Charlotte Cary-Beckett, PhD Candidate, English, University of Chicago & Josephine McDonagh, George M. Pullman Professor of English, University of Chicago:
“Idyll as Refuge: The Settler’s Dream”
Kate Nolan, PhD, English, University of Chicago: “It-Girls: Objectification, Agency and Subjectivity in the Eighteenth-Century Novel”Jacob Biel, PhD Candidate, English, University of Chicago
Jacob Biel, PhD Candidate, English, University of Chicago: “The Novel of the (Un)deserving: Henry Fielding’s Philanthropic Forms”
Helen Thompson, Professor of English, Northwestern University: “Mercantile Capitalism and Literary Form: The Royal African Company Letters”
Winter 2023
Hanna Khan, English PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Chicago: “Victorian Omniscience and Liberal Politics in Trollope’s The Warden”
Olivia Lingyi Xu, English PhD Candidate, Northwestern University: “Comparability in Circulation: Translating Race in a Global History of the Novel”
Adam Fales, English PhD Candidate, University of Chicago: “Proslavery’s Late Style: The “Peculiar Institution” in Antebellum Literature and Politics”
Fiona Maxwell, History PhD Candidate, University of Chicago: “‘Expression is Power’: Gender, Speaking, and Parlor Democracy at the Cumnock School of Oratory, 1871-1901” [Joint event with the U.S. History & Culture Workshop]
Fall 2022
Leland Jasperse, PhD Candidate, English, University of Chicago: “Singles Going Stead: The Short Story Collection’s Celibate Affordances”
Matthew Cerjak, MAPPS, University of Chicago: “‘Silence is a Female Charm:’ The Literary Fight Against Female Agency”
Rebeca Velasquez, PhD Candidate, English, University of Chicago: “Generating the Rule of Law: Policing Narrative Difference in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone”
Sukanya Banerjee, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley: “Reading the Nonevental: The Victorian Literary Sketch, Colonial Urbanity, and the Transimperial”
Winter 2020
Madison Chapman, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Byron’s Queer Grief, Form and the Thyrza Cycle”
Jennifer Yida Pan, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago “Narrative Guns”
Special Collections “Show-and-Tell” with Dr. Alexis Chema and Dr. Eric Slauter
Helen Thompson, Professor of English, Northwestern University
“Pernicious Science: Artifice and the Form of Narrative in Eliza Haywood’s Secret Histories”
Rebeca Velasquez, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Martial Law, the Limits of Liberal Governance, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt”
Fall 2019
Zarena Aslami, Associate Professor of English, Michigan State University
“Victorian Afghanistan, the Iron Amir, and the Poetics of Marginal Sovereignty”
Elaine Hadley, Professor of English, University of Chicago
“Equality or Equilibrium: Time Travelling with Economics”
Amanda Shubert, Humanities Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
“Magic in Cranford”
Katie Nolan, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
“‘Playing for Keeps’: Sentimental Women and the Vices of Objectification”
Spring 2019
Priyanka Jacob, Assistant Professor of English: Loyola University Chicago
“What the City Keeps: Secrets and Hoards in Little Dorrit”
Roundtable: “The Return of the 19th Century?”
Zachary Samalin, Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago; Benjamin Morgan, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago; Anna Kornbluh, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago; Nasser Mufti, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago || Logan 802, 4:30-6pm with 6-7pm reception *This is a joint event co-sponsored by the 20th and 21st Century Cultures Workshop with support from the Franke Institute for the Humanities*
Dr. Jill Gage, archivist: Guided Tour of the Newberry Library with Presentation of Archival Materials
Charlotte Saul, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Collecting eccentric characters at the turn of the 19th century”
Adam Fales, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Paradise Regained: Reserializing E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand.”
Winter 2019
Matthew Boulette, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“On the Inertia of Appetite: Transient Relations from the Chinatown Opium Scene”
Julia Rossi, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“The Ethics of Undetachability: Henry James and the Necessity of Contextual Reading”
Caroline Heller, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Elegiac Care: Ecological Responsibility in the Melancholic Poetics of Charlotte Smith”
Lauren Schachter, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Supplying the Omission: Priestley’s Futures in Grammar and Biography”
Dr. Stefano Evangelista, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College, Oxford
*Co-sponsored by the 20th and 21st Century Workshop*
Fall 2018
Sarah Johnson, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English, University of Chicago
“Maroon Hatchets: Victor Séjour’s Severed Frame”
Katie Nolan, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Cost-Benefit Analysis: Circulating Women and the Virtues of Objectification”
David Womble, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“What Climate Did to Consent, 1748-1818”
Spring 2018
Yasmin Solomonescu, Assistant Professor in English, University of Notre Dame
“Emma and the ‘Chimera of Relativism’”
Kevin King, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Dickens’s Many Bozwells: The Case of George Gissing”
The Annual Meeting of the Johnson Society of the Central Region: A Symposium of Current Work in 18th-Century Studies || Friday, April 27 & Saturday, April 28
Sam Rowe, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities, University of Chicago
“Three Logics of Equality in Godwin”
Allison Turner, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
Title TBA
Winter 2018
Katie Nolan, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“She Objects: On the (Im)mobility of Women in the 18th-Century Novel”
David Womble, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“The Body on the Moor: Wuthering Heights, Depopulation, and the Solitary Scene of Species Life”
Isaac Mier, MAPH Student, University of Chicago
“The Illusions of Slavery: Law vs. Legitimacy and the Declaration of Independence in Dred and A Heroic Slave”
Zach Samalin, Assistant Professor in English, University of Chicago
“The Odor of Things”
Lucy Hartley, Professor in English, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
“‘A Crisis of History’: Poverty and Progress”
Nathan Hensley, Assistant Professor of English, Georgetown University
“Ecological Formalism; or, Love among the Ruins”
Fall 2017
Amanda Shubert, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Conjuring Cranford: Apparitions, Natural Magic and Narration”
Lauren Schachter, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Godwin’s Grammar: Wishful Thinking with a Rule”
Anna K. Sagal, PhD, 2017-18 Monticello College Foundation & Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Fellow, Newberry Library
“Women’s Botanical Textbooks: From Native Blooms to Monster Plants”
Wendy Lee, Assistant Professor in English, New York University
“A Brief History of the Prude”
*Co-sponsored with Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop*
Spring 2017
Thomas Dikant, Postdoctoral Scholar in English, University of Chicago
“Describing Murder: Anna Katharine Green’s Criminal Procedure”
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson,Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago
“Inventing the Holocene: Climate, Deep Time, and Civilization in Victorian Britain”
Allison Turner, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Landscape with Figures: Reimagining the Forest
Caroline Heller, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Vernal Reading: Season Circumstance in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children”
*Co-sponsored with Poetry and Poetics*
Amanda Jo Goldstein, Assistant Professor in English, Cornell University
“Planetary Justice for Charles Fourier”
Elaine Hadley, Professor in English, University of Chicago
“Becker the Obscure: Modeling Human Capital”
Winter 2017
Katie Nolan, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“States of Undress: The Eroticism of Clothing in the 18th-Century Novel”
Anahid Nersessian,Assistant Professor of English, UCLA
“Wordsworth’s Obscurity”
*Co-sponsored with Poetry and Poetics*
David Womble, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“The Physiology of the Multitude”
Eric Powell, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“How to Do Things With Poems: Shelley’s Queen Mab, the Radical Press, and the English Working Class”
*Co-sponsored with Poetry and Poetics*
Jessica Peritz, PhD Candidate in Music, University of Chicago
“Castrati of Sensibility, or, the Politics of Voice in Enlightenment Italy”
Autumn 2016
Nasser Mufti, Assistant Professor of English, UIC
“A Historical Novel about Nothing: Nostromo, Civil War and the New Imperialism”
Ian Caveny,MAPH Alumnus
“Metafictionality and the Liminal in George MacDonald’s ‘The Golden Key’”
Sam Rowe, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Matthew Lewis and the Gothic Face”
Dustin Brown, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
TBA
Co-sponsored Events
Thursday, October 27: Simon Gikandi, Schirmer Professor English, Princeton University. “The Spaces of Enslavement: Rethinking the Architecture of the Castle/Dungeon.” Franke Institute at 1100 E. 57th St., 5:30 pm (co-sponsored with the Slavery and Visual Culture working group)
Friday, October 28: a workshop with Simon Gikandi, Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University; CSRPC at 5733 S. University Ave., 10 am (co-sponsored with the Slavery and Visual Culture working group)
Wednesday, November 16: a workshop with Monique Allewaert, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location TBA (cosponsored with the 20th- and 21st-Century Workshop)
Spring 2016
Sam Rowe, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
““Strange Diligence”: Lovelace and the Rake Ethic”
Susan Wolfson, Professor of English, Princeton University
“Wordsworth’s Words: What’s in a Name”
*Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop*
Jonathan Schroeder, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“The Circulation of Nostalgia: Bodies of Knowledge, Geographies of Emotion, and the Bonds of Empire”
Benjamin Morgan, Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago
“Fin Du Globe”: On Decadent Planets
*Co-sponsored with the C20/21 Workshop*
Winter 2015
Michael Dango, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
Jeremy Bentham’s Queer Theory: Space and Action
Amanda Shubert, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“‘A bright continuous flow’”: Magic Lantern Phantasmagoria and Historical Fiction in A Tale of Two Cities || *Co-sponsored with the Mass Culture Workshop*
David Womble, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“Afterlives of the Senses: Physiological Death and Late-Victorian Poetry
*Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop*
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Chair and Professor of English, Northeastern University
“Performance, Materiality, and Aesthetics in the Atlantic World: From Jonkonnu to Yankee Doodle Dandy”
*Co-sponsored with the American Cultures Workshop*
Cynthia Wall, Professor of English, University of Virginia
“Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Print, and Narrative”
Autumn 2015
David Kurnick, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers
“Eros and Quantification: The Application of Persuasion”
Cass Picken, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago
“On reproduction in the pre-emancipation West Indies”
Alexis Chema, PhD Candidate in English, Yale
“A tongue in every star: Wordsworth, Barbauld, and Excessive Figuration”
Mathias Mietzelfeld, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
“Fenimore Cooper’s Crime Scenes”
Mary Nyquist, Professor of English, University of Toronto
“Milton and Defoe: Friday as ‘Fit Help’”
*Co-sponsored with the Renaissance Workshop*
Oliver Cussen, PhD Student in History, University of Chicago
“Experiments in Empire: The Global Civil Society of Old Regime France”
Spring 2015
Tristan Schweiger, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago
“Squirearchy and Union: The Country Patriarchs of Owenson, Edgeworth, and Scott”
David Womble, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago
“Malthus and Bentham in the Gothic Novel, 1796-1817”
Lynn Festa, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University: “Lousy Bodies”
*Co-sponsored by the Animal Studies Workshop with support from the Nicholson Center for British Studies*
Emily Rohrbach, Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University
“Reimagining Transatlantic Literary Relations: Keats Reading Wieland”
*Co-sponsored by the American Cultures Workshop*
Martha Feldman, Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and Humanities in the College, University of Chicago
“Castrato De Luxe: Blood, Gifts, and Goods”
Winter 2015
Andrew Inchiosa, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago
“The Antiquaries’ Archives”
David Diamond, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago
“Fielding’s ‘Diagnostics’ of Nature: A Calvinist Inheritance”
Mollie McFee, PhD Student, Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
“Legal Translation and the Specters of Race: Abolition and Empire in Sommersett v. Stewart”
Dustin Brown, PhD Student, English, University of Chicago
“George Gissing, Late-Victorian Psychology, and the Novel Aesthetics of Withdrawal”
Kay Dian Criz, Professor Emerita of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Associate Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies, University of Chicago
“A Conversation on the Visual Construction of Mulatas: Slavery and Abolition in the Spanish- and English-speaking Colonial Caribbean”
*Co-sponsored with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop*
Cannon Schmitt, Professor of English, University of Toronto
“How to Read the Surface of the Sea”
Fall 2014
Cass Picken, PhD student, English, University of Chicago
“Imperial Rents and Laissez-Faire Sentimentality in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Tales”
Carolyn Steedman, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Warwick
“An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability”
Michael Dango, PhD student, English, University of Chicago
“The Utility of Focalization: Action and Representation in Phineas Finn”
Sam Rowe, PhD student, English, University of Chicago
“Acquisitive Desire and Characterization in 18th-century British Fiction”
Joel Calahan, PhD student, Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
Title TBA
*Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics workshop*
Lauren Schachter, PhD student, English, University of Chicago: “‘Well calculated for eloquence’: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Diffusive Style”
*Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics workshop*
Spring 2014
Doris Garraway, Associate Professor of French, Northwestern University: “Writing Abolitionism from the Abolitionist State of Haiti: Transnationalism, Sentiment, and Agency in the Baron de Vastey’s Colonial System Unveiled (1814)”
Zach Samalin, PhD, English, CUNY Graduate Center: “Plumbing the Depths, Scouring the Surface: Henry Mayhew’s Scavenger Hermeneutics”
Chris Taylor, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago: “The Political Economy of Neglect”
Tristan Schweiger, PhD Student, Department of English, University of Chicago: “Planters and nabobs: Colonial agents and the homecoming of capital in Grainger and Foote”
Aidan Beaty, PhD student, Department of History, University of Chicago: “Organised Manhood: Bodily Regeneration in Irish Nationalism”
Winter 2014
Cass Picken, Department of English, University of Chicago: “Provinces of Modernity: Romanticism and the Political Economy of Space”
Tony Brown, Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota: “Mandeville’s Ananas” (from Statelessness: On Almost not Existing in the Enlightenment)
Heather Keenleyside, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago: Title TBA (from On Animals and Other People)
Ruth Mack, Associate Professor of English at the University of Buffalo: “Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics”
Michael Hansen, Department of English, University of Chicago: Title TBA (On Hallam, Tennyson, and Moral Philosophy); *Co-sponsored with the Poetry & Poetics Workshop*
Kristian Kerr, Department of English, University of Chicago: “Classical sensations: Bulwer-Lytton and the novel in the 1830s”
Fall 2013
David Diamond, PhD student, University of Chicago: “Sex and Speculative Investment: Interest as Desire in Eliza Haywood’s ‘Secret History’ of the South Sea Bubble.”
Suzanne Taylor, PhD student, University of Chicago: “So Close a Connection: Painful Associations in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa”
Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English, Birbeck, University of London: “Emotions and Language: The Category of the Perlocutionary”
Ian Baucom, Professor of English, Duke University: TBA
Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of English, Princeton University: “Syllabics and Cinquains: Re-thinking early 20th-century rhythm”; * Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop*
Sam Rowe, PhD student, University of Chicago: “Coleridgean Kink: Christabel, Metrical Masochism, and the Question of Poetic Form” (with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop)
Erin Nerstad, PhD student, University of Chicago: “Coleridge’s Unitarian Conversations” (with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop)
Spring 2013
Andrew Piper, Associate Professor of German and European Literature, McGill University: “Reading’s Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology”; *Co-sponsored with the New Media Workshop
Aleksandr Prigozhin, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago: “The Weather of Modernity: Atmosphere and Mass Society in The Secret Agent”
Jutta Toelle, Visiting Scholar, University of Chicago; Assistant Professor, Music Department, Humboldt-Universität Berlin: “Music and Civilization: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and the Jesuits”
Rachel Ablow, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Buffalo: “‘Natural Magic’: Harriet Martineau and the Body in Pain”
Mark Wollaeger, Professor of English, Vanderbilt University: TBA
Winter 2013
David Diamond, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago: “Character and the Credit Revolution: Parole, Property, and Perspicuity in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters and Oroonoko”
Erin Nerstad, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago: “’Echo’s Pent Reverberant Store’: Heavenly Song in Christina Rossetti’s Roundel”; *Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop*
Jamil Mustafa, Professor of English, Lewis University: “Haunting ‘The Harlot’s House’
Lily Huang, Doctoral Candidate, History of Science, University of Chicago: “How Animals Think, How People Think, and What One Has to Do With the Other”
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Assistant Professor of British History, University of Chicago: TBA
Autumn 2012
Tristan Schweiger, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago: “A dissenter’s absolutist fantasies: The strange, surprising politics of Robinson Crusoe”
Suzanne Taylor, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago: “Deviant Connections in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses”
Nicole Wright, Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of English, University of Chicago: TBA
Jonathan Ullyot, PhD in Comparative Literature, Full-Time Instructor in the Humanities Core, University of Chicago: “Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as a Failed Grail Narrative”