Panel descriptions:

"Austen: Beyond Pride & Prejudice."
This panel will explore teaching Austen (successes and failures), but with special emphasis on the ways in which her lesser known texts (Mansfield Park, anyone?) can at times be more effective pedagogically than her best known novel, Pride and Prejudice. Methods for connecting Austen's pop culture identity to a more traditional classroom are welcome.

"East Meets West, Old and New Customs and Ideas--Cultural Resistance and Change in the 18th Century."
The philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment, the 'East', and new ideas generally were not always welcomed everywhere. Culturally isolated and very provincial regions were often fiercely resistant to new 'progressive' ideas that promised social change and threatened the status quo. Papers are invited from all disciplines. Graduate students are invited to submit papers.

"Eating Sociability in the 18th Century." This roundtable addresses the conference theme by conceptualizing the table as a site of intersection for personhood and state power, and/or East and West, in the 18th century. We seek papers that address how the act and art of eating and other food practices constructed identity and the viability of the individual. What foods made you popular? What food practices made you powerful? Which could ruin a reputation, and how did limits of alimentary propriety correspond to any others? What rituals attended the ingestion of status-changing comestibles, and what determined access to them, especially when they were "exotic"? What happened to you socially if you could not digest foods seen as desirable, or if you were unable to participate in prandial rituals that enhanced prestige? What relationships to food and which food practices were considered disorderly or indeed disorders, in period terms? These are just some of the questions we could address in this roundtable of approximately five 10-minute presentations followed by general discussion with the audience. We encourage submissions from any disciplinary approach to understanding 18th-century food and food practices within a cultural system and at the intersection of identity, economy, and power.

“It Happens in the East and it Happens in the West: Sunrise, Sunset, Dawn, Dusk, Twilight.”
From a purely numerical point of view, the east-west event that occurred more often than anything else during the Enlightenment—roughly 73,050 times during the eighteenth century, let alone the Restoration—was the passing of the sun across the horizon. Accordingly, sunrises, sunsets, and low solar elevation angles play an important role in eighteenth-century culture. Painters, especially in the later century, loaded the galleries with early morning and late afternoon scenes. Novelists such as William Beckford specialized in the description of twilight scenes. Ode writers such as Gray and Collins specialized in the barely illuminated moments that start and stop the day. Mariners lived or perished by accurate measurement of solar angles. Opticians drew rainbows from low angles of incidence. And so much more! This interdisciplinary panel will welcome paper that take any angle of vision on solar angular minima, whether as pertains to art, music, literature, philosophy, religion, or science.

"Moving Pictures: Eighteenth-Century Landscapes in Narrative Visual Media." This panel invites papers on longer narrative forms (films and graphic novels, for instance) that make use of eighteenth-century landscapes: gardens, wilderness scenes, alpine settings, etc.

"Unexpected Encounters: Eighteenth-Century Settings When We Least Expect Them." This panel invites papers on literature, film and other forms that make use of eighteenth-century setting or topics in an unusual manner (for instance, imagine a Star Trek episode set in the eighteenth century).