SOUTH CENTRAL SOCIETY
FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES
CONFERENCE, 2013
The SCSECS Planning Committee and Sam Houston State University welcome you to our 2013 conference. The theme will be "Frontiers of Friendships, Close and Distant" and will be held February 21-23 in Austin, Texas, the "live music capital of the world."
CONFERENCE THEME
Our conference aims to explore how people in the long eighteenth century conceived of and experienced friendships. What philosophical changes developed with regard to the idea of friendship? How did class and gender affect attitudes toward friendship? What personal, political and societal virtues supported friendship? In SCSECS's tradition of friendly openness, we welcome papers on other topics as well. Our presenters typically come from a variety of disciplines covering the period 1650-1850.
DEADLINES: Please send proposals directly to the panel organizer by December 10, 2012. If you wish to propose a paper that doesn't seem to fit in with
any of the panels below, contact this year's SCSECS President directly: Frieda Koeninger, fol_fck@shsu.edu.
PROPOSED PANELS TO DATE
Women's Friendship and Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century. Catherine Jaffe, cj10@txstate.edu
This panel invites papers that examine women's relationships with other women through friendship and
social or professional networks. Papers could examine literary or artistic representations of how women
established relations with other women, for example, through sociability or epistolary exchanges, or
historical records of women's networks.
Frontiers and Engagements: Friends, Lovers and Anti-Heroes.
Gloria Eive, geive@silcon.com
The eighteenth-century world can be described as a network of interlocking connections and relationships
that determined careers and personal achievements, and prescribed--and proscribed--activities on every
level. This panel will consider some of these extended networks and their consequences, particularly in the
worlds of literature and the arts.
Overlooked Texts.
Colby Kullman, egcolby@olemiss.edu
Papers on a variety of topics pertaining to the long eighteenth century are encouraged.
Hume and the Usual Suspects.
James Mock, jmock@uco.edu
Papers on philosophers of the 18th century are welcome.
Best Friends by Mail: The Past and Present Role of Electronic, Postal and Other
Correspondence in Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Kevin Cope, jovialintelligence@cox.net
The panel will look at a discipline that has always conducted its business among dispersed populations. It
will invite papers that look at email or postal exchanges between scholars (past and present); at the role of
friendly but distant, remote scholarly exchange in the doing of eighteenth-century studies and research; at
the influence of informal correspondence or on “mob” postal behavior (for example, the discussion threads
that break out on the internet) in the development of interests, topics, and fashions in eighteenth-century
studies; at the secret side of our field (in the event that anyone has a secret cache of letters); at impersonal
correspondence such as reviews transmitted to venues such as Amazon.com; and at anything else along
these lines that someone devises. Diverse Elements in the Thought of Jonathan Swift.
Connie Capers Thorson, thorson@unm.edu
All things Swift in body and spirit will be discussed.
Publishers and Booksellers. Susan Spencer, sspencer@uco.edu
This panel welcomes proposed papers on any and all aspects of the 18th-century publishing world and the relationships
(between friends, enemies, places, things...) that it created in London or Paris and beyond, including non-western countries.
“Publishing” might include books, pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, engravings, or anything produced by a printer.
Origins of the Gothic.
John Burke, jburke@english.as.ua.edu
Papers on the horror and romance of Gothic origins are welcome.
The Rise of Anti-Religious Arguments as Materialism Comes of Age: Meslier,
Voltaire, La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach…
Philippe Seminet, pseminet@stedwards.edu
This panel will consider some of the radical thinkers whose materialist ideas so often went hand in hand
with attacks on Christianity, a return to the works of the philosophes themselves, and the critical minds that
aspired to promote knowledge such that superstition would be swept away. They were humanists, often
deists, sometimes atheists, and came from various nations to take part in the intellectual ferment of the
Parisian salons of the time.
Images of Criollo Nationalism/Identity in Spanish America.
Andrew Graciano, GRACIANO@mailbox.sc.edu
Participants' papers will examine visual imagery-painting, sculpture, architectural detail, graphic work, etc.-
that seems to connect to or to assert an early sense of Creole (Criollo) nationalism and/or identity in the
face of Spanish imperial authority. To what extent is Criollo identity distinguished from peninsular
Spanish? To what extent, if any, does this assertion of distinction subvert Spanish colonial interests and
claims? How does religion (and religious imagery), in some places, participate in the formation of this
identity (and others) and, by extension, a proto-nationalism? How does it, in other places, negate or
counteract such assertions and, by extension, uphold monarchical interests?
Armida in Opera: Perspectives and Treatments.
Janet Wolf, Janet.Wolf@cortland.edu
This panel will discuss several operas that center on Armida, and their various interpretations of this figure.
Friendship and Friction in the Caribbean: 1650-1850.
Rafael Saumell-Munoz, FOL_RES@SHSU.EDU
This panel will discuss works from the Caribbean, some fiction and some true, which reference the societal
pressures on friendship, especially race and class.
From Friendship to Citizenship: 'The Ties That Bind Us',
Christopher Fritsch, stxoxfd@earthlink.net
This session explores the nature of those things that bind people across the eighteenth century. Stealing a
line from a hymn, the session opens the door to exploring the variety of the experience from ethnicity,
religion, and spatial relationships from the local, as in a neighborhood to a broader sense of commonality
within the state. This can become a conversation about cultural/ethnic traditions in terms of language, food
ways, dress that define the basis of friendship and commonality. Aspects of religious practice and thought
also becomes a tool which defines our relationships within a community. The sense of spatial relationships
brings our discussion into contact with the means by which we define each other within the state and,
conversely, how the state defines and creates subjects and citizens. Papers that focus on the literary,
cultural, or political expression of these ideas would be greatly welcome.
Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature.
Madeline Sutherland-Meier, madelinesm@austin.utexas.edu
Several aspects of works from 18th-century Spain will be discussed.
Notable Friendships: Fostering Patronage through Correspondence, spans
several countries, gender issues, and personal/professional patronage issues.
Lynee Lewis Gaillet, lgaillet@gsu.edu.
Our panel explores Italian, British, and American eighteenth-century intellectual friendships through
examination of several sets of correspondence. Spanning mid eighteenth-century through the early
nineteenth century, our correspondents illustrate eighteenth-century issues of gender restrictions and
experiences, patronage and opportunity, education and advancement.
Imagining (Dis)Connection in the Long Eighteenth-Century.
Jordan Fletcher Hobson, jhobson4@gsu.edu
As this year’s conference explores friendship, we hope to examine the myriad and sometimes contradictory
(dis)connections and affinities between varieties of texts and the discourses they represent. We analyze the
epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic kinships within and between these discourses. Each of the
essays on the panel troubles the ‘standard’ interpretations of rhetorical and symbolic structures.
Fueling Friendship: The Mutual Expenditure of Energy.
Baerbel Czennia, bczennia@mcneese.edu
This panel invites papers from scientists and historians, as well as those who prefer to read the title as
metaphor.
Adventures in Opera.
Gloria Eive, geive@silcon.com
Whimsy? Humour? Heroism? Enlightenment and Masonic manifestos? Nobility? All this and more in
Mozart's The Magic Flute!
Selfhood and Freedom in the Enlightenment
Michael Matthis, Michael.matthis@lamar.edu
The Enlightenment expressed a celebration of new freedoms in the realm of science and government. At
the same time it involved great skepticism toward traditional metaphysical concepts, such as those of free-will
and selfhood. Any paper on these issues, involving any philosophical connection to the 18th century,
is welcome.
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Brett McInelly, brett_mcinelly@byu.edu
This panel invites papers that examine (1) religion and religious attitudes and practices during the age of
Enlightenment; (2) the impact of the Enlightenment on religion, religious thought, and religious experience;
and (3) the ways religion informed Enlightenment ideas and values, from a range of disciplinary
perspectives, including, but not limited to, history, theology, literature, philosophy, the social and physical
sciences, economics, and the law.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Long Eighteenth Century
Kathryn Stasio, kathryn.stasio@saintleo.edu
Various disciplines and approaches will be represented.
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