Society of Early Americanists

THE FOURTH BIENNIAL MEETING FOR THE SOCIETY OF EARLY AMERICANISTS

31 March-2 April 2005 Old Town Alexandria, Virginia

CALL FOR PAPERS



1. Beyond 'Christian Charity':   Early American Sermons as Popular Literature

  In his appendix to Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amory uses the NAIP to show that 3192 sermons were published in North America between 1640 and 1790 .  As a popular genre, then, sermons must have been in a dialectical relationship with the anxieties and preoccupations of colonial Americans.   What do we find if we consider this mass of texts as the pre-eminent popular art of early America?   A related question is the relation of sermons to other religious publishing, such as hymnals and devotional tests like Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 

Send abstracts to Robert Battistini, Department of English, Franklin & Marshall College, Box 3003, Lancaster, PA.  17604-3003.   Tel: 717.358.4554   E-mail: robert.battistini@fandm.edu

 

2. Representing Insurrection: Early America and Its Discontents
According to Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, inciting domestic insurrection was a wrong imposed by the British monarchy grievous enough to warrant a revolution. Yet America’s early national period was also enervated by a number of its own home-grown insurrections that threatened domestic tranquility and the stability of government. How did early Americans and their transatlantic contemporaries react to, report on, and represent these threats? Papers answering this question or discussing any of the literary, artistic, or historical interpretations of insurrection (broadly construed) in the early national period are welcome.

Contact Information:

Email: cbradshaw@utm.edu (preferred)

Mail: Charles Bradshaw, Dept. of English,, 131 Holt Humanities Bldg., University of Tennessee at Martin, Martin, TN 38238

 

3. Stranger than Fiction: Contemporary Creative Writers and Historical Inspiration
In the tradition of Foster’s The Coquette, this panel for the fourth biennial conference of the Society of Early Americanists in Alexandria, VA, 31 March to 2 April, 2005 seeks to hear creative works from contemporary fiction writers and poets who employ, rework, or re-envision historical events or individuals in their writings in order to bring the historical nuances of early America to life.  As individuals working in the field of creative historical fiction have often discovered, giving a human voice to our ancestors allows the writer to deconstruct the impediments of landscape and time---often in imaginative and exciting ways unfeasible for writers of critical works.  Please submit electronically manuscript(s) selection(s) for a 20-minute reading to Salita S. Bryant, New York University, salita.bryant@nyu.edu or ssbryant@olemiss.edu by September15, 2004.

 

4. Law and Literature in Early America

When one surveys the field of law and literature, several areas of scholarly inquiry emerge.  The first of these grows out of a recognition that practitioners of law and students of literature share a common interest in the processes of interpretation.  In this context, a number of scholars have begun to consider whether the hermeneutic theories and practices of literary criticism can offer anything of value to legal scholars and professionals.  A second sub-field focuses on articulating the historical connections between legal and literary narratives.  Scholars working in this area have thus sought both to recontextualize literary works against a legal historical background and to deepen our understanding of manifestly legal thematic content in literary works.  Yet another group of critics (with links to New Historicism) has attempted to understand the ways in which both legal and literary narratives function, as James Boyd White puts it, as “constitutive rhetorics” where “character and community . . . are defined and made real in performances of language.”  Such scholarship has produced powerful insights into the relationships between the ideological content of various types of storytelling and the discursive power of social institutions. 

For this panel, papers are invited that explore any aspect of the connection between law and literature in early America (up to 1830).  Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

comparisons of legal and literary hermeneutics, explorations of rhetorical connections between legal and literary texts and/or oral performances, studies of legal themes articulated in early American writing, discussions of ideological connections between legal and literary narratives, legal aspects of colonialism and connections to the literature of discovery and travel, discussions of the relationship between legal and literary professionalization
Please send (by email or snail mail) a 500 word abstract to: David J. Carlson, Department of English, California State University, San Bernardino, 5500 University Pkwy, San Bernardino, CA 92407, dajcarls@csusb.edu (Please include academic affiliation and an email address with your submission.)

 

 

5. Whose Documents? "Our Documents"

 This panel offers Early American Studies scholars a venue to consider the contents and the claims of the "Our Documents" website, "A National Initiative on American History, Civics, and Service" [see http://www.ourdocuments.gov/].  Presentations might include critical readings of the documents in light of the

site's claim that they "reflect our diversity and our unity, our past and our future, and mostly our commitment as a nation to continue to strive to 'form a more perfect union.'" How does the site construct a language of political "union" from the multiple, nuanced meanings scholars and students derive from these early texts? Additionally, papers might examine the ways in which the site represents these texts as foundational documents in projects of "civic engagement," "service learning," and/or "community partnership."  How might scholars and teachers of Early American Studies offer supplements and challenges to, or reconfigurations of, these projects and of the "Our Documents" site itself?

Please send abstracts by email to lorrayne@usm.maine.edu or hard copy abstracts to Professor Lorrayne Carroll, Dept of English, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth St, Box, 9300, Portland, Maine 04104-9300

 

 

6. "Privacies"
The advantages, attractions, and risks of privacy historically considered.  Changing definitions, conceptual models, and practices of privacy in law, politics, psychology, religion, diplomacy, medicine, manners, architecture, erotic life.  Privacy as privation, as concealment, as freedom.  The nature, extent, and permeability of psychological, spiritual, and corporeal barriers.  Disguise and the lure of self-display.  The excitements of identification and exposure.  The transactional discourses of privacy: promises, secrets, gossip.  Surrogacy, personae, and masks.  Publicity, interiority, and abjection.  Posthumous privacy: the archive, the grave.  Paper proposals to Max Cavitch at cavitch@english.upenn.edu.

 


7. Rumor and Recital in the Early American Novel, 1782-1830

 The “tales of truth” “founded in fact” that compose the early American novel are often times tales retold.  This panel investigates the presentation of, and the often vexed and dizzying relationship between, fact and fiction in the early American novel.  In order to establish the authenticity of their texts, many authors in the new Republic included elaborate footnotes and long prefaces that grounded their novels in truth.  Such strategies of authentication are reinforced or undermined within the text by representations and scenes of rumor and recital.  For example, while Hannah Webster Foster narrates the history of Elizabeth Whitman in The Coquette (1798), she includes scenes of gossip and circulation at the conclusion of her novel that in turn call into question her own retelling of the story “founded on fact.”  This panel will uncover the ways in which authors and readers attempt to reconcile the novel’s assertion of truth telling and the potential for inauthenticity inherit in the terms “rumor” and “recital.”  What difference is there between rumor and recital?  Is one more truth-bound than the other?  Is recital fact, or is it, as Philip claims, a “performance,” and thus, fictional?  How do these terms complicate the perception of the early American author as a monolithic, didactic figure?  How can gossip or rumors be used as pedagogical tools or strategies?

Please send paper proposals of 300 words to Jennifer Desiderio by September 2004 via email at desiderio.3@osu.edu. Or, if you prefer to mail a paper copy, after August 2, 2004, you may mail it to Professor Jennifer Desiderio, Florida International University, Department of English, University Park Campus, DM 453, Miami, Florida 33199.

 

 

8. Saint-Domingue/Haiti/Caribbean:  The Domestication of Foreign Intelligence

News from abroad often came to Early America by circuitous media and often belatedly.  News from the Caribbean colonies is but one example; but touching on issues of race, coloniality, and inter-imperial competition, news from the still colonial south was both foreign and close to home.  News from and accounts of the Haitian Revolution, for example, an event drawn out over 13 years, filtered through periodicals, newspapers, and into popular fiction throughout the 1790s and into the early nineteenth century.  Sources included refugees resettling in the US from New Orleans to Philadelphia and often the slaves who travelled with them, American merchants who continued to trade during and after the Revolution, and novelists and imaginative writers like Charles Brockden Brown and Leonora Sansay.   What picture of Saint-Domingue/Haiti emerged from this confluence of sources?  Was news from abroad linked to events closer to home, and if so, how and in what form (in fiction, poetry, drama, historiography)?  Papers on news from abroad from any region are welcome, but preference will be given to those concerning the Anglophone or French Caribbean.  Please send paper abstracts to Michael Drexler, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837 or by email to mdrexler@bucknell.edu by September 15, 2004. 

 

9. The Economies of Early American Literature

The emergence of print culture in the colonies of North America and the first few decades of the United States coincided with the development of capitalism and a market economy identified equally by poverty, prosperity, trade and turmoil.  This era of colonization and settlement is particularly marked by issues of debt, credit, counterfeiting, and land speculation, issues that helped to shape social relations and cultural production.  For this panel, I solicit papers that explore this correlation between literary and economic development.  How did early American writers represent, engage with, and perhaps even influence economics?  How did land speculation shape the representation of the colonies?  How did writers confront commercial anxiety?  What was the effect of debt and credit on early American writing?  How did the increase of paper money affect the reception and acceptability of literature?  Papers on these or similar topics dealing with early American literature and the economy are welcome. 

Send 250-500 word proposals by September 15, 2004 to Scott Ellis at elliss3@southernct.edu (preferred) or Department of English, Southern Connecticut State University, 501 Crescent St., New Haven, CT 06515.

 

 

10. "Just Do It"?—The Pain and Pleasure of Researching Early American Literature

Research—we all do it, but we usually talk about its products, not the process. This panel is designed to reflect on the activity that makes the vibrancy of our field possible.  In order to represent perspectives from various stages of the professional career, this panel will employ a roundtable format. Thus, 4-5 speakers will introduce a topic for 10 minutes each, followed by an extensive discussion period. Issues and questions include: new technologies and research methods; archival vs. “virtual” research; research and the scholarly/professional career; research in different institutional settings; research and publication; research and teaching; future directions.  

Please send one-page proposals (e-mail attachments in Word format preferred) to: Patrick M. Erben pmerbe@wm.edu, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, PO Box 8781, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8781

 

11. The Performance of Early American Culture

Recent work on the colonial period, including studies by Jay Fliegelman, Jeffrey Richards, Christopher Looby, Nancy Ruttenburg, and Joanne Freeman, have suggested the significance of performance as a metaphor for cultural production.  This panel seeks to extend this insight by applying it to a broader range of settings.  As ritual practice, performance was intimately involved with early cross-cultural encounters, in trade, treaty-making, and the experience of captivity.  Colonists as well as Indians saw themselves as sustaining and altering customary performances, and their texts, both verbal and nonverbal, contributed to that practice.  Spiritual lives were also marked by a Christian drama that was most visible in times of crisis. Execution sermons, demonic possessions, and political trials were all species of performance–-by women as well as men.  In the late eighteenth century, colonists not only engaged in political theater but also began to write tracts and novels rooted in the metaphors of public performance.  And those notions of public display, in turn, influenced the emerging image of an ambitious middle class whose status depended on its economic performance.  It is my hope that the contributors to this session will address both local and general concerns, suggesting how the notion of cultural performance can sharpen our apprehension of the past.  Send 1-2-page abstracts to Joseph Fichtelberg, English Department, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549, or e-mail to engjaf@hofstra.edu


12. "public travels in the service of Truth": The Textuality of Transatlantic Quakerism
George Fox urged his followers to "Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people and to them." Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Friends embraced his direction, developing an emphatically transatlantic culture, with people and texts actively circulating across the Atlantic, through the American colonies and in the West Indies. We welcome papers addressing any aspects of this transatlantic phenomenon, including patterns of travel, migration of writers, modes of publication, and circulation of bodies, identities, and texts across the Atlantic.
Proposals should be sent electronically to both Michele Lise Tarter at tarter@tcnj.edu and Lisa Gordis at lgordis@barnard.edu.

 

 

13. Aesthetics and Politics.

Aesthetics is no longer a dirty word. In light of this critical trend, this panel aims to reconsider historical and ideological conditions shaping the categories of aesthetics and politics in early America--and the relations/boundaries between them. How might we re-think the very distinction between the two? Investigations of this sort might involve the political valences of aesthetic language as well as the possibilities for thinking about politics aesthetically. When, for example, do political conflicts become aesthetic ones as well? Papers are invited that investigate the relations between aesthetic and political theories, between art forms and political events, and between metropolitan and provincial cultures. Send 1-2 page individual paper proposals to Philip Gould at Philip_Gould@Brown.edu.

 

 

14. Cosmopolitan Literacies.

Recent theoretical interest in the relations between nationalism and cosmopolitanism occasions this panel. How might contemporary cultural theories of cosmopolitanism inform our field? Alternatively, how might the literary and cultural histories of early America (a term taken expansively here) help to reformulate cultural theories of identity and exchange? This panel seeks to propose provisional answers to this question by exploring specific historical sites in the early Americas where cosmopolitan "literacy" was operative. Papers dealing with print and oral cultures, comparative cultural analysis, transatlantic studies, and non-traditional regional and imperial models are especially encouraged. Send a 1-2 page individual paper proposal to Philip Gould at Philip_Gould@Brown.edu.

 

 

15. The Construction of the African-American: Explorations in the Black Atlantic and After

I would like to solicit papers to form a panel that would explore the differences, as captured in literature, between the cultural situation of Africans brought to the new world in the late 17th and earliest 18th century and that of those living in early America after the abolition of the slave trade but before the abolition of slavery itself.  The literature involved can be written by those of African origin or by others about the African presence in America.  I would welcome papers from a variety of disciplines.

Please submit abstracts or papers via snail mail to: Rosemary Guruswamy, Department of English,  Box 6935,  Radford University, Radford, VA  24142, or electronically as a Word document to: rguruswa@radford.edu

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16. Nature's Manuscripts

When pen is set to paper, the editing of nature begins. How do authors sensitive to their environs edit the natural world? In what ways have editorial projects from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present shaped the ways in which we read the colonial environmental imagination? How do print and manuscript cultures intersect? Where do studies of textual scholarship and literary ecology converge? This panel invites papers, both theoretical and practical, exploring any aspect of manuscript, text, and the natural world. Send proposals or papers to Thomas Hallock (U. South Florida St. Petersburg), tbhallock@cs.com

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17. Roundtable:  Developing Research Teams for the Transamerican Study of Colonial Women
 In her response to the Tucson Summit in Early American Literature 38.1, Dana Nelson suggests that research teams may fruitfully undertake the challenges of transamerican comparative work in ways that elude individual scholars trained in particular linguistic and national traditions.  Continuing conversations from several recent conferences, this roundtable will focus on the nuts and bolts of developing research teams dedicated to comparative work on colonial women that may serve as models for transamerican comparative work in other areas.  What research areas might we explore?  What modes of collaboration would be most useful and productive?  Would a website along the lines of the Brown Renaissance Women Writers Online project be appropriate?  What can we do to take the focus of such a website off the simple collection of texts, bibliographies, etc. and place it more firmly on interpretive projects?  Should we consider establishing workshops, publishing projects, regional reading groups, or other collaborative undertakings?  How best might we coordinate these efforts and share their results?  What problems can we anticipate?  Because our focus will be on coming up with specific plans for future activities, presentations by panelists should be no longer than 5 minutes long and should make proposals and ask questions that encourage discussion.  Send proposals by September 15 to Tamara Harvey at tharvey2@gmu.edu, George Mason University, Department of English, 4400 University Drive, MSN 3E4, Fairfax, VA  22030.

 

18. Early British-American Poetry and the Circum-Atlantic World

Much of the work in the emerging field of circum-atlantic studies—especially Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996), Suvir Kaul’s Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (2000), and most recently Kathleen Wilson’s This Island Race (2003)—provides a richly provocative comparative context in which to revise our understanding of the aesthetic and cultural work of Early British American Poetry, particularly the poetry of the long eighteenth century.  For the poems of this period, constructed as they so often are through the dynamic interplay between discursive and aesthetic networks, are peculiarly attentive to what Roach terms the “oceanic intercultures” of this world.  The processes of literary adaptation in this period closely retrace, and reflect, the cultural adaptations of circum-Atlantic societies along the Atlantic rim; they enable us to explore, in vivid microcosm, the complexities of cultural performance as a relentless process of surrogation.  Hence, these poems can powerfully disclose the elaborate patterns of remembrance and forgetting through which Anglo-Americans forged their identities, imagined their futures, and mourned for their pasts at once through an ambivalent identification with the imperial center and a no less ambivalent repudiation of racial others.  Papers that explore any aspect of these poems’ engagements with the circum-Atlantic world are welcome.  Please send 1-2 page abstracts by September 15 to Larry F. Kutchen at lkutchen@trinity.edu, or at Department of English, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX, 78212  

 

 

19. Women and Early American Studies
 This panel welcomes papers which explore the current status and future  directions of early American women's studies. At an SEA-sponsored panel at  the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Fall  2003, Sharon Harris cautioned that the history of women's writing is  composed of cycles of recovery and loss. This panel seeks to interrupt that cycle by maintaining the importance of women's texts and histories to our  field and our world.  How do comparative colonial, transnational,  transatlantic, and interdisciplinary frameworks impact our study of early  American women? How will new feminist theoretical approaches, technological advances, or contemporary institutional conditions shape our work? What dimensions of early American women's lives--especially the lives of Black, indigenous, lesbian, and queer women--call for better understanding? We welcome new work in women's history and literature, as well as women-focused cultural, ethnic, and religious studies. Abstracts by September 15 to Lisa Logan (lmlogan@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu) and Joanna Brooks (brooks.j@mail.utexas.edu).

 

20. Mediating "Science" in Early America
This panel will consider ways in which knowledge was created and transmitted in early America. Of particular interest will be explorations of the natural and/or physical sciences: material practices, economic realities, textual production and consumption, or aesthetic interests associated with mediating knowledge are potential sub-topics. Others may be considered. Study of practices, authors, and/or works from any time period, from Franco, Anglo, and Ibero exploration and colonization to the records of Lewis and Clark and the latter years of the early Republic.Please contact via e-mail. Queries are welcome. Send 250-500 word proposals as Word attachments. ettamadden@smsu.edu   Etta M. Madden, Associate Professor, Southwest Missouri State University

 

 

21. "Colloquy With Cathy Davidson on Revolution and the Word, Twenty Years Along"

Two or three seats are still available at the table, along with Cathy Davidson.  As with earlier colloquies at SEA along these lines -- on Cato's Tears, most recently, on An Anxious Pursuit in '001, and on both The Plight of Feeling and States of Sympathy, back at Charleston -- each panelist makes a brief opening com ment, freeing up time for discussion involving audience as well as presenters.  As in the past, a panelist on the colloquy may give a paper on another panel. Contact dmoore@english.fsu.edu.

 

22. Teaching “Historical Awareness” with Sedgwick and her Contemporaries

Many of us teach in English departments that are replacing the traditional “fields” of literature with broader categories of learning – one of which is “historicity” or “historical awareness.”  What does this shift mean for early American literature courses and the possibilities for thinking beyond the survey?  How do you teach something like “historical awareness” in the humanities anyway? 

This panel will apply these theoretical questions to our understanding of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s early writing – or that of her contemporaries.   How does Sedgwick “use” history in her works?  How, in turn, can we use her?  Can we teach The Linwoods in a course on the American Revolution, or Hope Leslie in a course on the Pequot War?   What assumptions about literary value are we then, implicitly or explicitly, making?  What about other less obvious historical events or issues?  Finally, how do questions about teaching “historical awareness” help us reassess Sedgwick’s legacy? 

History can be considered in many ways: events like the Pequot War, social history, interracial history, constructions of early American history, narrative, literary history, life history, rewriting history, theoretical concepts of history, etc.  Please send abstracts or questions to lisa.norwood@drake.edu or mail to Lisa West Norwood, Department of English, Drake University, Des Moines, IA  50311

 


23. The Uses of Print in Early America: Publication, Reading, and Interpretation This panel will explore early American print culture in all stages of its production, consumption, and reception by focusing on the ideological, economic, and personal relationships generated by the printed word. Breaking down the traditional boundaries between elite production and non-elite consumption of printed texts, this panel will consider the uses of print by the educated elite as well as by non-elite groups such as the poor, the uneducated, and non-white. We welcome proposals that aim to examine the interplay between oral and print culture, publication strategies, reading experiences, and other dimensions of print culture.
Contact information:
Michelle Orihel, Syracuse University morihel@maxwell.syr.edu
Karen Weyler, University of North Carolina, Greensboro kaweyler@prodigy.net


24. “The Place of Place in Early American Studies”

In the late twentieth century, scholars from a number of different fields—cultural geography, ecocriticism, phenomenology, regionally-based literary studies—have developed a variety of theories about “place.”  Some scholars describe the increasingly “phantasmogoric” quality of place in the contemporary U.S. as humans increasingly operate within a network of distant nodes of influence and activity; others lament and oppose the way the “spatial colonizations of capitalist modernity” have quashed “place-based territorial identity”; some argue that place is socially constructed while others are interested in how places are experienced through the senses; some scholars focus on the environment and its history in a given bounded area while others think about places as “open and porous networks of social relations.” This panel will ask: how are scholars who study North America and the Caribbean before 1830 engaging in this discussion?  How were places constituted and encountered in this period?  How were the meanings of places contested by indigenous peoples, settlers, and enslaved Africans?  As a period of intense migration—both volitional and forced—when subjects frequently found themselves in strange new worlds, how did they orient themselves to their geographic situations?  How did subjects mesh in their imaginations the material environment around them with the distant and virtual landscapes and cityscapes of their old worlds and of their spiritual worlds?  Do the distant imperial networks of this period disrupt the theory that it was only with 20th-century networks of global capital that atopic ‘space’ displaced human identification with and commitment to locales? The panel seeks to bring together literary, architectural, environmental, and cultural historians who are considering ‘place’ in their own work.

Please contact: Susan Scott Parrish, University of Michigan at sparrish@umich.edu

 

 

25. Dramas and Theaters in the South before 1820.The panel will consider papers that address specific theatrical performances; individual careers of theatrical personages of all sorts, including backstage workers, financiers, managers, as well as writers and actors; dramatic texts composed or acted in the South; archaeological or art historical examinations of theater sites, theatrical material culture, or architecture; and/or problems for the study of theater in the colonies and states from Delaware and Maryland south.  As an example of the latter, one might address the challenge of moving beyond the regional theater history model for study of early southern theater.  Papers drawing upon archival work especially encouraged.

One-page abstracts (500 words max) by 15 September 2004 to:

Jeffrey H. Richards, jhrichar@odu.edu, Professor, Department of English, Coordinator, American Studies, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, 757/683-4032, fax: 757/683-3241

26. Slavery and Literacy in Early America.

The default assumption has been that slaves in pre-1800 America had few opportunities to acquire literacy; but we know that some did.  Certainly, among free blacks there were possibilities for learning to read and write and to use those skills, yet what of slaves, north and south?  This panel seeks papers that explore specific means of literacy acquisition; stories of individuals known to be able to read; accounts of slave networks of learning; little-known campaigns or efforts by patrons to encourage literacy (as distinct from, even if coincidental with, evangelizing); or methodological investigations of how we might find out more about slave literacy.  What does it mean to know that slaves on a particular plantation or in a certain city had the wherewithal, like Frederick Douglass in the 1820s and 30s, to read of the onerousness of their condition?

One-page abstracts (500 words max) by 15 September 2004 to:

Jeffrey H. Richards, jhrichar@odu.edu Professor, Department of English, Coordinator, American Studies, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, 757/683-4032, fax: 757/683-3241

 

 

27. Science and Religion in the Colonial Americas, 1500 - 1800

Recent scholarship has explored links between empiricism and imperialism, between new science and new world exploration.  This panel considers how methods of scientific inquiry instituted by such institutions as the French Academy and Royal Society of London complement or contest supernatural, magical or providential beliefs within a New World context.  Topics might include: natural reason’s attempt to understand demonic agency; the “contact zone” as a site for negotiating systems of natural knowledge; Baconian categories of evidence in relation to laws of evidence and exegesis in Puritan typology; or the status of the Praying Indian within scientific discourse.   

Please submit 1-2 page abstracts to Sarah Rivett (serivett@uchicago.edu) by September 15.

           

 

28. Transatlantic Intellectual Networks in the Age of Revolutions

According to the general understanding, American nationalism received a major boost during the time of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. However, this is also a time rife with the spirit of internationalism and enlightened cosmopolitanism and a period of intense transatlantic intellectual exchange. Many of the United States' most prominent political and intellectual figures – among them, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Joel Barlow – spent considerable time in Europe and developed close associations with Europeans and an lively interest in European ideas. In turn, quite a number of Europeans – such as Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, and a host of transatlantic travelers – made contacts with Americans and brought their impressions of American republican life back to Europe.  Important transatlantic intellectual networks were also created through the great number of Americans studying abroad (particularly at Scottish universities) and through the imports of European academics to American colleges.  The workshop invites papers identifying and describing transatlantic friendships, associations, and intellectual networks in the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. How do the participants view their role in the republican society of the US or the republican movements in Europe? What is the place of internationalism or cosmopolitanism in the republican visions of the participants? The approach can be biographical, history-of-ideas, or socio-institutional or a combination of these.

Please send a 1-page abstract to Dietmar Schloss, Anglistisches Seminar, University of Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany; or to Dietmar.Schloss@urz.uni-heidelberg.de

 


29. Failed Ventures
America was the home of a number of notorious failed colonial ventures by English speaking peoples: Roanoke, the Saghadoc Colony in Maine, Raleigh's venture in South America, Cromwell's Western Design, the first settlement of Providence Island, New Caledonia in Darien. How did these disasters haunt the imagination of literate persons and imperial projectors through the Colonial Era?
Please send proposals to David Shields via email at dshields@gwm.sc.edu, or via regular mail at or via regular mail at Dr. David S. Shields, Editor, Early American Literature, McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, Department of English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, 3.777.7630


30. Prophets and Mystics:
German hermits, Quaker visionaries, Native prophets, Shaker apostles, and New Light rhapsodes. A multi-cultural exploration of enthusiasm and mysticism.
Please send proposals to David Shields via email at dshields@gwm.sc.edu, or via regular mail at
or via regular mail at Dr. David S. Shields, Editor, Early American Literature, McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, Department of English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, 3.777.7630

 

 

31. Southeastern Indian Captivity Narratives

This panel invites papers dealing with any of a broad range of topics associated with early southeastern Indian captivity narratives. Papers might address how these narratives intersect with issues of nationality, political ideology, religion, economics, race and ethnicity, propaganda, fictionalization, slavery, gender, domesticity, agriculture, ecology, life writing, region, the Caribbean, environmental history, and so on. Indian captivity narratives constitute some of the first accounts of America and its inhabitants. From Juan Ortiz’s 1557 tale of capture on the Florida coast, to Captain John Smith’s meeting with Pocahontas in early seventeenth-century Virginia, to Massachusetts slave Briton Hammon’s 1747 shipwreck and captivity, these and many other unique narratives represent a rich source for early American study. Please submit proposals (of approximately 300 words) for fifteen-minute papers, along with short biographical statements, to Matthew Wynn Sivils at siv@sbcglobal.net

E-mail submissions are encouraged; file attachments are okay. If necessary, you may also mail your proposal to Matthew Wynn Sivils, 205 Morrill, Department of English, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078. The submission deadline is September 15, 2005.



32. Parody, Power and the Public Sphere
The eighteenth-century was the age of print culture in America, but it was also the age of parody. Writers made their case for Revolution by parodying the official language of colonial proclamations; parodic broadsides regularly mimicked the language of political speeches and essays; poets sought to negate through parody the effects of other poets’ works. This panel proposes to analyze the significance of this parodic moment by considering, in particular, the function of parody within the complex and shifting power relations brought about by the rise of print culture. What was the relationship between parody as an act of discursive struggle and the emergent critically reading and debating public sphere? What kinds of power relations motivated parodic expression, and how did parody refigure such relations? How did shifts in the situation of writers (e.g. between colonial subject and citizen of the new republic) complicate the politics of parody? Papers on both traditionally literary and nonliterary forms of parodic expression will be considered. Send or email proposals to Colin Wells, Department of English, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Ave., Northfield, MN 55057; wellsc@stolaf.edu.

33. Islam in Early National Print Culture
The purpose of this panel is to examine depictions of Islam and Arabic cultures in a variety of early national texts.  Hopefully, the panel participants will discuss how these often distorted depictions were used inversely to reinforce American self-perceptions.  Topics that examine descriptions of Islam and the Muslim world in early national print culture, roughly from 1785 to 1815, are particularly encouraged, though papers discussing pre-Revolutionary texts are certainly welcome.  The range of possible texts and subjects is wide and may include “Oriental” tales, Barbary captivity narratives, travel accounts, satires, religious tracts, and newspaper reports.  Please send proposals to: Daniel E. Williams, TCU Box 297270, Fort Worth, TX 76129; or email at: d.e.williams@tcu.edu

 

 

34. American Foundation Myths: The 19th Century Remembers the 17th
This panel will feature investigations into the construction of American foundation myths. Throughout the antebellum period, seventeenth-century “histories” were appropriated by fiction writers and historians such as Hawthorne, Longfellow, Cooper, Child, Bancroft, Parkman, Prescott, and others, resulting in texts which deliberately contributed to or critiqued American nationalist myth-making rather than to historical clarity. We will explore some of the ways in which literary romanticism relates to history in creating a collective memory by analyzing original seventeenth-century documents in contrast to the resultant texts that became tools in the construction of a national identity. In a way, this panel queries the origins of what it meant to be an early Americanist at the moment of the professionalization of academic scholarship. Please send abstracts to either:
Prof. Edward S. Watts, Michigan State University, wattse@msu.edu; and Abigail Davis, Graduate Student, University of Minnesota, Davis_11733@msn.com, or davi0028@umn.edu