*This page lists CFPs for Defoe sessions at other conferences. For information on the Defoe Society’s Biennial Meeting, please visit the Conference page.

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Defoe Society has proposed the following special session for the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which will be held March 28-29 and April 4-5, 2025, online. Please consider submitting an abstract for this session during Round 3, August 5-September 13, using the Stova Submissions System Form.

Virtual Defoe
This panel invites all scholars of Defoe and his contemporaries to contemplate the concept of the virtual from multiple perspectives. The virtual is a problem-solving concept, and Defoe was nothing if not a driven solver of problems economic, political, social, and literary. The virtual is also an imagined space, an alternative, allowing us to think about the history of alterity: alternative ways of being, alternative sexualities and identities, alternative bodies and spaces. Pierre Lèvy approaches the virtual as potential, using the example of a seed: the seed is not a tree, but the “tree is virtually present in the seed.” As the seed develops, it faces problems, like bad soil, unfavorable climate, fire, or human intervention, and those problems shape the tree’s development. 18th-century literary forms – and characters and plots — work in similar ways in that they are forms shaped by obstacles. David Mcinnis offers yet another approach. He considers scholarship itself as “an exercise in virtual reality,” challenging the scholarly practice of studying only surviving texts and pushing us to “sense” the gaps, the missing works and authors, the topics not discussed.

Panelists could consider questions like: What problems did Defoe and his contemporaries seek to address through imagined spaces? What alterities do we find in the period and its writings? What are the problems that shaped specific forms, like the heroic couplet or the novel, which could invite close reading? How might the virtual allow us to rethink forms, conventions, plots, characters, or systems? If we look between Defoe’s works and other works of the 18th century, what might we find? What are the gaps in Defoe’s writings or other authors’ writings?