The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a forum for debate and discussion that engages a range of critical approaches and interests. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions, featuring precirculated papers.
Sponsored by the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and directed by Timothy Campbell, University of Chicago; Lisa A. Freeman, University of Illinois at Chicago; John Shanahan, DePaul University; and Helen Thompson, Northwestern University.
All sessions are free and open to the public; registration in advance is required.
Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In the late eighteenth century, traditional notions of time and history came under pressure from work in three emerging sciences: astronomy, geology, and paleontology. By cutting time loose from embodied experience and biblical chronology, these sciences challenged fundamental understandings of climate, nature, and humankind's ability to "improve" local or regional conditions by converting wetlands and forests to agricultural production. In subtle and complex ways, Austen's Mansfield Park registers contemporary anxieties about climatic instability, even as the novel suggests that an appreciation of Nature is crucial to individual and social morality. Ultimately, Austen's attention to the ecological and economic pressures on the English countryside disclose the unsustainability of an idealized Nature and its susceptibility to change over newly recognized registers of time.
A reception will follow the lecture.
Register to attend.
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2:00 p.m. Saturday, February 12Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago
A reception will follow the lecture.
Register to attend.
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Title to be announcedDena Goodman, University of Michigan
A reception will follow the lecture.
Register to attend.
While there is no fee to attend these programs, participants must register in advance. Use our online form; e-mail renaissance [at] newberry.org; or call 312.255.3514.
Funds may be available for graduate students and faculty of Consortium institutions to travel to the Newberry Library to attend this program. Contact your Representative Council member or the Center for Renaissance Studies.
Announcements of individual Center for Renaissance Studies programs are made by email only. To ensure that we have your most current information, please join our mailing list.