The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University

The Center would like to recognize the following books, which have been shortlisted to win the Kenshur Prize, honoring the year’s best book in eighteenth-century studies. We will announce the winner later this summer.

We're hosting our twenty-second annual Spring Workshop, "The Magical Eighteenth Century," next week! Do join us in what promises to be a spell-binding array of panels and events!

We had a great time at last night’s “Pecha Kucha” event. With many thanks to our co-sponsor, the program in Victorian Studies. See you next year!

There is still time to apply to this year's Workshop! Please do send your proposal to us by the due date: Friday, January 26:

The Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies announces its twenty-second annual Bloomington Spring Workshop (May 16-18, 2024)

The Magical Eighteenth Century

Conjured into existence by the words “Enlightenment” and “reason,” the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies has nonetheless long been haunted by the Gothic, the uncanny, and the fantastic. From Newton’s alchemy to Mesmer’s acolytes, from Die Zauberflöte to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, from the Salem witch trials to the Brothers Grimm, the long eighteenth century is framed by and shot through with magic. If, as Keith Thomas once wrote, “magic” can be defined as “the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available,” then our current moment demands a re-examination of this topic.

Throughout much of its history, of course, “magic” has been understood to designate cultural practices antithetical to the concept of modernity. Anthropologists such as Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, for example, saw magic as the chief adversary of Western science, a practice that existed—for better or worse—primarily in “primitive” cultures. For Max Weber, it constituted one of the most “serious obstructions” to the rational organization of modern economic life. Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, meanwhile, distinguished magic—as a private or cult practice—from the official or public rituals performed by religion. Though Sigmund Freud would reject this binary, seeing magic and religion as inherently similar systems of belief, he would nevertheless cast it as decidedly unmodern: a remnant from a superseded past, which served to shield modern culture from its most unsettling realities.

We invite papers interrogating the practice, theory, and representation of magic in the long eighteenth century in Europe, its colonies, and beyond. The Workshop is always open to colleagues working in any discipline or between multiple disciplines and has long been a home for contextualist history of ideas and various forms of historicism; we hope this year’s theme will prove especially rich for those working in the history of science, folklore, music, and performance studies. Papers informed by approaches that understand magic with reference to the foreign, the subaltern, or the Other (based in methodologies such as New Materialism, Black and indigenous studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, disability studies, gender and q***r studies) are especially welcome.

We look forward to reading your abstracts and ideas. A non-exhaustive list of topics they might address would include:

• magic tricks and la magie blanche
• occultism, paganism, and druidism
• witchcraft and witch trials
• popular magic and “cunning folk”
• magical healing, prophecy, curses, and omens
• ghosts, fairies, and the undead
• prognostication, astrology, divination
• alchemy and transmutation
• possession, summoning, and other forms of demon worship
• obeah and Vodou
• the improbable, miraculous, and coincidental
• conspiracy and paranoia
• Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and other forms of mysticism
• the Gothic and literary supernaturalism
• illusion and trompe l’oeil
• aesthetic experience as magic
• histories of “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment”

During the Workshop, we will discuss pre-circulated texts (due in mid-April) and perhaps have an occasional lecture or visit to a library, museum, or archive. We are especially open to co- and multi-authored contributions, including those that work across hitherto conventional boundaries of genre, discipline, and media. We hope that participants will be present for the entire event but anticipate making provision for some online participation as well.

The application deadline is Friday, January 26, 2024. Please send a paper proposal (1-2 pages) and current brief CV (3 pages, max) to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Administrator, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Please e-mail to [email protected].

We will acknowledge all submissions within a fortnight. If you do not receive an acknowledgment by February 9, 2024, please e-mail [email protected] or the Center’s Director, Jesse Molesworth ([email protected]).

Papers presented at the Workshop will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. We reimburse most expenses for visiting scholars: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals. Expanded abstracts and/or entire papers may be published in the Center’s online open-access journal The Workshop, along with discussion transcripts or summaries.

The Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies announces its twenty-second annual Bloomington Spring Workshop (May 16-18, 2024)

The Magical Eighteenth Century

Conjured into existence by the words “Enlightenment” and “reason,” the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies has nonetheless long been haunted by the Gothic, the uncanny, and the fantastic. From Newton’s alchemy to Mesmer’s acolytes, from Die Zauberflöte to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, from the Salem witch trials to the Brothers Grimm, the long eighteenth century is framed by and shot through with magic. If, as Keith Thomas once wrote, “magic” can be defined as “the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available,” then our current moment demands a re-examination of this topic.

Throughout much of its history, of course, “magic” has been understood to designate cultural practices antithetical to the concept of modernity. Anthropologists such as Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, for example, saw magic as the chief adversary of Western science, a practice that existed—for better or worse—primarily in “primitive” cultures. For Max Weber, it constituted one of the most “serious obstructions” to the rational organization of modern economic life. Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, meanwhile, distinguished magic—as a private or cult practice—from the official or public rituals performed by religion. Though Sigmund Freud would reject this binary, seeing magic and religion as inherently similar systems of belief, he would nevertheless cast it as decidedly unmodern: a remnant from a superseded past, which served to shield modern culture from its most unsettling realities.

We invite papers interrogating the practice, theory, and representation of magic in the long eighteenth century in Europe, its colonies, and beyond. The Workshop is always open to colleagues working in any discipline or between multiple disciplines and has long been a home for contextualist history of ideas and various forms of historicism; we hope this year’s theme will prove especially rich for those working in the history of science, folklore, music, and performance studies. Papers informed by approaches that understand magic with reference to the foreign, the subaltern, or the Other (based in methodologies such as New Materialism, Black and indigenous studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, disability studies, gender and q***r studies) are especially welcome.

We look forward to reading your abstracts and ideas. A non-exhaustive list of topics they might address would include:

• magic tricks and la magie blanche
• occultism, paganism, and druidism
• witchcraft and witch trials
• popular magic and “cunning folk”
• magical healing, prophecy, curses, and omens
• ghosts, fairies, and the undead
• prognostication, astrology, divination
• alchemy and transmutation
• possession, summoning, and other forms of demon worship
• obeah and Vodou
• the improbable, miraculous, and coincidental
• conspiracy and paranoia
• Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and other forms of mysticism
• the Gothic and literary supernaturalism
• illusion and trompe l’oeil
• aesthetic experience as magic
• histories of “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment”

During the Workshop, we will discuss pre-circulated texts (due in mid-April) and perhaps have an occasional lecture or visit to a library, museum, or archive. We are especially open to co- and multi-authored contributions, including those that work across hitherto conventional boundaries of genre, discipline, and media. We hope that participants will be present for the entire event but anticipate making provision for some online participation as well.

The application deadline is Friday, January 26, 2024. Please send a paper proposal (1-2 pages) and current brief CV (3 pages, max) to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Administrator, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Please e-mail to [email protected].

We will acknowledge all submissions within a fortnight. If you do not receive an acknowledgment by February 9, 2024, please e-mail [email protected] or the Center’s Director, Jesse Molesworth ([email protected]).

Papers presented at the Workshop will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. We reimburse most expenses for visiting scholars: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals. Expanded abstracts and/or entire papers may be published in the Center’s online open-access journal The Workshop, along with discussion transcripts or summaries.

We had a great time celebrating this year’s Kenshur winner, The Sun King at Sea. Looks like the book’s co-winners, Gillian Weiss and Meredith Martin, picked up some suitable swag, courtesy of a local brewery.

Very pleased to announce the new issue of The Workshop, our online open-access journal. Filled with comments from previous Kenshur Prize colloquia, as well as abstracts and comments from our most recent Spring Workshop on "Bodily Autonomies, Autonomous Bodies." Enjoy!

The Workshop The Workshop publishes works produced by and at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Indiana University) including abstracts, texts, and transcribed discussions.

We are delighted to announce that the 2023 Kenshur Prize has been awarded to The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis IV's France (Getty Publications, 2022), by Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss. We will hold a colloquium celebrating the winner on Friday, September 15.

The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV.

The Center wishes to recognize the following outstanding works of scholarship, which have been shortlisted for our book prize, the Kenshur Prize. We will announce the winner in July!

Many thanks to all who participated in our twenty-first annual Spring Workshop! Pictured here: an image from Meg Kobza’s lecture, “Whose Costume, Whose Body? Appropriation, Agency, and Bodily Autonomy at the Georgian Masquerade.”

Our annual Spring Workshop, on the theme "Bodily Autonomy, Autonomous Bodies," will take place next week. Behold this mouth-watering line-up of speakers and events!

The Center congratulates its former director, Rebecca Spang, who has been named IU's newest Distinguished Professor!

4 named Distinguished Professors This is the highest academic appointment for IU faculty whose research and scholarship have been recognized in their fields nationally and internationally.

Interested in questions of autonomy in the eighteenth century? Apply to our Spring Workshop!

The Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies announces its twenty-first annual Bloomington Workshop (May 18-20, 2023)

Bodily Autonomies, Autonomous Bodies

The idea of “autonomy” arises in the early modern period in relation to political entities, rather than individuals. A borrowing from the Greek (αὐτο + νόμος) meaning self law, autonomy referred to ability of an institution or a state to govern itself. In the eighteenth century, that scope began to apply increasingly to the capacities of individuals. Indeed, one strong tradition in eighteenth-century studies identifies our period with the invention of the author and the origins of the modern, autonomous individual. Looking back to the early modern, eighteenth-century conceptions of autonomy draw from the foundations that would lead to the birth of the nation state, and from contrasting models of internal and external virtue. From out of the eighteenth-century, the application of the term will spread from Montesquieu’s political philosophy, to Kant’s moral philosophy, and extend across the natural and social sciences. And yet the questions of autonomy –of self governance of a human or a political body– do not move in straight lines or toward easy answers.

Self-governance is often a sweet lie that hides the abuse of power, from the personal level to the geopolitical. Foucault has taught us that the individual operates within a network of power systems –religious, gendered, political, racial, geographic, and colonial, among others– that can influence, abridge, inhibit, or reinforce their ability to exercise agency or will over their life and body. More recently, methodological approaches such as New Materialisms, object-oriented ontologies, and alternative ontological frameworks such as those drawn from Black and indigenous studies often serve to unsettle the concept of autonomy, probing the spaces between the ephemeral capacity to self-govern, the material acts of self-determination, and the very notion of a “self” who can be governed and determined at all. Therefore, with this Workshop theme, we hope to explore the limits of self-governance within the network of power structures that make up the world, to recognize the ways that autonomies exist against the grain of social discourse, and to acknowledge long-running ramifications –both positive and negative– of the aspirational quality of this ideal. At the same time, we look to question whether this idealization has contributed to dogmas of personal responsibility and economic self-interest at the expense of collective forms of action and care.

Within the sphere of the eighteenth century, we invite papers about autonomy as it applies to individuals across the spectrums of power and privilege; of groups whose identity or enforced social status inhibits or countermands their capacity to exercise agency; of national or political entities whose formation, liberation, and sovereignty are impacted by colonial pressures, and work that questions and probes autonomy’s drawbacks and boundaries as they figure in eighteenth-century histories, archives, and texts.

We look forward to reading your abstracts and ideas. A non-exhaustive list of topics they might address would include:

• negotiating questions of self and autonomy for enslaved persons
• the autonomy of gendered bodies
• autonomy within or of a colonized state
• freedom of movement: border-crossings, gatherings, quarantines, departures
• approaches that complicate or question ideas of personal or political sovereignty
• scientism and visions of the body as machine
• the individual figured against a backdrop of control or systems of power
• disenfranchisement: debt, citizenship, exile, etc.

In last year’s Workshop, which focused on Collaborations, questions arose about the limits of what can be considered labor performed together (col + labōrāre) in the context of radically inequal power relationships or within systems of sanctioned oppression. This year we hope to continue these conversations, which hold the echoes of the Center’s first workshop, “Signs of the Self,” and resound into a present where the concept of the autonomous individual is being questioned for political gain.

During the Workshop, we will discuss pre-circulated texts (due in mid-April) and perhaps have an occasional lecture or library, museum, or archive visit. Given the theme, we are especially open to co- and multi-authored contributions, including those that work across hitherto conventional boundaries of genre, discipline, and media. We intend and hope that the workshop will largely take place in person (and that participants will be present for the entire event), but anticipate making provision for some online participation as well.

The application deadline is Friday, January 20, 2023. Please send a paper proposal (1-2 pages) and current brief CV (3 pages, max) to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Administrator, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Please e-mail to [email protected].

We will acknowledge all submissions within a fortnight: if you do not receive an acknowledgment by January 31, 2022, please e-mail [email protected] or the Center’s Director, Jesse Molesworth ([email protected]).

Papers will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. We cover most expenses for visiting scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals. Expanded abstracts and/or entire papers may be published in the Center’s The Workshop, along with discussion transcripts or summaries.

Just a reminder: if you published an academic monograph related to eighteenth-century studies in the past year, please do have your press nominate it for the Kenshur Prize. Instructions are currently published on our website.

Thanks to all who participated in Friday's Kenshur Prize colloquium! Congratulations to this year's winning book: The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire by Henrietta Harrison. Just a reminder: we are currently accepting submissions for books published in 2022. Please see our website for details.

Please join us for the Kenshur Prize colloquium, honoring the year's best book in eighteenth-century studies, in two days, on Friday, Nov. 11, from 11AM - 12:30PM EST. We will be celebrating this year's winner, Henrietta Harrison's The Perils of Interpreting (Princeton University Press). You may register for this event, held via Zoom, at the following link:

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Kenshur Prize colloquium. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Kenshur Prize colloquium. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

The Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies announces its twenty-first annual Bloomington Workshop (May 18-20, 2023)

Bodily Autonomies, Autonomous Bodies

The idea of “autonomy” arises in the early modern period in relation to political entities, rather than individuals. A borrowing from the Greek (αὐτο + νόμος) meaning self law, autonomy referred to ability of an institution or a state to govern itself. In the eighteenth century, that scope began to apply increasingly to the capacities of individuals. Indeed, one strong tradition in eighteenth-century studies identifies our period with the invention of the author and the origins of the modern, autonomous individual. Looking back to the early modern, eighteenth-century conceptions of autonomy draw from the foundations that would lead to the birth of the nation state, and from contrasting models of internal and external virtue. From out of the eighteenth-century, the application of the term will spread from Montesquieu’s political philosophy, to Kant’s moral philosophy, and extend across the natural and social sciences. And yet the questions of autonomy –of self governance of a human or a political body– do not move in straight lines or toward easy answers.

Self-governance is often a sweet lie that hides the abuse of power, from the personal level to the geopolitical. Foucault has taught us that the individual operates within a network of power systems –religious, gendered, political, racial, geographic, and colonial, among others– that can influence, abridge, inhibit, or reinforce their ability to exercise agency or will over their life and body. More recently, methodological approaches such as New Materialisms, object-oriented ontologies, and alternative ontological frameworks such as those drawn from Black and indigenous studies often serve to unsettle the concept of autonomy, probing the spaces between the ephemeral capacity to self-govern, the material acts of self-determination, and the very notion of a “self” who can be governed and determined at all. Therefore, with this Workshop theme, we hope to explore the limits of self-governance within the network of power structures that make up the world, to recognize the ways that autonomies exist against the grain of social discourse, and to acknowledge long-running ramifications –both positive and negative– of the aspirational quality of this ideal. At the same time, we look to question whether this idealization has contributed to dogmas of personal responsibility and economic self-interest at the expense of collective forms of action and care.

Within the sphere of the eighteenth century, we invite papers about autonomy as it applies to individuals across the spectrums of power and privilege; of groups whose identity or enforced social status inhibits or countermands their capacity to exercise agency; of national or political entities whose formation, liberation, and sovereignty are impacted by colonial pressures, and work that questions and probes autonomy’s drawbacks and boundaries as they figure in eighteenth-century histories, archives, and texts.

We look forward to reading your abstracts and ideas. A non-exhaustive list of topics they might address would include:

• negotiating questions of self and autonomy for enslaved persons
• the autonomy of gendered bodies
• autonomy within or of a colonized state
• freedom of movement: border-crossings, gatherings, quarantines, departures
• approaches that complicate or question ideas of personal or political sovereignty
• scientism and visions of the body as machine
• the individual figured against a backdrop of control or systems of power
• disenfranchisement: debt, citizenship, exile, etc.

In last year’s Workshop, which focused on Collaborations, questions arose about the limits of what can be considered labor performed together (col + labōrāre) in the context of radically inequal power relationships or within systems of sanctioned oppression. This year we hope to continue these conversations, which hold the echoes of the Center’s first workshop, “Signs of the Self,” and resound into a present where the concept of the autonomous individual is being questioned for political gain.

During the Workshop, we will discuss pre-circulated texts (due in mid-April) and perhaps have an occasional lecture or library, museum, or archive visit. Given the theme, we are especially open to co- and multi-authored contributions, including those that work across hitherto conventional boundaries of genre, discipline, and media. We intend and hope that the workshop will largely take place in person (and that participants will be present for the entire event), but anticipate making provision for some online participation as well.

The application deadline is Friday, January 20, 2023. Please send a paper proposal (1-2 pages) and current brief CV (3 pages, max) to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Administrator, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Please e-mail to [email protected].

We will acknowledge all submissions within a fortnight: if you do not receive an acknowledgment by January 31, 2022, please e-mail [email protected] or the Center’s Director, Jesse Molesworth ([email protected]).

Papers will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. We cover most expenses for visiting scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals. Expanded abstracts and/or entire papers may be published in the Center’s The Workshop, along with discussion transcripts or summaries.

We are delighted to announce that this year's Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth-century studies has been awarded to Henrietta Harrison's The Perils of Interpreting. We will host a symposium with the winner, conducted via Zoom, on Friday, November 11, from 11am-12:30pm EST. We hope that you can join us for this event (more details to follow).

The Perils of Interpreting An impressive new history of China’s relations with the West—told through the lives of two language interpreters who participated in the famed Macartney embassy in 1793

We are delighted to present the six books shortlisted for this year's Kenshur Prize. The winner will be announced in late August and we will host a symposium honoring the winning book later in the Fall. Congratulations to the authors and to their publishers!

We have big news. After ten years, Rebecca Spang is stepping down as Director. She'll be away for 2022-2023 on a Guggenheim Fellowship and Jesse Molesworth will serve as Acting Director. Thank you, Rebecca! Welcome, Jesse!

Very happy to have been able to host an in-person Workshop and hoping the combination of masks and outdoor meals kept everyone safe. It was our TWENTIETH Workshop and we were delighted to have Dror Wahrman and Mary Favret back for the occasion! Program here: https://voltaire.indiana.edu/workshop2022.html

Despite the challenges and frustrations of intellectual sociability at a distance, we had a great conversation yesterday evening with Kirsten Sword and Dave Nichols about their work. Thank you so much to Christoph Irmscher for his comments!

Our website is now up to date, with information on events here (and elsewhere) for winter-spring 2022, plus details on how IU students can apply for funding, and authors/publishers can submit books for this year's Kenshur Prize. Plus the cfp for our May workshop remains open for another week!

News & Events News & Events

We're still working on the website, but it is now back online and includes information about both the Kenshur Prize and our May 19-21, 2022 Workshop. Still time to submit books or a proposal for either one! https://voltaire.indiana.edu/index.html

Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University -

Our website will be down until Monday. We'll post again when it's up and running!

We had an in-person meeting!! By the end, our extremities were a bit chilly but our minds were warmed.

We're unbelievably excited to announce plans for our TWENTIETH Workshop!! May 19-21, 2022.
We intend to welcome collaborators to Bloomington once again, but will make some provision for remote participation. Proposal deadline is January 21, 2022, but you are invited to contact the Center's Director (Professor Rebecca Spang rlspang AT indiana DOT edu) with thoughts, enthusiasms, suggestions for people to invite, etc. etc. at any time. Our website is under renovation; full CFP for the time being can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OmP9M9CrwZfuBxJwDuyenMlbHJvCbNC0/view?usp=sharing

Were it not for the pandemic, we would have held this year's Kenshur Prize symposium in honor of Vince Brown's _Tacky's Revolt_ in the Lilly Library with maps of the eighteenth-century Atlantic on display. While it was odd to meet in the nowhere of Zoom to discuss a book so attentive to the particulars of place, it was nonetheless a wonderful event, moving and powerful thanks to all contributors. One might even say it was 'epic'!

We're still here!! We'll be having our first meeting of the semester on Thursday, Sept. 30th at 4:15 and we will be meeting outdoors to minimize the risk of contagion.

In the meantime, we're excited to welcome new* colleagues in English, Spanish, and History (Cass Turner, Rhi Johnson, and Dave Nichols pictured) as well as new graduate-student affiliates from English, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, History, and Germanic Studies. If you would like to be added to our e-mail list (for details of next week's meeting and so much more), please write to our Director, Professor Rebecca Spang (rlspang AT indiana DOT edu)

* as of August 2020

We are delighted to announce the short list for this year's Kenshur Prize. Congratulations to the authors of these exceptional books! We will announce a winner later this summer and hope to welcome them to an in-person symposium this autumn. For more about the Prize, see our website: https://voltaire.sitehost.iu.edu/Kenshurprizeshortlist.html