NEASECS 2023

“Old and New, Beginnings and Endings”

Virtual Conference

November 18-19, 2023

Conference Schedule

All attendees must pay both the NEASECS Membership Fee and NEASECS 2023 Conference Registration Fee in order to attend the conference.

• Please register for the conference here.
• Renew or start your membership here.

Keynote Speaker: Marlene Daut, of the Department of African-American studies, at Yale University. (November 18)

In France in 1723, the heady days of the Regency drew to a close as Louis XV ascended to the throne: out with the new, and in with the old. By the end of his reign in 1774, France was only 15 years away from the Revolution that would bring an end to this “old” regime and give rise to the modern French republic. Across the channel, the Kingdom of Great Britain was formed in the early part of the century, and a few decades later adopted the Gregorian calendar, changing the start of the legal year to January 1. Across the ocean, the Declaration of Independence was signed, creating a new nation on the land of the indigenous peoples. A slave revolt begun in 1791 in Saint Domingue led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent nation in Latin America.

For NEASECS 2023, we are inviting papers and panels that consider the new and the old, beginnings and endings in an eighteenth-century context.

Possible topics include:

• New readings of eighteenth-century texts or eighteenth-century artistic productions; adaptations, retellings, and reconfigurations, whether from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century.
• La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in eighteenth-century France.
• Eighteenth-century histories and historiography.
• Eighteenth-century inventions, new technologies, and medical advances.
• Revolts, rebellions, resistance, and régime changes.
• Antiquities, ancient civilizations, and the development of archaeology.
• Eighteenth-century translations of older texts.
• Academies and new modes of exhibition, collecting, and teaching art.
• The Grand Tour and the modern encounter with the ancient world.
• New and old forms of power.
• Eighteenth-century deep time.
• Ecocritical reflections on beginnings and endings.
• First novels, final words, and firsts of a kind.
• The beginning and the end of the French Revolution.
• Eighteenth-century abolitionist writings, cultural productions, and movements.
• Fashions, new and old.

Please send your proposals to Paul Young (pjy@georgetown.edu) and NEASECS (neasecs@gmail.com). Panel proposals should be received by May 15th. Full panels should be received by June 15th. Paper proposals are due by June 15th. All presenters will need to be members of NEASECS.

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