Long 18th Century Past Events

2023-2024

September 29, 2023
Thadeus Dowad, Northwestern University
“Turquerie’s Other Colors: Portraiture & Race between Paris, Istanbul, and the Caribbean”

December 1, 2023
Claude Willan, Rowan University
“Manifolding the Eighteenth Century”

February 2, 2024
Julie Park, Penn State University
“The Camera Obscura & Spaces of Inner Life in 18th-Century England”

March 22, 2024
Eugenia Zuroski, McMaster University
“A Funny Thing: An Undisciplined 18th Century”

2022-2023

September 30, 2022
Dipti Khera, New York University
“The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century”

October 21, 2022
Chelsea Stieber, The Catholic University of America
“Revolutionary mémoires, Dessalinean critique, and the origins of Haitian anticolonial writing”

January 27, 2023
Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s University
“What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century”

March 3, 2023
Thomas Manganaro, University of Richmond
“Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century”

2021–2022

November 19, 2021
Mei Mei Rado, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“Western Tapestries at the Eighteenth-century Qing Court in China”
Online

December 3, 2021
Abigail Zitin, Rutgers University
“Asexual Generations”
Huntington Library

January 21, 2022
Wendy Anne Lee, New York University
“Jane Austen & the End of Life”
Huntington Library

February 25, 2022
Jason Farr, Marquette University
“The Deaf Soundscapes of Burney’s Cecilia”
Huntington Library

April 22, 2022
Andrew Bricker, Ghent University
“Sophists in Calumny: Satirists in Court in the Eighteenth Century”
Huntington Library

2020–2021

October 23, 2020
Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
“Francis Hayman’s History of the Two Indies at Vauxhall Gardens”
Online

November 20, 2020
Sal Nicolazzo, University of California, San Diego
“Toward an Abolitionist Literary History of the Police”
Online

January 29, 2021
Davide Panagia, University of California, Los Angeles
“Eighteenth-Century Moral Sentimentalism and Contemporary Criticism”
Online

March 19, 2021
Ashley Cohen, University of Southern California
The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756-1815
Online

Event cancelled
Wendy Anne Lee, New York University
“Perception, Persuasion, and the End of Life”

April 23, 2021
Joseph Drury, Villanova University
“The Whimsical Eighteenth Century”
Online

2019–2020

September 13, 2019
David Taylor, University of Oxford
“Addison’s Theatre of the Aesthetic”
Huntington Library

November 1, 2019
Kelsey B. Rubin-Detlev, University of Southern California
“Catherine the Great and Russian Reactions to the French Revolution”
Huntington Library

February 7, 2020
Alexander Wragge-Morley, New York University
“The Aesthetic Sciences of the Long 18th Century”
Huntington Library

March 6, 2020
Julia Fawcett, University of California, Berkeley
“Performing Personal Space in Restoration London”
Huntington Library

April 3, 2020
Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
“Francis Hayman’s History of the Two Indies at Vauxhall Gardens”
Canceled

2018–2019

September 21, 2018
Mary Favret, Johns Hopkins University
“How the Bookworm Got Its Glasses: A Natural History of Bookishness”
Huntington Library

October 19, 2018
Naomi Tadmor, Lancaster University
“The Settlement of the English Poor in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Huntington Library

November 5, 2018
Tita Chico, University of Maryland
“Facts and Other Metaphors in the British Enlightenment”
University of Southern California

January 25, 2019
Spencer Jackson, The University of Queensland
“Tory Abolitionists in Early America: Phyllis Wheatley’s Republican Political Poetics”
Huntington Library

February 22, 2019
John A. Hodgson, Princeton University
“Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity”
Huntington Library

April 12, 2019
Antonia Szabari, University of Southern California
“Radical Botany and the Romantic Plant”
Natania Meeker, University of Southern California
“Radical Botany and the Romantic Plant”
Huntington Library

2017–2018

November 3, 2017
Frederic Clark, Rice University
“Writing the ‘Ancient and Modern History of the World’: Universal History and the Antecedents of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall”
Huntington Library

November 3, 2017
Anton M. Matytsin, Kenyon College
“Writing Cultural History in the Enlightenment: Antecedents of Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs at the Académie des inscriptions”
Huntington Library

January 26, 2018
Amanda Vickery, Queen Mary University of London
“Polymorphous Uniformity: Packaging Identity in 18th-century England”
Huntington Library

February 26, 2018
Robert Wellington, Australian National University
“Onontio’s Reward: When Louis XIV’s Head Hung from Native American Necks”
University of Southern California

March 2, 2018
David O’Shaughnessy, Trinity College Dublin
“Charles Macklin, the ’45, and the Opportunity of History”
Huntington Library

April 6, 2018
Catherine Roach, Virginia Commonwealth University
“The British Institution and the Making of the Modern Art Exhibition”
Huntington Library

2016–2017

September 30, 2016
Matthew Hunter, McGill University
“‘Render’d Immortal’: The Work of Art in An Age of Chymical Reproduction”
Huntington Library

October 28, 2016
Sarah Raff, Pomona College
“Inventing the Custodial Novel: Mansfield Park, Shakespeare, and the Absent Garden”
Huntington Library

February 10, 2017
Jon Mee, University of York
“The Doctor that Blushed: John Ferriar and the Body in Early Industrial Manchester”
Huntington Library

April 21, 2017
Daniel O’Quinn, University of Guelph
“Sir Joshua Reynolds, Decolonization, and the Pictorial Dialectics of Crisis”
Huntington Library

2015–2016

September 25, 2015
Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
‘Cosmopolitanism Before Kant: Towards a New History of ‘World Literature’”
Huntington Library

January 29, 2016
William Warner, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Reality and the Novel: How the 19th and 20th century Critical Creed of Realism Has Obscured What was New in the New Novel of the long Eighteenth century”
Huntington Library

March 25, 2016
Dena Goodman, University of Michigan
“Family, Friendship, Sociability, and Science in Revolutionary France”
Huntington Library

April 29, 2016
Lisa A. Freeman, University of Illinois, Chicago
“Mrs. Inchbald’s Remarks”
Huntington Library

2014–2015

October 17, 2014
Kathleen Wilson, State University of New York, Stony Brook
“Blackface Empire: Love, Theft and Subversion in British Domains”
Huntington Library

February 27, 2015
Paula Backscheider, Auburn University
“Crisis Texts: Wartime Women on Stage”
Huntington Library

May 8, 2015
Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine
“Milton’s Hair: A (Long) Eighteenth-Century Entanglement”
Huntington Library

2013–2014

November 8, 2013
Helen Thompson, Northwestern University
“Racial Difference and Eighteenth-Century Matter Theory”
Huntington Library

January 24, 2014
Stuart Sherman, Fordham University
“News, Plays, Days: Rhythms of Performance and Report, London 1620-1779”
Huntington Library

March 28, 2014
David Cressy, Ohio State University
“Eighteenth Century Gypsies: The Trials and Travels of Mary Squires”
Huntington Library

April 11, 2014
Elizabeth Kuti, University of Essex
“1798: War, Terror, and Performance”
USC, University Park Campus

April 12, 2014
Elizabeth Kuti, University of Essex
The Broken Token
UCLA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

May 2, 2014
Harriet Guest, University of York
“Sociability and Social Class: Seaside Holidays in 18th-Century Literature”
Huntington Library

2012–2013

October 4, 2012
Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania
“Black Lacquer: Race, Science, and Chinoiserie”
Huntington Library

January 18, 2013
Lynn Hunt, UCLA
“French Revolutionary Prints and the Social Imagination”
Huntington Library

March 29, 2013
Meg Russett, USC
“Blake’s ‘Bonifieds’: Milton, Body and Soul”
Huntington Library

May 2, 2013
Misty Anderson, UT, Knoxville
“The Scottish Play: Centlivre and The Wonder of Britishness”
Huntington Library

2011–2012

October 14, 2011
Emily Hodgson Anderson, USC
“Animating Hermione: Sarah Siddons in The Winter’s Tale”
Huntington Library

January 26, 2012
Gillian Russell, Australian National University
“ ‘Accidental reading’: ephemeral textuality and sociability in the fiction of Maria Edgeworth”
Huntington Library

March 15, 2012
Lynn Festa, Rutgers University
“Fallen Things”
Huntington Library

April 20, 2012
David Brewer, Ohio State University
“The Inhumanity of Authors”
Huntington Library

2010–2011

October 8, 2010
Linda Colley, Princeton University
“Gendering the Globe: The Political and Imperial Thought of Philip Francis”
Huntington Library

December 3, 2010
Sandra MacPherson, Ohio State University
“Pornomorphography”
Huntington Library

February 11, 2011
John Mee, University of Warwick
” ‘The Most Garrulous Female Chronicler’: Piozzi Boswell, and the Conversible World of the Literary”
Huntington Library

March 25, 2011
Ted McCormick, Concordia University
“Three Aspects of Population in the Enlightenment”
Huntington Library

April 22, 2011
Kevin Gilmartin, California Institute of Technology
“Experimental Pastoral”
Huntington Library

2009-2010

Friday, October 9, 2009
Jill Campbell, Yale University
“‘Join/Griefs to thy griefs’: Authorial Feeling and Literary Work in the Age of Pope”

Friday, November 20, 2009
Nicholas Rogers, University of York
“The Trials of Admiral Knowles: Duels and Recriminations in the British Navy, 1740-1750”

Friday, January 15, 2010
John Brewer, California Institute of Technology
“Feeling and Distance: Loyalist Instinct and Radical Benevolence in the 1790s”

Friday, March 5, 2010
Jocelyn Harris, University of Otago
“The Mansfield Park Theatricals and the Controversy over the Stage”

Friday, April 30, 2010
Helen Deutsch, UCLA
“The Literary Afterlife of Jonathan Swift”

2008-2009

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Laura Brown, Cornell University
“Shock Effect: Monkeys, Marriage & Frances Burney’s Evelina”

Friday, November 14, 2008
Joseph Boone, USC
“European Travelogues & Ottoman Sexuality: Sodomitical Crossings Abroad, 1600-1830”

Thursday, January 8, 2009
Howard Weinbrot, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Thirtieth of January Sermon: Swift, Johnson, Sterne & the Evolution of Culture”

Friday, March 6, 2009
Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University
“Women & the Public/Private Divide in Anglo-America, 1640-1750”

Thursday, April 30, 2009
Angela Rosenthal, Dartmouth College
“The Art of Undoing: Slave Portraiture in the Age of Abolition”

2007-2008

Thursday, October 11, 2007
Malcolm Baker, University of California, Riverside
“Making the Portrait Bust Modern: The Changing Role of Sculptural Portraiture in 18th-Century Britain”

Friday, January 11, 2008
Daniela Bleichmar, USC
“Learning to Look: Art, Science, and Visual Expertise in the 18th Century”

Thursday, March 13, 2008
Jenny Davidson, Columbia University
“The Hows and Whys of Shakespearean Adaptation in the 18th Century”

Friday, May 2, 2008
Marta Vicente, University of Kansas
“The Sex of Children: Family, Nature, and Culture in Early Modern Thought”