Atlantic Routes and Roots: The Seventh Biennial Conference of the Defoe Society

The seventh biennial conference of the Defoe Society will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, homeland of the Taíno people and a site of imperial contests reaching from the fifteenth century to the present. Our meeting embraces the fully transatlantic nature of our membership and author with the theme: Atlantic Routes and Roots.

The conference, organized in partnership with the Early Caribbean Society, invites proposals for panels on any topic related to the study of Defoe and his contemporaries, broadly defined as the Restoration period to the mid-eighteenth century; we particularly welcome proposals that underscore our theme through a focus on:

• transoceanic crossings
• the Caribbean
• Circum-Atlantic influences
• texts and contexts for race, ethnicity, and African-descended and Indigenous peoples

 

We are thrilled to announce our plenary speakers:

• Professor Marisa Fuentes, author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, the winner of the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the 2016 Caribbean Studies Association Barbara Christian Prize, and the 2017 Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award
• Professor Rajani Sudan, author of The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technology of Colonialism, named “Top 6” South Asia studies publications of 2016 by the British Association for South Asian Studies

Proposals are invited for fully comprised panels, for roundtable sessions, and for alternative format sessions as well. Proposals for individual papers or complete panels should be submitted to dfroid@purdue.edu  by 1 February 2021. Please limit abstracts to 500 words and include a very brief biography.

This meeting will be held 2-4 December 2021 at the San Juan Marriott. For more information, click here.

Past Conferences

The Sixth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Crusoe at 300: Adaptations, Afterlives and Futures
July 10-12, 2019 (University of York)

The Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Tolerance and Intolerance in the Age of Defoe
September 7-9, 2017 (New Haven, Connecticut)

The Fourth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Nature in the Age of Defoe
July 22-23, 2015 (Bath, UK)

The Third Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Global Defoe: His Times and His Contemporaries
August 9-10, 2013 (Normal, Illinois)

The Second Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
The Culture of Grub Street
July 14-16, 2011 (University of Worcester, UK)

The First Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
September 25-26, 2009 (Oklahoma State University)