Since its inception in 1975, the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) has provided a forum for scholars of the "long" eighteenth century (c. 1660-1830). A regional affiliate of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, SCSECS is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization that enjoys a reputation for exceptional conviviality and inclusiveness. This year, we invite you to join us at North Carolina's fabled Pinehurst Resort for our annual meeting and celebration of our fiftieth anniversary.
Founded in 1895 by the Boston philanthropist James Walker Tufts, Pinehurst served as a health resort, where members of the middle class retreated from cities to recuperate from respiratory ailments. Tufts believed the "pine ozone" found only in this region of the country held curative properties. Visitors engaged in popular activities of the day such as riding, polo, lawn bowling, archery, bicycling, and tennis. Golf followed shortly. Pinehurst continues today as a world-class resort and frequent host to the prestigious U.S. Open golf championship. Nestled in a late 19th-century village, it features bountiful restaurants, quaint shops and an array of activities. Guests might relax at the spa, take a carriage ride through the village, watch races at the harness track, visit the Tufts Archives, take their turn in a round of croquet, pedal through the streets of the village, or sip bourbon at the North South Bourbon Bar. Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the village features beautiful well-maintained historic homes and Olmstead's signature curvilinear and concentric system of streets. It offers a peaceful atmosphere for your morning run, afternoon walk, or quiet meditative moment.
To reserve your room at the resort, please use our dedicated link to make sure you will be accommodated as part of the SCSECS room block and will receive our discounted conference rate. You can find further information on our Hotel and Travel page.
The conference registration fee has been set at $199 for the Earlybird rate (by Dec. 10, 2025); $250 for the Standard rate (by Jan. 3, 2026); and $300 at the door. Social passes for those who are not on the program but who want to attend receptions and the luncheon are available for $100.
In keeping with the topic and this year's sport-related venue, our plenary speaker will be Peter Radford, Professor of Sport Sciences at Glasgow University and Brunel University in London and, recently, a Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. A former British sprinter who has broken world records and won Olympic medals, Professor Radford is the author of The Celebrated Captain Barclay: Sport, Money and Fame in Regency Britain (Headline Book Publishing, 2001). In 2023 his new book, They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain, was published as part of the University of Virginia's Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories series. You can find a brief interview at the UVA Press's "Author's Corner."
If you do not see a panel topic below that fits the subject you are interested in, or if you would like to propose a panel that you have already filled with presenters, please submit an abstract of your paper or each of the papers (if you are proposing a full panel) directly to the SCSECS President, Catherine Parisian, at Catherine.Parisian@uncp.edu.
Individual paper proposals are due on or before December 1.
"'Adam Lost Heaven for an Apple; Will You Lose Heaven for a Playhouse, Cards, or Any of the Sinful Diversions of the Age?': Religious Opposition to Worldly Pleasures"
"Asia in the Eighteenth Century"
Chair: Susan Spencer, University of Central Oklahoma sspencer@uco.edu
This panel invites scholars from any discipline, concentrating on any region within Asia during the long eighteenth century (c. 1650-1830)."Eighteenth-Century Gardens of Inspiration in Literature and the Arts"
This panel will honor our late dear friend Gloria Eive and highlight her interest in gardens."Follies and Farces: The Exhibition and Use of Humor and Comedy in the 18th Century"
A focus on comedic acts or performances of the period, ranging from plays and theatrics to individuals such as clowns and/or "jesters": What was seen or perceived as funny and how now it could potentially represent the attitudes or beliefs of groups/populations of the time.
"Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Long Eighteenth Century"This panel welcomes papers on any topic--pleasurable or not--with an interdisciplinary approach: literature, history, philosophy, music, art, adaptation, etc."Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Leisure"
This panel will explore leisure, games, and play in the works and letters of Maria Edgeworth and her wide-ranging circle. The use of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project--a growing archive of Edgeworth letters--is encouraged."Playful Pedagogues of the Long Eighteenth Century"
This panel invites abstracts that address playful and innovative methods for teaching the long eighteenth century in the classroom of all kinds of levels."Pleasures of the Floating World"
The culture of the "floating world," or ukiyo, of the Edo Period in Japan (1603-1868) was defined by an ephemeral and pleasure-seeking lifestyle. From the amorous writings of authors such as Ihara Saikaku to the celebrity of Kabuki theater, the fashionable middle class thrived on felicities and flash. "Pleasures" examined for this panel may range from the sensory to the intellectual, from the spiritual to the visual.
Round table. We have 4 scholars so far: Elizabeth Goodenough, Andrea Immel, Mary Galbraith, Marilynn Olson."Golf, Back-Gammon, Whist, and other Eighteenth-Century Games"We invite others to join a roundtable on the joy of encountering or imitating or identifying with birds in early life, an experience widely represented in the long eighteenth century. Our starting point will be learning how these articulate creatures can breathe life into story, image, and play, advancing critical analysis of what it means to communicate. The spiritual essence of birds has been a literary trope since ancient times. In the 18c, Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who influenced William Blake (1757-1827), the first English picture book artist, described the spiritual essences of animals and their afterlife in Heaven and Hell. The emotional and philosophical portrayals of birds by important 18th century authors associated with child life such as Gilbert White, Rousseau, Blake, and Barbauld retain their importance in eco-spirituality today. The works of John Newbery (1713-1767), the preeminent children's book publisher, also frequently document children's games and outdoor recreations inspired and intertwined with bird life. "All the Birds in the Air," for example, is a children's game described in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), still passed down (by other names) in children's culture. Many 18c juvenile publications describe bird-oriented pastimes engaged in by children, some encouraged, others admonished. The protagonists, whether incipient rural poets like Burns or city dwellers with access to the multitude of newly constituted pet emporiums, could be expected to be intimately familiar with bird life. They invite comparison with our own children's world.
As we plan to gather at one of the premier golf resorts in the world, this panel welcomes papers on any aspect of the game golf and its contexts, as it emerged in the eighteenth century. The Old Course at St. Andrews remains a destination for golfers interested in the history of the game, but let's recall that Edinburgh, notwithstanding its standing as Scotland's urban capital in the eighteenth century, boasted two courses in the eighteenth century: the Bruntsfield Links and the Leith Links. Smollett includes a rich passage in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker on the Leith Links and the game's relation to social class, health, and even aging: Jeremy Melford notes "one particular set of golfers, the youngest of whom was turned fourscore." And golf is only one of the many, many games that captured the minds of a great variety of people. Edmond Hoyle, to offer only one example, realized this fascination with games, and wrote popular works on "Back-Gammon," whist, and other games. Indeed, the complicated rules of such games doubtless stimulated a culture saturated in legal thinking. In short, this panel will follow the wise perception of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the great teacher, Renaissance scholar, and theorist of baseball: in an essay first delivered at the University of Michigan Law School, Giamatti wrote, "we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work."
"Doing Good, Feeling Good: Literature and Life in the Age of Benevolence"Throughout the eighteenth century, literate men and women tended to tell themselves that they had the means to reduce suffering and to enhance the well-being of the human persons (and, sometimes, the non-human animals) around them. Older conceptions of Christian charity were still current throughout the century, while the newer language of moral sentiment led people to believe that "disinterested," altruistic, and benevolent actions might be accompanied by pleasurable emotions. Virtue, in other words, felt good. Papers for this panel might explore the social and philosophical conditions that enabled the "man of feeling" to emerge as an ideal type; the uneven distribution of moral agency according to gender, class, ethnicity, and other identity markers; the relationship between philanthropy and sociability; the experiences of those people who found themselves cast as the "objects" of charity; and much more."The Pleasures of Texts in the Long Eighteenth Century"
In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes famously introduced distinctions between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. "Readerly" texts were said to communicate pleasure in a passive way, while "writerly" texts enabled bliss and broke the reader out of their subject position to promote active engagement in the making of meaning."Samuel Johnson and His Circle"We have come a long way since 1973. Eighteenth-century studies have seen a proliferation of scholarly work in which the pleasures (plural) of texts of many different kinds have been central: they have been understood as the emotional engine; the imaginative, experiential and moral substance; and as the cognitive, social or technological end of the works in question. From Addison's "pleasures of the imagination," at one end of the century, to Wordsworth's romantic landscapes at the other, pleasure of one kind or another has been a desideratum of many kinds of writing in this fecund, surprising, informative, and multidimensional period. This panel seeks papers that discuss any of the pleasures associated with any of the genres or kinds of writing of the long eighteenth century, including (but not limited to) the Philosophic, Critical, Satiric, Comic, Tragic, Romantic, Poetic, Fictional, Descriptive, Lexicographic, Illustrative, Analytical, Dogmatic, Technical, Mathematical, Scientific, Botanical, Expostulatory, Meditative, and Religious.
The panel would like to include 4 (or more, possibly) papers, each of about 15 minutes in length. Texts--and critical and scholarly perspectives and methods--of any kind are welcome. Please send suggestions with a title and a sentence or two, to Greg Clingham, email: clingham@bucknell.edu.
At a recent conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Greg Clingham brought together a handful of Johnson scholars and a room full of conferees, and posed an intriguing question. In that Johnson, unlike many other eighteenth-century figures, remains popular both in a variety of university courses and in contemporary scholarship, what might be the future of Johnson scholarship? Remarkably, much energetic conversation emerged, from a variety of perspectives, indicating that Johnson--his writing, his life, his mind--remains a subject of real interest today. This panel, then, welcomes papers on any aspect of Johnson and his intellectual and literary milieu. For many years, Donald Mell conducted vibrant panels on Jonathan Swift, each with the same title: "Jonathan Swift and His Circle." The simple title of this panel, then, pays tribute to the late Donald Mell and the significance of his achievement in promoting the study of Swift, an author who similarly captivated Samuel Johnson."The Other Kind of Re-Creation: Bringing the Past into the Present by Updating, Imitating, Revising, Reforming, Adapting, Extrapolating, Enlarging, Exaggerating, Enhancing, Inventively Copying, or Otherwise Deploying Earlier Achievements in Later Times"
In its obsession with precedents, prototypes, and previousness--in its enthusiasm for the to-and-fro between the ancients and the moderns--the long eighteenth century liked to lengthen itself outright asymptotically, finding ways to incorporate into the era everyone, everything, and every time, from old Thales of Miletus to Roman rarities to forthcoming, emergent chimeras to futuristic forecasts, freaks, and fantasies. This panel will welcome papers dealing with any aspect of trans-temporal reconfiguration, whether Johnsonian imitations of Juvenal or Panini's views of ancient Rome or Dryden's updating of neoclassical critical norms or Henry Fielding's jotting of a putative (ancient) epic in modern comic prose or tuneful Händel's heartily contemporary handling of age-old events. Come one, come all!
Let's talk about calamaties, calumnies, and crashes, either public or personal. This panel welcomes papers across all disciplines and geographical regions, just so long as you've got some juicy bad news to share!
"The Opposite of Pleasure: Work, Pain & Repentance"
Chair: Reuben Lamb, Texas A & M University reubenglamb@gmail.com
A focus on activities seen as "unpleasurable," ranging from "daily duties" to disease/sickness to discussions of sinful actions and how to reconcile/prevent the behavior/actions
Illustrations from Outlines of Figures, Landscapes, and Cattle etch'd by T. Rowlandson for the Use of Learners. London: S.W. Fores, 1790