Upcoming Conferences
The First Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Call for Papers
Oklahoma State University will host the first biennal meeting of the Defoe Society, an international organization that is one of the newest affiliate societies of ASECS, in Tulsa, OK, on September 25-26, 2009. This inaugural conference is designed to range across the extraordinary variety of Defoe's activities and writings and to interrogate the question of how an examination of Defoe and his work can function as a vehicle for understanding his time and place. Our aim is to provoke a fresh examination of the period, one that revisits our notions of "the Augustan Age" by considering how it might appear when viewed from a perspective that puts Defoe at the center. At the same time, we hope to prompt discussion of the place of the study of a single author in the enterprise of understanding an important literary-historical period. We welcome panels and papers focusing on the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century that consider Defoe's poetry, fiction, political and economic writing, satire, religious and didactic works, and so forth as well as related work by other writers from the same period. Plenaries will include presentations by internationally renowned Defoe scholars; there will also be two late night film showings in the conference hotel with discussions following.
Tulsa is an attractive, lively, medium-sized city (called by the Advocate one of the gay-friendliest cities in America) situated at the conjunction of three rivers (the Arkansas, the Verdigris, and the Cimarron) with important museums like the Gilcrease, with its world-famous collection of Native American art and artifacts, four university campuses, an interesting film and music scene, and fine restuarants. Tulsa boasts a museum of jazz - the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame (located in Tulsa's historic Greenwood District) - memorializing, among other things, the important Muskogee jazz scene. The city also has a celebrated collection of Art Deco architecture. The host hotel, the Tulsa Crowne Plaza, which recently has been completely remodeled, will provide an excellent, and quite reasonable, setting for this meeting. We look forward to seeing you at this inaugural meeting of the Defoe Society.
The submission deadline for all session proposals is January 15, 2009. The submission deadline for all paper proposals is March 15, 2009. Please send your brief abstract (no more than 1 page) to Program Chair Robert Mayer at robert.mayer@okstate.edu. Mail submissions to: Robert Mayer, Department of English, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078-4069.
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Defoe Society is proposing two panels for the 2009 ASECS Conference in Richmond, Virginia:
1. The Stoke Newington Defoe Series Editorial Round Table
Chair: Max Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Kit Kincade, Indiana State University
Manuel Schonhorn, Southern Illinois University
Gabe Hornstein, President, AMS Press
Respondent: Kevin Cope, Louisiana State University
Envisioned as primarily an editorial discussion about the history and future of the Stoke Newington Defoe Series, this panel has been devised to address and promote textual and editorial scholarship in the field of Defoe studies.
2. The Didactic and Non-fictional Works of Daniel Defoe
Chair: Andreas Mueller, University of Worcester
In contrast to his novels, Daniel Defoe's didactic and non-fictional works have only recently begun to be explored critically on their own terms. In an effort to continue and extend this trend, this panel offers an opportunity for papers on Defoe's non-fictional works that investigate and comment upon Defoe's use of literary forms, genres and structures, as well as the functions of Defoe's non-novelistic writings in their socio-historical and literary contexts.
Please visit the ASECS Website for more information.
Past Conferences
The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The 37th Annual Conference was held from the 3rd to the 5th of January 2008 at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. Chris Mounsey, University of Winchester, chaired a panel on Daniel Defoe that included the following papers:
Leyli Jamali, Islamic Azad University of Tabriz, "Darker Than The Plague: Defoe's Symbolic Gaze in A Journal of the Plague Year"
Andreas Mueller, University of Worcester, "A question of influence: Daniel Defoe's 'Meditations'"
Nicholas Seager, University of Nottingham, "Daniel Defoe, Major Ramkins, the Canon, and the Novel"
Jed Wentz, University of Leiden, "Roxana's Dance: The Persuasive Footwork of Defoe's Fortunate Mistress"
Please see the BSECS Conference Website for more details about the panel and paper abstracts.
The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Twelfth International Congress on the Enlightenment was held in Montpellier, France from the 8th to 15th of July 2007. Robert Mayer chaired a panel there on Defoe and the Enlightenment.
Please see the ISECS Conference Website for more information.
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
There were two panels on Daniel Defoe at the 2008 ASECS Conference on March 27th-30th in Portland, Oregon:
1. "Defoe Visualized: Illustrations, Film, Television, and New Media"
(Defoe Society)
Chair: Richard Frohock, Oklahoma State University
Andreas Mueller, University of Worcester, "Vulgar Postcolonialism: The Case of Halmi's Robinson Crusoe"
Robert Mayer, Oklahoma State University, "The Robinsonade on American Television"
Sharon Alker, Whitman College, and Holly Faith Nelson, Trinity Western University, "Defoe in Cyberspace: Eighteenth-Century Authors on the Web"
2. "Defoe: The Cambridge Companion" (Defoe Society)
Chair: John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
J. Paul Hunter, University of Virginia
Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia
Maximillian Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Ellen Pollak, Michigan State University
A Defoe Society roundtable on "The Future of Defoe Studies" was hosted at the 2007 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The details regarding the roundtable were as follow:
"The Future of Defoe Studies" (Defoe Society)
Chair: Sharon Alker, Whitman College
Geoffrey Sill, Rutgers University [Read Remarks]
Robert Mayer, Oklahoma State University
Irving Rothman, University of Houston
John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
Maximilian Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
This panel was dedicated to the memory of Professor Jim Springer Borck (1941-2007).
Please see the ASECS Conference Website for more information.