SCSECS 2025: Lost and Found in the Eighteenth Century
SCSECS returned to the Magnolia Hotel in Dallas, Texas for our 2025 conference, trying a new symposium format for the first time: instead of concurrent panels with 20-minute presentations we experimented with one panel at a time, with each presenter allotted 15 minutes. This provided a wonderful opportunity for speakers to address a full audience and for those with the privilege to listen a chance to participate in (what felt like at least) one of our most interdisciplinary conferences yet. The shorter format made for snappy presentations and lively Q&A. And nobody had to miss any papers scheduled against each other!
Our luncheon plenary speaker, Brett McInelly of Brigham Young University, exemplified this interdisciplinary approach in his talk "Performing Methodism and the Eighteenth-Century Stage." Brett interrogated how Methodist preaching fit within eighteenth-century entertainment culture. Methodists were critical of the theater yet clearly dramatic in the performance of sermons, taking advantage of theatrical conventions and actually creating a rivalry for the same audience. The presentation connected the gallows to public preaching to art, creating our own eighteenth-century academic entertainment.
Brett also received the Distinguished Service Award. As a long-time member of the SCSECS board, Brett always chairs at least one panel at every conference in addition to presenting and consistently offers his support in the yearly logistics required host successful conferences. His contributions include the monumental tasks of hosting two conferences in Utah, one in 2010 and another in 2017, but we also appreciate his service on an annual basis.
In the regular sessions, an array of scholars dazzled with papers that ranged from exploring how letters indirectly shaped empire, how ballads created pirate identity, and how Benjamin Franklin deployed wit in diplomacy. Some introduced us to underrepresented works of visual and literary art, while others took fresh approaches to canonical favorites. Geographically, presenters came from as far as Poland and as close as local friends in Dallas. In the presentations, the world itself received attention from Vietnam and Taiwan to fictional locales such as Robinson Crusoe's desert island.
Material culture got a great deal of attention, including presentations on menswear, portraits of dogs and naval battles, French accounts of Louisiana and maps of America's Indian Territory, a controversial statue in Santa Fe's Cathedral Basilica, and some very revealing marginalia in Edo-Period Japanese books. There was even a panel on the intriguing new genre of "death writing."
You can view the entire program here.
In addition to seasoned scholars, SCSECS once again was fortunate to welcome many graduate students and even a couple of undergraduates, some presenting for the first time. Thank you to these newer academics who shared their impressive research, and to their faculty mentors who took the time to guide them to our conference.
Remember that if you presented at SCSECS 2025, you are eligible to apply for the Presidential Award, with the winner being published in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, edited by our own Kevin Cope.
We are excited to reconvene in Pinehurst, North Carolina under the able leadership of SCSECS President Catherine Parisian, February 19-21, 2026 and hope to see you there! Please visit our Call for Papers for more information about the venue and how to submit your proposal.
