Material/Immaterial: 2023 WSECS Annual Meeting
All sessions will take place in Whitsett Room/Sierra Hall 451 and the Linda Nichols Joseph Reading Room/Jerome Richfield Hall 319. The two halls are linked by the Sierra Center. The plenary is in the Orchard Conference Center. Here is a Google Campus Map indicating all conference locations, the transportation hub, and visitor parking lot.
Friday, Feb. 17
Registration: 9:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., outside of Jerome Richfield Hall 319
10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.
Troubling (the) Sciences
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Susan Carlile, California State University, Long Beach
Lora E. Geriguis, La Sierra University The Materials of Female (Science) Education at the Mid-Century Moment: Charlotte Lennox, Benjamin Martin, and Joseph Wright of Derby
Tom Hothem, UC Merced Picturesque Landscape Description and Community Science: Toward an “Applied” 18th Century
Lucien Darjeun Meadows, University of Denver Weather Diaries and Cloud Taxonomies of the Eighteenth Century
Jolene Zigarovich, University of Northern Iowa Flesh and Fluids: The Troubling History of Eighteenth-Century Intersex Case Studies
Novelistic Fictions
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Jessica Roberson, Mount Saint Mary’s University
Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA Passion and Character in Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Ryan Heuser, Princeton University From the Romance to the Romantic Novel: A Digital Anatomy of Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Miranda Hoegberg, UCLA Hogarth’s Open Doors and the Problem of Perspective in Novelistic Scene-Setting
Maureen Harkin, Reed College Godwin, Sympathy, and Emotion
12 p.m.-1 p.m.
Lunch
Pick up outside Jerome Richfield Hall 319
1 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Resistance & Revision
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Chris Blakely, CSUN
Anna Feuerstein, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa From Cowrie Shells to Parrots Beaks: The Animal Products of Slavery and Empire
Anthony S. Parent, Wake Forest University “Shawno Old Fields Deserted”: Mapping Shawnee Country, 1672-1736
Ilaheva Tua’one, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Early London Missionary Societies in Tahiti, and the Creation of an Indigenous Advance-Guard for the Advance-Guard of Colonialism
Self-Fashioning With & Against the Grain
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Lora E. Geriguis, La Sierra University
Rachael Scarborough King, UCSB Keeping an Account: Pocket Diaries and the Spaces of Self-Improvement
Humberto Garcia, UC Merced Refashioning Masculinity in Regency England: Queer Fashions Inspired by the Persian Envoy Mirza Abul Hassan Khan
John Henry Merritt, UCLA Revision and Rectification in Phillis Wheatley’s “To the University of Cambridge”
2:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
The Social Life of Correspondence Networks
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Howard Horwitz, University of Utah
Deborah Gordon, CSUN The Ballitore Project Gender Study
Chloe Summers Edmondson, Stanford University Surveillance and Privacy in the Media Environment of 18th-Century France
Texts & Textiles
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Richard Frohock, Oklahoma State University
Diana K. Anderson, Cal Poly-Pomona Bringing Emma Woodhouse to Life Through Costume in Emma (2020)
Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, University of Washington Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela
Xinyuan Qiu, Binghamton University Women’s Headdresses as Material Means of Knowing and Altering Their Worlds in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Jessica Roberson, Mount Saint Mary’s University Figuring Women’s Creative Labor in Poetry and Lacemaking
Keynote & Reception
Visit to CSUN Library Special Collections & Archives
4:30 p.m.
University Library, 2nd Floor, West Wing
Keynote: “Being a Book, Hearing a Voice—Jonathan Swift, Edward Said and the Matter of Literature”
Helen Deutsch, UCLA
5:30 p.m.
Orchard Conference Center
Reception
6:30 p.m.
Orchard Conference Center
Saturday, Feb. 18
Registration, 8 a.m.-1:30 p.m., outside Jerome Richfield Hall 319
9 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Race, Slavery, Nation
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Humberto Garcia, UC Merced
Matthew Dentice, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Britons Have Always Ruled the Waves: Prince Madoc’s Eighteenth-Century Transformation from Colonialist Culture Hero to Abolitionist Icon
Miranda Hannasch, UCLA “Sad Oroonoko pleads for each poor African”: Adapting Oroonoko to Abolitionist Narratives
Richard Frohock, Oklahoma State University Pirates, Race, and Ethnicity
Leigh-Michil George, UCLA The Romance of Wake Work: Late Eighteenth-Century Blackness and Being in Beverly Jenkins’s Captured
Materialities & Geographies of Print
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: David Alvarez, DePauw University
Kate Moffatt, Simon Fraser University Mapping Alice Reilly (Dublin Printer-Publisher, 1741-67)
Julianna Wagar, Simon Fraser University A Royal Printer: Recovering the Success of Agnes Campbell in Scotland’s Book Trade
Susanne Anderson-Riedel, University of New Mexico Le Musée Français: From the materiality of a collection to the immateriality of its expansive memory in prints
Norbert Schürer, California State University, Long Beach Capitalism and Civic Society in Subscription and Circulating Libraries
10:45 a.m-12:15 p.m.
Shrinking Material? The “Long Eighteenth Century” in a Time of Short Attention Spans
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chairs: Nicole M. Wright, University of Colorado, Boulder; Regulus Allen, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo
Tekla Babyak, Independent Scholar The Aesthetics of Distracted Listening in the 18th and 21st Centuries
Dale Ireland, Hunter Center, City University of New York Academics with ADHD: Tech, Neurodiversity, and Disability in the Academy
Sarah Ramsey, University of Colorado, Boulder Low Stakes Assignments and Creative Bursts
Rachel Seiler, Big Sea, Digital Marketing What Counts as Attention?
Luke Vines, Vanderbilt University Against Speed: Slowly Reading, Teaching, and Learning from The Vicar of Wakefield with Undergraduate Non-Majors
Brittany Whelan, University of Colorado, Boulder The Landscape of Text: Materiality and Mapping in the Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative
Locating Women’s Voices
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Erin Severson, UCLA
Linda Van Netten Blimke, Concordia University of Edmonton Confronting Fear in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Travelogues
Judith Broome, William Paterson University Imaginary Portugal
Dana Graham Lai, Simon Fraser University Eighteenth-Century EME Nuns: Historical Gaps and Literary Misconceptions
Rebecca Stuive, Simon Fraser University Locating the Voice of Sarah Siddons
12:15 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Lunch
Pick up outside Jerome Richfield Hall 319
1:45 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Form, Function & Education
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Linda Van Netten Blimke, Concordia University of Edmonton
Diane Kelley, University of Puget Sound Imoinda and El Dorado: Literary correspondences between La Place’s 1745 translation of Oroonoko and Voltaire’s Candide
Brian Michael Norton, California State University, Fullerton Shaftesbury’s Ecological Aesthetics
Jesslyn Whittell, UCLA Thomas Spence’s Pigs’ Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude
Social Emotions, Trauma, and Disability from the Plantation to the Battlefield
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Jarett Henderson, UCSB
Chris Blakely, CSUN “Thrown into this Dirty, Stinking Place”: Anguish and Resentment in Battlefield Medicine from Québec to Lenapehoking
Daniel Livesay, Claremont McKenna College Elderly Resilience in the Slave Trade to Jamaica
Elizabeth E. Bohls, University of Oregon Sensibility and the Politics of Place in Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack
3:30 p.m.-5 p.m.
Ethical, Orderly & Spiritual Matters
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
Chair: Regulus Allen, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Tekla Babyak, Independent Scholar Enlightenment or Mysticism?: Nineteenth-Century Musical Evocations of Eighteenth-Century Spirituality
Tim Erwin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas New Contexts for Austen’s Persuasion
Elden Dale Golden, Union Institute & University Creativity’s Moral Imperative and Edward Young’s 1759 Conjectures on Original Composition
Howard Horwitz, University of Utah “Faithful Narrative” and Civic Order in Charles Brockden Brown’s “Thessalonica”
Circulating Identities
Sierra Hall 451
Chair: Elizabeth A. Bohls, University of Oregon
David Alvarez, DePauw University Constructing Race and Cosmopolitan Modernity in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters
Omar Miranda, University of San Francisco The Exalted Soul: Madame de Staël’s Global Celebrity and Artistry
Justine Atwal, Simon Fraser University Manipulating Materiality in Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator
Erin Severson, UCLA “Smoke, Othello!”: Self-Fashioning Against the Interpretive Grain in the Letters of Ignatius Sancho
2023 WSECS Annual Meeting 