of the Long Eighteenth Century
Dwight Codr, University of Connecticut (Dwight.codr@uconn.edu) 
We often think of the terms “globe” and “world” as synonymous because they seem to similarly name the totality of the thing on which or in which we all find ourselves living. This panel asks contributors to consider different formations of planetary or worldly experience in the long eighteenth century, if only to highlight the particular implications of considering the world as species of globe.

So if, in the eighteenth century, the concept of the globe helped Britons to imagine their planetary place cartographically, what function did the concepts of “world” and/or “worldliness” serve? To what extent did the moralistic connotations of worldliness, so central to Calvinist theology, remain or remain viable? Did the myriad connotations of worldliness factor into global imperial projects or ideologies? Further, if the project of empire was global domination in a politico-cartographical sense, did the “world” figure similarly, or did it name, reference, or designate a different kind of space? Perhaps a space beyond occupation or territorialization? To put a fine point on it, could the “world” be subject to the rule of a nation or people in the same way that the “globe” could be?

This panel is not intended to be an inquiry into the etymology or signification of these variant terms, though speculations regarding these matters are welcome. More importantly, this panel seeks papers that explore renderings of earth – “the world considered as the dwelling of humans,” according to one of many definitions provided by the OED – and seeks investigations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century efforts to capture or represent or figure human totality (geographical or otherwise). All essays pertinent to this question are invited to submit abstracts of 200-500 words.

Slavery and Methodology
Sean Moore, University of New Hampshire (sean@unh.edu) 
This panel, in keeping with the NEASECS conference’s theme of race and empire, aims to explore the intersections between the study of slavery and a variety of other fields, methodologies, and modes of inquiry. How may the study of race and slavery be enhanced through the methodology of the history of the book, and how may the assumptions and concerns of book history be altered through engagement with race and slavery? Are the Digital Humanities in dialogue with slavery scholarship, and how may each inform the other? What can gender and queer theory teach us about slavery and other forms of human trafficking? How has postcolonial theory opened up new avenues for understanding slavery in relation to empire? What does slavery have to do with food studies, and how can we understand the African diaspora through culinary customs?

Papers are solicited that address these and other questions of methodology in relation to slavery. Please send 250-word abstracts.

Transmitting and Translating the 18th Century to the 21st-Century Classroom
Jason Gulya, Rutgers University (jasongulya@gmail.edu) 
It has been nearly twenty years since Neil Postman published his Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century. In this book, Postman compellingly discusses why it was becoming increasingly important for turn-of-the-century individuals to read writers like Voltaire, Diderot, and Johnson. It’s often a model for how we can look at eighteenth-century literature and philosophy through the lens of modern events.

This panel shares Postman’s interest in why we teach the eighteenth century to our students, but it is also equally interested in how we teach it. What texts—literary or otherwise—do instructors find particularly fruitful for giving students a sense of eighteenth-century life? What teaching strategies have proven helpful for getting students to think critically about an historical event, a social development, or a literary text?

Potential panelists are encouraged to submit proposals for any paper investigating the reasons and methods for teaching the eighteenth century today. Topics include (but are not limited to) the reasons why twenty-first century students should read eighteenth-century texts, what texts and documents are particularly important for our students to read, using technology to improve student engagement with specific texts or events, and methods for encouraging the close reading of eighteenth-century documents.

French Women Artists in England
Nadine Berenguier, University of New Hampshire (nsb@unh.edu)
Many French women artists left France and took up residence in England for extended periods of time during the long 18th century. Their reasons varied as much as their experiences abroad, but all were influenced by and influenced the culture in their new home. This panel will focus on women artists who became part of that migration, and how their British ‘séjour’ influenced them and their artistic endeavors and conversely what their impact was across the Channel.

Undergraduate research on the 18th century (roundtable)
Melissa Bissonette, St. John Fisher College (mbissonette@sjfc.edu)
Undergraduate research is being promoted nationwide as a “high impact” practice. What this looks like in the sciences is fairly well established: students work in a particular faculty member’s lab, usually under the purview of that scholar’s research agenda. In the Humanities and Social Sciences. How do you encourage research on the 18th century? What kinds of projects have your students engaged in successfully? Unsuccessfully? Are there models of faculty involvement besides the graduate mentor? Is it possible to engage students to work on your own topic, or to co-write with your students? What strands are most accessible to undergraduate students? Are some academic areas more approachable than others? What other obstacles are there, and is there anything we can do about them? This roundtable seeks discussions of best practices, as well as challenges to the premise – are there reasons not to encourage undergraduate research in the humanities, or in the eighteenth century in particular?

Resistance and Race in European Fiction
Catherine Gallouët, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Gallouet@hws.edu)
This panel proposes to examine specifically the narratives of Black and African resistance, revolt and revolution in European fiction. How does the author "translate" to her/his European readers the experience of the black subject's revolt? To what extent are those textual representations reiterations of traditional narratives about blacks and Africans? Is the Black subject only positioned to "translate" an ideology, such as white supremacy, or abolitionism? Or does he/she begin to redefine his subjectivity? The panel welcome papers addressing varied form of fictional narratives about Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

Irreverence and the Boundaries of the Sacred
Andrew McKendry, Yale University (Andrew.mckendry@yale.edu)
If postsecular criticism aims, in part, to redress those distortions that have traditionally defined our understanding of religious culture and experience, there can be few topics more germane and challenging than irreverence - expressions and behaviors that disregard the respect demanded by sacred topics. From the atheistical libertine to the sober Dissenter, our established vision of eighteenth-- century religion leaves little room for religious jokes or sacred laughs. But a panoply of works from the period, such as Defoe's Political History of the Devil or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, suggest how comical or flippant treatments of religious topics might provide the very foundations of faith. This panel seeks new perspectives on "irreverent" engagements with the sacred. What types and degrees of "license" were permitted when dealing with sacred subjects? How were the boundaries of "irreverence" delineated, and how did these boundaries coincide (or clash) with social codes, such as politeness? How could contravening these expectations serve to renegotiate, rather than simply renounce, belief?

Vice and Transgressive Behavior in Travel
Tamra Lepro, Rutgers University (tamra.lepro@rutgers.edu)
In Aphra Behn's play, The Widow Ranter, the entire Virginia colony seems to be spiraling into an unstoppable rebellion that may, or may not, have been caused by Bacchanalian bliss. From tobacco and alcohol to sex and marriage plots, the character Hazard is seemingly dropped into a den of vice as soon as he steps off the boat from England. This panel proposes to examine the concept of vice as a direct result of someone transgressing, or literally stepping over, a border. How do the narratives of "self versus other" in the eighteenth century deal with naturalized behaviors coming home? How does the proliferation of tobacco in the American colonies cross the ocean and infiltrate domestic space? Can the metaphor of vice be extended to the colonial project as a whole? Papers should examine the concept of vice, habit, or addiction in literature that is also concerned with traveling to other places, but this does not only have to be transatlantic. Other examples of this is seen in James Boswell's London Journal, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, and many others.

Transalpine Journeys
Andrew Hamilton, College of the Holy Cross (ahamilto@holycross.edu)
The rugged mountains in the middle of Europe have long served as both a practical and a mental dividing line for the continent. They were a geographic divide for the Romans and they have served as shorthand for any number of divisions ever since: Germanic from Romance languages, Nordic from Mediterranean culture, Protestant from Catholic Europe—the list goes on, each division as important as it is imprecise.

Like all boundaries, the Alps have been permeable. This panel will investigate the practice and significance of transalpine journeys in the eighteenth century, a time when unprecedented numbers of northern Europeans, and Germans in particular, crossed their southern border into Italy. We will explore the rich cultural interchange between north and south, both the empirical countries and their respective imaginations of each other.

This panel invites papers exploring any aspect of transalpine travel in the long eighteenth century. Possible approaches include, but are certainly not limited to: literary, historical, and cultural methods, tourism studies, natural scientific expeditions, transnational and migration studies, and comparative studies of all sorts. Possible topics might include re-imaginations of antiquity; classicism, romanticism, and their blurry boundaries; Protestants returning to the Catholic Church; the Italian journeys of three generations of Goethes, or of many other northern European writers and intellectuals. Studies of journeys in the opposite direction would be most welcome. Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words. I would also be happy to answer any questions or discuss ideas prior to the deadline.

Crossing Borders of Identity in the Global Eighteenth Century
Slaney Ross, Fordham University (Sross27@fordham.edu)
This panel examines how external forces transgress the boundaries of the European self in eighteenth-century literature, recharging and reorganizing seemingly discreet categories of identity and genre. The eighteenth century has consistently been viewed as a seminal period in the formation of modern ideas about selfhood. Foucault notably identified the Enlightenment as the event that “led us to constitute ourselves, and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.” Yet scholars such as Dror Wahrman, Jonathan Lamb, and Julian Fabian have suggested that eighteenth-century European identity is perhaps less self-conscious, more fragile and permeable, than is sometimes assumed. The papers on this panel examine how such permeability is at the heart of three different eighteenth-century narrative perspectives—those of the secret historian, the African traveler, and the gentleman spectator. All three appear to inhabit a “global” position that is abstract, rational, privileged, and/or naturalized. However, as the individual abstracts below detail, our papers index a range of ways that such subjects, and their texts, are shaped from the outside in.

Subjects of Transmission: Women and the New German Theater
Sara Jackson, University of Massachusetts (sarajackson@german.umass.edu)
In the mid- to late eighteenth century, theater and drama became central to nascent formulations of German national identity, and also to complex questions of selfhood in the age of enlightenment. Much research has been devoted to the vision of theater as a means to transmit cultural, philosophical and political ideals that canonical authors such as Lessing, Goethe and Schiller proposed. It has only been more recently, however, that scholars have uncovered the significant influence that German women had as stage performers and producers, and given serious attention to the dramatic texts that they authored. Examining Caroline Neuber’s theater reform, Luise Gottsched’s influential translations and adaptations for the German stage, and original dramas by Charlotte von Stein and others, feminist scholarship views women not only as objects of the message, but also as transmitting subjects. In doing so, such research investigates how women contributed to and challenged the thematic and formal parameters of German theater and drama in this key developmental phase. This panel examines the transformative roles that women played in the creation of the new German theater, and thus also investigates how they intervened in the transmission of ideas and ideals in the eighteenth century.

Worldly Objects: Decorative Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century
Alden Cavanaugh, Indiana State University (alden.cavanaugh@indstate.edu)
This session welcomes papers that address the global decorative arts in the eighteenth century: that is, the intricate systems of transmission and translation that governed and created decorative objects, as well as the spaces in which those objects were displayed or used. Papers that use innovative or novel approaches in the interest of exploring decorative arts and/or interior design as manifestations of a transcontinental or global focus are particularly desirable.

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to: Translations (or mistranslations) of styles, subject matter or narratives Trade, supply, or logistics Secondary markets Conceptions of Others (Chinoiserie, Turquerie, etc.) Fashions in decorative arts Marketing or production issues Economic realities related to decorative arts or interior decoration Lacquer, porcelain, glass, metalwork, jewelry, furniture, textiles or other material production Material exoticism Nationalistic impulses Objects of self-fashioning or personal maintenance Patterns of consumption

Libertine Transmissions, Translations, and Transgressions
Paul Young, Georgetown University (pjy@georgetown.edu)
Whereas transgression and transmission (of knowledge) are hallmarks of the libertine project, and also of libertine literature, translations may offer a lesser-explored means of looking at libertine literature. In this panel, I welcome papers that examine that practice of transmission in libertine fiction (including papers exploring philosophical or sexual educations, libertine pedagogies, the libertine desire to create protégés or pupils, scientific inquiries in libertine texts, transmission of objects from one culture to another within the libertine text, and even the transmission of disease in the libertine text). I also welcome papers that explore the notion of translation within libertine literature, including, but not limited to: explorations of libertine intertextuality as a kind of translation, libertine texts translated during the eighteenth century,