The Magnolia Hotel 
The 44th Annual Meeting of the
South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies:

The Eighteenth Century in Perspective

Dallas, TX
21-23 February 2019


The SCSECS 2019 annual conference was held in Dallas, Texas, 21-23 February, at the Magnolia Hotel. Nestled in the heart of Downtown Dallas, this beautiful beaux-arts building--once home to the executive offices of the Magnolia (which later became Mobil) Petroleum Company--provided easy access on foot or by public transportation to many of Dallas’s cultural and historic destinations, including the Dallas Arts District, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza, and Dallas Heritage Village. Live music and good food were also a short walk away.

You will find the full program below, beneath the information about our two plenary speakers.

Events commenced Thursday evening with a welcome reception featuring food, drinks, and live music. Sessions ran on Friday and Saturday, closing with a farewell banquet and plenary session on Saturday evening in the spectacular Pegasus Room.

Jacqueline Chao

About our Plenary Speakers

Jacqueline Chao is Curator of Asian Art at the Crow Museum of Asian Art. Her presentation on Friday will feature a discussion of art and artifacts from the Crow’s holdings. We will be able to view some of these artifacts in person during a private tour of the collections later that afternoon.

Dr. Chao’s recently curated exhibitions include Invisible Cities: Moving Images Asia, Hidden Nature: Sopheap Pich, and Landscape Relativities: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney. She has curated and organized many exhibitions at the Crow, as well as at Phoenix Art Museum, ASU Art Museum, ASU Institute for Humanities Research, Chicago Artists Coalition, and the University of Toronto Art Centre, in the areas of ink painting, Tibetan sculpture, Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary site-specific installation, photography and new media.

She has authored and edited several articles, books and catalogs on Chinese art and Buddhist art, and has presented her research at Harvard University, University of Hawaii, University of Washington, and other universities, museums, academic conferences and symposia. She previously taught Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was Director of Exhibitions and Residencies at Chicago Artists Coalition, and contributed research to the Chinese painting collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MA and PhD in Chinese Art History from Arizona State University, and a BA in Art History from the University of Toronto.

Phyllis Thompson 

In her presentation on Saturday, Phyllis Thompson will unpack our custodial responsibility as scholar-archivists to bear witness to the material and affective conditions of women’s lives in the eighteenth century. Using the recipe books, commonplaces, and journals of Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, as a concrete point of reference, she will challenge us to embrace not only the order and organization of archives and archival materials but also the untidy messiness we find there.

Suggesting that it is often in the clutter, disarray, scraps and specks that we find testaments to experience, Dr. Thompson demonstrates that by opening our archival practices to include locating absence, valuing disorder, and surfacing affect we change our relationship to the archive in a way that can help us better bear witness to women’s lived experiences in the eighteenth century and to an expanded notion of archive and archival practice in the twenty-first.

In conjunction with this presentation, we will have on display a selection of eighteenth-century cookbooks from the Texas Woman’s University Special Collections in a traveling exhibit curated by graduate students at TWU.

Dr. Thompson is Director of Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English at East Tennessee State University. She earned her Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature and Gender Studies from Louisiana State University, and she is a long-time member of the SCSECS Executive Board. She teaches graduate- and undergraduate-level courses on the eighteenth-century and women authors, archival studies, girls' studies, feminist pedagogies, and gender-based violence.

Her scholarship emerges from her interests in women’s health, healing, and well-being; the eighteenth century; and archival studies and takes her up windy mountain roads and into dusty attics and modern archival repositories, where she examines women’s medicinal recipes, letterbooks, and diaries from the eighteenth century to discover what we might learn about daily life, reading and writing, healing women and their communities, and the archive itself from reading women’s unpublished life writing. Her book project, Kitchen Physik, examines women's contributions to family medicine and community healthcare in early eighteenth-century Britain, illuminates the ethics of care women fostered in rural communities, and showcases the ways in which 18th-century women’s work can provide a conduit to conceptualizations of the new archive.

South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
2019 Program

This year's theme is The Eighteenth Century in Perspective, considered in its broadest sense, although we welcome papers addressing any aspect of the long eighteenth century. There is something here for everyone!
 

Thursday, February 21, 6:30–8:00
Welcome Reception
The Library

“The Queen’s Closet Reopened: Eighteenth-Century Cookbooks from the TWU Special Collections”
Presentation & Exhibit
Shannon Baughman, Madison Gravens, & Taylor Fitzgerald, Texas Woman’s University

Friday, February 22, 8:30–10:00

The Enlightenment in Literature and the Arts: Light, Darkness, and Truth
Chair: Stacey Jocoy, Texas Tech University

  1. “Johann Karl August Musäus’ ‘Fairy Tales of the Germans’ (1782-1786): A precursor of the Brothers Grimm?” Francien Markx, George Mason University
  2. “‘Love in Fairy-land’: Literary Wives and Daughters,” Linda Reesman, Queensborough Community College
  3. “A Narrow Strip of Darkness”: Treachery Exposed in the Gallows Songs of Captains Kidd and Macheath,” Stacey Jocoy, Texas Tech University

Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Theater and Performance, Part 1
Chair: Ashley Bender, Texas Woman's University

  1. “Imitating Theatre: The Dramatic Rhetoric in Sheridan’s Anti-Hasting Speeches,” Lu Lu, Cornell University
  2. “Adaptation in Performance: Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale,” Willow Chiari, Florida State University

Approaches to Overlooked Texts
Chair: Mimi Gladstein, University of Texas at El Paso

  1. “Reading Ignatius Sancho’s Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African as a Slave Narrative,” Charles Tita, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
  2. “Forgotten Castles: Investigating Queer Potentials in Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne,” Dylan Lewis , Texas Tech University
  3. “Naughty Nuns: Aphra Behn’s Little Known Protagonists,” Mimi R. Gladstein, University of Texas at El Paso

Friday, February 22, 10:15–11:45

Paragons of Their Sex: Gender, Identity, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Chair: Lindsay Emory Moore, University of Texas at Dallas

  1. “The Perfect Model of a Woman: Female Identity and Desire in Mansfield Park,” Blake Bowens, Clemson University
  2. “Tumble Down Masculinity: Allworthy’s Garden and the Shifting Patriarchal Landscape,” Brian Reed, Mercyhurst University
  3. “Homosocial Desire and ‘a most dangerous Plot against you’ in The Reform’d Coquet,” Susannah Sanford McDaniel, Texas Christian University

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Long Eighteenth Century, Part 1
Chair: Phyllis Thompson, East Tennessee State University

  1. “Some Problems With the Use of Stylistics in Two Studies of the Dramatic Canon of Aphra Behn: Psychology, Attribution, Chronology,” Joseph Rudman, Carnegie Mellon
  2. “Digitally Analyzing 18th-Century Nominalist Determinism: A Tristram Shandy by Any Other Name,” Walter Barta, University of Houston
  3. “A Traditional and Digital Humanities Approach to Tristram Shandy and the Novel,” David Bishop, University of Houston

Religious Perspectives and Perspectives on Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century, Part 1
Chair: Brett McInelly, Brigham Young University

  1. “Subverting the Marriage Plot: Jane Taylor’s Progressive Female Friendship,” Tara Stafford West, Northern Arizona University
  2. “Henry Fielding’s The Old Debauchees: A Precursor to the Gothic Feminist,” Jacqueline Smith, Brigham Young University
  3. “But Where Does it Come From? Moral Virtue in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,” Angelina Dulong, Brigham Young University

 

Friday, February 22, 12:00–1:45

Lunch & Plenary
Dr. Jacqueline Chao, Curator
Crow Museum of Asian Art

“Imperial Taste, Global Ambitions: Art from China’s Qing dynasty (1611-1911) in the Crow Museum of Asian Art.”
 

Friday, February 22, 2:00–3:30

Asia in the Eighteenth Century
Chair: Samara Cahill, Nanyang Technological University

  1. “One Wife Fits All: The Four Virtues of a Confucian Wife in The Tale of Kiều,” Anh Dinh, University of Central Oklahoma
  2. “Yi Ok’s Vulgar Maxims: Beautiful Surfaces & Internal Turmoil in 18th-Century Korea,” Richard Serrano, Rutgers University
  3. “Predestined Life and Orchestrated Enlightenment: Human Identity in Hong Loumen,” Thanh Huynh, University of Central Oklahoma

Fortune’s Favorites: Politics, Prophecy, and the Gothic
Chair: Brian Fehler, Texas Woman's University

  1. “Societal Trends and Political Commentary in Seventeenth Century Fortune-Telling Literature,” Gail Ellis, University of Tulsa
  2. “This Mark of My Shame, This Seal of My Sorrow: Sexual Censorship and Female Disenfranchisement in Early-Modern Gothic Literature," Victoria Wamsley, Kent State University at Stark
  3. "Vulgar Minds and the Gothic Tradition,” Mary Rooks, Kent State University at Stark

The Long Reach of the Long Eighteenth Century: Long Eighteenth-Century Influences on Later Literature
Chair: Janet Wolf, SUNY Cortland

  1. “Bound against their Will: Indentured Servants in Contemporary Literature,” Virginia Dow, Liberty University
  2. “‘Knowledge was Barr’d as Poison’: Milton, Byron, and the Human Condition,” Brittany Barlow, University of Central Oklahoma
  3. “Burying and Praising Sir Thomas Browne: Tony Kushner’s Hydriotaphia,” Janet Wolf, SUNY Cortland

 

Friday, February 22, 4:00–5:00

Tour of Crow Museum of Asian Art

5:30–7:00

Perspectives on Publishing in Eighteenth-Century Scholarship

Cocktail Hour & Roundtable

Samara Cahill
Kit Kincade
Brett McInelly
Mona Narain
J. T. Scanlan

Saturday, February 23, 8:00–10:00

Graduate Student Breakfast & Professional Development Session
“‘Tell Us about Your Research’: Writing and Talking about What You Do for Multiple Audiences”
Host: Gretchen Busl, Texas Woman’s University

Saturday, February 23, 8:30–10:00

Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Theater and Performance, Part 2
Chair: Ashley Bender, Texas Woman's University

  1. “And then, I was a slave’: Female Subjugation and Desired Will in Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” Natalie Julian, Texas Woman’s University
  2. “Aphra Behn’s Use of the Anonymous Play The Dutch Lady in The Roundheads (1681) and The City Heiress (1682),” Joe F. Stephenson, Abilene Christian University
  3. “English Feminism through an Orientalist Fable: Delarivier Manley’s Almyna (1706),” Tarek Shamma

Perspectives on Retirement (Roundtable)
Chair: C. Earl Ramsey, UA Little Rock

  1. Colin T. Ramsey, Appalachian State University
  2. Louise Barnett, Rutgers University
  3. Roslyn L. Knutson, University of Arkansas Little Rock

Biography, Autobiography, & Self-Fashioning in 18C Literature & Art
Chair:

  1. “Spinning a Yarn: The Self-Fashioning of William Dampier,” Jennifer Knox, Sam Houston State University
  2. Title TBA, Lindsay Emory Moore, University of Texas at Dallas
  3. “Austen's Emma and the Burden of Gratitude,” Dallin Lewis, Southern Virginia University

The “Invisible” Woman of the Eighteenth-Century
Chair: Randy Phillis, Colorado Mesa University

  1. “Flagellating Females: Punitive Women in Plantation Jamaica,” Chloe Northrop, Tarrant County College
  2. “Satirical Manipulation of a Romantic: Arabella’s Covert Mission in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” Rhanda McGee, Stephen F. Austin State University
  3. “Sensibility in Extremis: Mary Hay’s The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Emotional Philosophy,” Kristin Hague, Colorado Mesa University
  4. “The Visible Invisible Woman,” Dona Cady, Middlesex Community College

Saturday, February 23, 10:15–11:45

Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Female Rhetorical Performance
Chair: Elizabeth Tasker-Davis, Stephen F. Austin State University

  1. “Women Writers, Women Readers: Letter-Writing as Rhetorical Strategy in Emma,” Elizabeth H. Battles, Texas Wesleyan University
  2. “An Eighteenth-Century Miss Marple: Imagining Jane Austen as Detective,” Marta Hess, Georgia State University
  3. “Cosmopolitan Ethos in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Elizabeth Tasker Davis, Stephen F. Austin State University
  4. “Preaching with Permission: The Rhetoric of Sarah Crosby’s Assent into Ministry,” Lara Smith-Sitton, Kennesaw State University

The Eighteenth-Century Self
Chairs: Danielle Ezor, Southern Methodist University and Kelsey Rozema, Southern Methodist University

  1. “Placing St. Paul the Hermit: Monastic Identity and Spanish Sculpture,” Kailey Fairchild, Meadows Museum
  2. “Learning to Live in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” Xena Fitzgerald, Southern Methodist University
  3. “Seeing and Touching Galatea,” Michael Feinberg, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Grammars
Chair: J. T. Scanlan, Providence College (hambone@providence.edu)

  1. “The Dictionary Johnson Never Wrote,” Jack Lynch, Rutgers University-Newark
  2. “The Spread of Literacy in the 18th Century: The Heyday of English Grammar,” Bryan Garner, LawProse
  3. “The Dictionary of the Counter-Enlightenment?” David Eick, Grand Valley State University

Romantic Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
Chair: Michael Cerliano, Texas Woman's University

  1. "The Language of Rustics: Its Durability, Naturalness, and Arbitrariness in Wordsworth's Linguistic Theories," Sunghyun Jang, Korea University
  2. "Mesmerism and Psychogeography in De Quincey and Poe," Michael Cerliano, Texas Woman's University
  3. "Mary Shelley in Italy," Jaid Wehrenberg, University of Central Oklahoma

 

Saturday, February 23, 12:00–1:30
Lunch Break
Business Meeting
 

Saturday, February 23, 1:30–3:00

(Self) Portraiture in the Eighteenth-Century
Chair: Aria Cabot, Southern Methodist University

  1. “Autopsy-turvy: Representations of Women Readers in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” Aria Cabot, Southern Methodist University
  2. “The Rise of the of the (Female) Self: Frances Burney’s Journal-, Letter- and Novel-Writing as Foucauldian Technologies of Self (Care),” Kelly Plante, Wayne State University
  3. “Vittorio Alfieri’s Alceste seconda as a Revision of the Tragic Self,” Corie Marshall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gulliver (and his Contemporaries) in Asia
Chair: Susan Spencer, University of Central Oklahoma

  1. “Dryden, Defoe, Swift and the Uses of Japan During the Long Eighteenth Century,” Gregory Rohe, Aichi Gakuin University
  2. “The Analog Odysseys of Gulliver and Shidoken,” Raven Johnston, Richland College
  3. “Yahoo Modernities: Swift’s England as Sino-Japanese Periphery,” Andrew Barrow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Long Eighteenth Century, Part 2
Chair: Brian Tatum, Tarrant County College

  1. “Newton’s Use of Rhetoric in The Principia,” Giribala Joshi, Texas Woman’s University
  2. “The Moral and Political Economy of Land Improvement in Sarah Scott’s Utopian Novels,” Jeannie Dalporto, University of Charleston
  3. “The Problem and Appeal of Pride and Prejudice—A Buddhist Approach,” Kathryn Duncan, Saint Leo University
  4. “Wright’s Hypothesis: Restructuring the Hierarchy Within an Infinite Universe,” Brian Tatum, Tarrant County College

Religious Perspectives and Perspectives on Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century, Part 2
Chair, Brett McInelly, Brigham Young University

  1. “Blake’s Philosophy of Aesthetics: Miltonian Visualizations in Songs of Innocence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton: A Poem,” Hue Woodson, Tarrant County College
  2. “The Contemplative Georgic: Gardening, Thought, and Imagination in Cowper’s The Task,” Jonathan Callis, Oklahoma Baptist University
  3. “Fair and Impartial? The Monthly and Critical Review’s Assessment of the Works of John Wesley and George Whitefield,” Brett McInelly, Brigham Young University

Saturday, February 23, 3:15–4:45 Scarcity, Economy, Survival: Enlightenment Perspectives on the Environment
Chair: Samara Cahill, Nanyang Technological University

  1. "Mining and Subterranean Exploration in the Inorganic Economy," Kevin MacDonell, Rice University
  2. "Resilience in the Eighteenth Century? Changing Perspectives on Coal Production," Samara Cahill, Nanyang Technological University
  3. “Seeing Red and Blue: Observations on Natural Dyes in the Mexican Enlightenment,” Frieda Koeninger, Sam Houston State University

Negotiating Transatlantic Identity: New World and Old World Perspectives
Chair: Heather Robinson-Lauer, Independent Scholar

  1. “Benjamin Franklin's 'Epitaph' Manuscripts and the Tradition of English Epitaph-Poetry,” Colin T. Ramsey, Appalachian State University
  2. “Savage Heathens to Noble Savages: Redefining Native Americans in the Eighteenth Century,” Keri Overall, Texas Woman's University
  3. “What to do When the Dishes are Done? The Old Woman and Evangelical Concepts of Leisure,” Kaitlyn Waynen, Texas Woman's University

Human Subjects in History and Literature, 1690–1820
Chair: Victoria Warren, Binghamton University

  1. “A Neurodiverse Perspective of the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue,” Hilary Fezzey, University of Wisconsin–Superior
  2. “‘Quite careless of Futurity’: Eighteenth-Century Kingston and Its Forms of Social Time,” David Mazella, University of Houston
  3. L’Encyclopédie and the Representation of the Other,” Guillermo Pernet, University of Arkansas
  4. “Austen's Emma and the Burden of Gratitude,” Dallin Lewis, Southern Virginia University

Place, &c. in London
Chair: Heather Scheele, University of Central Oklahoma

  1. “‘A Straw in the Shoe’: London and the Law in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, J. T. Scanlan, Providence College
  2. “Samuel Johnson’s Inclusive Perspective in ‘London,’” Ann von Mehren, Bowling Green State University
  3. “The Eighteenth-Century London Foundling Hospital as a Site of Cultural Exchange,” Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen, University of Central Oklahoma
  4. “Art of the Foundling: From Moses to Superman,” Beth Anderson, University of Central Oklahoma

 

Saturday, February 23, 5:00–6:00

Plenary Presentation: Dr. Phyllis Thompson
Associate Professor
Director of Women’s Studies Program
East Tennessee State University

“Scribbled Recipes, Tattered Pages, and Absent Affections: Bearing Witness and the Stuff of the Archives.”

6:15/30-8:00

Closing Banquet

Leng Mei (active 1677-1742), Spring Evening Banquet at the Peach and Pear Blossom Garden (detail)
National Palace Museum, Taipei

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