Society of Early Americanists

Second Biennial SEA Conference
8-10 March  2001
Norfolk, Virginia

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline: September 15, 2000

The Society of Early Americanists announces its second biennial conference for March 8-10, 2001, in Norfolk, Virginia.  A seaport city that still has remnants of its eighteenth-century past, Norfolk has undergone considerable renovation since sailors' bars and bordellos dominated the old downtown.  With opera, theater, the Virginia Symphony, the Chrysler Museum, and a number of arts programs, Norfolk will offer conference-goers a variety of cultural activities.  Nearby are Jamestown, various seventeenth-century structures, and Virginia Beach.  In addition, Norfolk's proximity to Colonial Williamsburg should make for an exciting program.

 The SEA 2001 program committee has approved the following panels. This interdisciplinary meeting seeks panelists from all disciplines whose work touches on early American studies (to 1800). Prospective panelists should send one- to two-page proposals and short CVs directly to chairs no later than September 15, 2000. For more information about SEA or the conference, please see the homepage on this web site ( SEA Home Page) or contact:

Jeffrey H. Richards
(jhrichar@odu.edu)
SEA 2001 Program Chair
Department of English
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529

or

Dennis Moore
(dmoore@english.fsu.edu)
SEA 2001 Associate Program Chair
Department of English
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580
 
 

1. "The Material Text"
2. "New World Narratives"
3. "The Occom-Wheelock Circle"
4. "'That Art of Coyning Christians': Reading Puritan Mission Writings"
5. "The Land Speaks: Cartography and Identity in Early America"
6. "(Mis)Representing the Self in Image and Word"
7. "Language and Economics in Early American Literature"
8. "An Interdisciplinary Look at Eighteenth-Century Theater and Drama"
9. "'A General Civilization of Mankind': Collective Identities and Australia, New Zealand, China, and 'the Antipodes' in Early-American Writing"
10. "Interactions between German and English Print Cultures in Eighteenth-Century America"
11. "Teaching Early American Literature with Technology"
12. "Psalmody and Hymnology: An Exploration of the Development of Church-Related Musical Forms and Their Relation to Poetry in Early America"
13. "Sectarian Sisters: Relocation and Revelation in Women's Personal Narratives"
14. "Rococo and Revolution in America"
15. "Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America"
16. "Eighteenth-Century Periodical Literature"
17. "Constructing Manhood and Masculinity in the Early Americas"
18. "The Hub of Empire:  The Caribbean in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
19. "The Seven Years' War and Early-American Literature"
20. "Landscapes of Culture and Commerce: The Valley Road in Early Virginia"
21. "Transatlantic Print Culture"
22. "Spiritual and Secular States: Church and Social Order in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
23. "Teaching Crèvecoeur: Beyond 'What Is an American?'"
24. "Filming Early America"
25. "The Colonial-Era Archaeology of Tidewater Virginia and Eastern North Carolina"
26. "Spanish Writings From and About the Colonial 'Borderlands'"
27. "Textual Apparatuses of Early-American Elections"
28. "The Day After: When Doomsday Fails to Come"
29. "The Salem Witch Trials: Criticism and Pedagogy"
30. "Parallaxes: Early Americanists Reading Pynchon Reading Early America"
31. "Sites of Transgression: Quaker Texts, Colonial Contexts"
32. "Theorizing Conspiracy: Suspicion and Paranoia in Early America"
33. "Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Early-American Responses to Disease"
34. "To the Shores of Tripoli: Slavery and Liberty in Non-Native American Captivity Narratives"
35.  Religion, Radicalism and the Response to America
36.  In Sickness and In Health:  Social Conditions of Health Care in Early America
37.  Sex and the City
38.  The World of Things and the Politics of Empire
39.  Sensibility in the Forest
 
 

1. "The Material Text"

Early American literature is rich in the visual statements made by title pages, frontispieces, embossed and embellished covers and bindings, and illustrations within the text. This panel will address the ways in which literary scholarship accounts for the material text. How do we "read"title pages and illustrations, and how do these elements contribute to our reading of the literary text? Participants might examine the original context of periodical literature, such as the advertising that surrounds a literary piece, the other literary and journalistic pieces that precede or surround a given work within a magazine. Papers on teaching the material text are also encouraged.

Dorothy Z. Baker, dzbaker@uh.edu
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-3012
telephone: 713-743-2938
fax: 713-743-3215
 

2. "New World Narratives"

How does the cultural mission of Lafitau and Cartier in New France compare with that of Lery in the territory that is now Brazil? In what ways do the Relations of the Jesuits among the Hurons, the Relacion of Cabeza de Vaca, and New English captivity narratives represent the colonial experience throughout the Americas? This panel will present a comparative study of New World narratives and will investigate the ways in which French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and/or Dutch explorers and settlers write the New World and are imprinted by the New World.

Dorothy Z. Baker, dzbaker@uh.edu
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-3012
telephone: 713-743-2938
fax: 713-743-3215
 

3. "The Occom-Wheelock Circle"

This session will explore the relationships among various figures in the Occom-Wheelock circle: those writers who corresponded with Mohegan missionary Samson Occom or his sometime-mentor Eleazar Wheelock, or those who wrote and worked within their circles of acquaintance: Joseph Johnson, David Fowler, Hezekiah Calvin, Nathaniel Whitaker, John Thornton, Samuel Hopkins, Mary Occom, and others. While this panel encourages papers that draw connections among writers in the Occom-Wheelock circle, it will consider papers on single authors and on the historical/social phenomena influencing these authors as well as broader papers on Christian Indians and missionaries in colonial New England.

Heather Bouwman, hbouwman@ttacs.ttu.edu
Department of English
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
 

4. "'That Art of Coyning Christians': Reading Puritan Mission Writings"

John Eliot's boast that Puritans had not learned the art of mass, nominal conversions, but were occupied with "real" salvation, focuses attention on the "art" of the Puritan mission discourse. This session welcomes papers that explore formal aspects of mission writings in relation to rhetorical strategies, evangelistic tactics, the representation of converts, other European missions, and Native American agency. Panelists are invited to consider how we read missionary literature and what we read such writings for. To encourage discussion, each speaker will provide an excerpt from a primary source for distribution in advance.

Kristina Bross, kbross@purdue.edu
English Department
Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907
 

5. "The Land Speaks: Cartography and Identity in Early America"

This panel invites papers on maps, charts, and atlases; technologies of cartographic writing; histories of cartographic identities in the imperial, colonial, or national context. How has the materiality of maps informed subjectivities, sexualities, literatures, and cultures?

Martin Bruckner, mcb@udel.edu
English Dept.
University of Delaware
Newark, DE, 19716-2537
 

6. "(Mis)Representing the Self in Image and Word"

New historicist work like Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning has long since suggested how political selves were constructed through the circulation of images, and early Americanists have widely accepted Michael Warner's genealogies of public rhetoric in Revolutionary print culture. This panel invites papers which explore the fashioning of selves across various media, incluidng (but not limited to) autobiography, natural history, portraiture, and the periodical press to suggest how public personae would mask, define or reconstitute private selves during the republican and early national periods.

Ann M. Brunjes, abrunjes@bridgew.edu
Bridgewater State College
Department of English
Bridgewater, MA 02325
(508) 531-2435
 

7. "Language and Economics in Early American Literature"

Papers are invited which deal broadly or specifically with intersections between economics and linguistics, in any genre and discipline. Topics might include, but are not limited to: money, labor, and class; mercantile discourse and the rhetoric of commerce; economic language and linguistic economies; transnational/domestic economies and aesthetics; colonies and capital; the ethics of exchange; economic criticism and early American texts.

Michelle Burnham, mburnham@scu.edu
Department of English
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara CA 95053
 

8. "An Interdisciplinary Look at Eighteenth-Century Theater and Drama"

Critical inquiry into eighteenth-century theater and drama has resulted in a splintered view of the past. Theater and drama scholarship, however, has begun to implement models and investigate issues that speak across scholarly boundaries. The result is a much broader awareness of new, interdisciplinary approaches and questions. The matrix of relationships between literature, art, and music concerning theater and drama has now entered a new stage which seeks to interpret complex historical processes by incorporating input from social, economic, religious, dramatic, artistic, and musical sources. This panel will investigate these new avenues of inquiry into eighteenth-century theater and drama.

Timothy M. Crain, tcrain@mailer.fsu.edu
5 Greenhill Street
Charleston, SC 29401
 

9. "'A General Civilization of Mankind': Collective Identities and Australia, New Zealand, China, and 'the Antipodes' in Early-American Writing"

This panel will explore the use of Australia, New Zealand, China, and other "antipodean lands" in the production of identity. Papers should explore images, descriptions, and/or references of or to China, Australia, New Zealand, or any antipodean community--real or imagined--in American writing before 1820, though talks that focus on seventeenth- or eighteenth-century British writing will also be considered. Papers might investigate issues such as, how did early American writers use figures of the antipodes to help produce modern categories of collective identity? Literary, anthropological, historical, and other disciplinary approaches are welcome.

Jim Egan, Jim_Egan@brown.edu
Department of English
Box 1852
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
 

10. "Interactions between German and English Print Cultures in Eighteenth-Century America"

This panel explores the complex interactions, reactions, and influences of German and Anglo-American print cultures. Throughout the eighteenth century, German and English printers such as Christoph Sauer and Benjamin Franklin issued a variety of widely popular publications, including newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, and religious tracts. Presenters may examine how these publications both enforced and mediated disparate spiritual, political, and social sensibilities. How did the printing presses cause or erase frictions between English and German immigrant groups? Where did print culture maintain transatlantic ties, and where did it break down ethnic divisions, thus establishing distinctly colonial identities?

Patrick Erben, perben@emory.edu
Department of English
Emory University
302 North Callaway Center
537 Kilgo Circle
Atlanta, GA 30322
 

11. "Teaching Early American Literature with Technology"

Computers are transforming our teaching. We invite reports on computer activities ranging from the isolated assignment to the entire course. Subjects might include using web archives for research, creating conference boards for collaboration, using chat programs for role playing, and assigning html projects instead of "papers." Think especially of stimulating experimentation among faculty not currently using computer technology. What are you now doing with the computer? Why? And how's it working? But desiderata for a dream course, a dream skill, or a dream resource would be welcome as well. What would you like to do with computer pedagogy, and why?

Edward J. Gallagher, ejg1@lehigh.edu
Dept of English
Lehigh University
35 Sayre Dr.
Bethlehem, Pa. 18015
 

12. "Psalmody and Hymnology: An Exploration of the Development of Church-Related Musical Forms and Their Relation to Poetry in Early America"

This panel will explore various issues from literary, musical, and/or religious perspectives that focus on how the music and words of psalmody and subsequent church hymnody had an effect on the language and imagery of poetry written in colonial America and the early Republic from roughly 1630 to 1800. Papers that explore the development in a broad way, or those that concentrate on the work of one or two individuals, are welcome. Papers that focus on any religious tradition or area of the colonies/early Republic will be considered.

Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy, rguruswa@runet.edu
Department of English
Box 6935
Radford University
Radford, VA 24142
 

13. "Sectarian Sisters: Relocation and Revelation in Women's Personal Narratives"

This panel addresses the ways in which sectarian women used personal narratives to express moments of transition and trepidation in their lives. Dissenting protestant groups like the Moravians and Quakers encouraged the recording of spiritual and secular experiences across gender boundaries in forms such as diaries, lebenslauf, spiritual autobiographies, and travel narratives. Panelists may explore perceptions of space and landscape in colonial America, changes in agency through spatial/social mobility, and the intersections between the secular and sacred and the public and private in women's narratives. A focus on travel accounts and/or ecocritical approaches are encouraged.

Rebecca L. Harrison, engrlh@panther.gsu.edu
Office of the Dean
College of Arts & Sciences
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 4038
Atlanta, GA 30302-4038
 

14. "Rococo and Revolution in America"

This panel solicits a wide range of topics exploring Rococo aesthetics in early America. Papers might address specific and/or individual Rococo manifestations in painting, decorative arts, fashion, architecture, folk culture, theater, or literature. Speakers might examine the rococo and class, race, gender, power relations, sexuality, encounters with "nature," or interconnections/conflicts between the aesthetics of the rococo and revolutionary ideologies. Papers investigating the visual arts, theater, and music are especially encouraged.

Christine Huber, chuber@mindspring.com
1212 Hill Street
Durham, NC 27707-1344
 

15. "Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America"

This session seeks papers on women's travel accounts--letters, journals, and diaries--that increase our understanding of how women represented their travel experiences in early America. Papers that address the topic of women and travel from a variety of theoretical approaches are welcome.

Susan Clair Imbarrato, simbarra@mnstate.edu
Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Department of English
1104 Seventh Ave. So.
Moorhead, Minnesota 56563
 

16. "Eighteenth-Century Periodical Literature"

Proposals are invited for a panel on early-American periodical literature from about 1720 to the end of the century and its historical and cultural contexts. Presentations which are interdisciplinary or employ recent critical approaches to re-examine various transatlantic contexts, material or editorial practices, relationships between (non)traditional genres and discourses, political ideologies, or the role of ethnicity, class, religious belief, or gender in various magazines and gazettes are especially appropriate. Papers which use the contents of early-American periodical literature to further historicize or complicate aspects of contemporary theory are also welcome.

Mark Kamrath, mkamrath@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu
Department of English
P.O. Box 161346
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816-1346
 

17. "Constructing Manhood and Masculinity in the Early Americas"

This panel will explore different ways that texts, music, and/or art construct definitions of manhood and masculinity. Panelists may want to consider representations of masculinity in English, French, and/or Spanish cultures of the early Americas. Possible issues to be examined include (but are not limited to) the ways genres or cultures define differing and even competing constructs of masculinity and manhood. Which versions of masculinity are validated and which ones rejected? Is the masculine subject always an adult male? How are representations of masculinity used as counterpoints or complements to femininity and childhood? What are the relationships between perceived notions of masculinity and sexuality? How is masculinity linked to citizenship and national identity? What anxieties and ambivalences are expressed about masculinity or through the masculine subject?

Denise Kohn, kohnd@gborocollege.edu
Department of English
Greensboro College
Greensboro, NC 27401-1875
336-272-7102, x.285
 

18. "The Hub of Empire:  The Caribbean in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"

Taking its title from Hilary Becklesís chapter in the new Oxford History of the British Empire, this panel aims to provide a forum for work on the history and culture of the West Indies in the early modern period.  Papers on any aspect of Caribbean culture, especially having to do with the connections between the Caribbean and the larger imperial worlds, will be considered.

Thomas A. Krise, Krise@usafa.af.mil or  krisetw@hotmail.com
Dept. of English
United States Air Force Academy
2354 Fairchild Drive, Suite 6d45
Colorado Springs, CO 80919
 

19. "The Seven Years' War and Early-American Literature"

This session's central goal is to explore two interrelated questions: how did the Seven Years' War in North American shape Early American literature; and how did that literature help shape the cultural memory of that war? How does the literature of and about the War help us understand it as a cultural and political watershed? Did this literature strengthen Americans' imperial identity, or did it more strongly contribute to a proto-national identity? How did it influence cultural attitudes toward Native Americans, imperial violence, and wilderness? Papers that explore any aspect of these or related questions are welcome.

Larry Kutchen, lakut22@socrates.berkeley.edu
Department of English
322 Wheeler Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
 

20. "Landscapes of Culture and Commerce: The Valley Road in Early Virginia"

The Valley Road of Virginia, now designated as one of America's great national highways, has long played a critical role in the economic, social, and cultural life of the Shenandoah Valley. The principal highway in the colonial backcountry and a crucial artery through which trans-Appalachian settlement proceeded, the road was rebuilt as the Valley Turnpike in the nineteenth century and played a strategic role in the American Civil War. This session examines the growth and development of the Valley Road and its changing cultural landscapes in the colonial and early national periods.

Gabrielle M. Lanier, laniergm@jmu.edu
Department of History, MSC 2001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
540-568-3615
 

21. "Transatlantic Print Culture"

We have typically studied eighteenth century American authors as writing for a colonial audience, but what would it mean to interpret them in terms of a more cosmopolitan European audience? How would this complicate these authors' status as colonials? The periphery was often understood as a site of raw datum, rather than a place where these facts could be synthesized into theory. Thus the intellectual trade was meant to mimic the economic one. But was this so? Were there ways in which colonials played with this anticipated hierarchy in which they gathered the raw datum for a metropolitan process of finishing, authenticating, and legitimating?

Edward Larkin, elarkin@richmond.edu
Department of English
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173
 

22. "Spiritual and Secular States: Church and Social Order in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"

This panel asks us to examine some of the relationships between theological discourses and extra-ecclesiological conceptions of social or culturalorder. From the two-tiered General Court in Puritan Massachusetts, to the precise observance of ritual along class lines in some Virginian sanctuaries, to the various Catholicisms imported into New Spain and New France by inspired soldiers who were themselves supported by equally fervent missionaries, it was impossible in the colonial period to escape the syntactical and semantic influences of religious belief. All papers treating the spiritual and secular ties of that time, or which trace its effects, are invited.

Clark Maddux, madduxhc@netusa1.net
PO Box 130
Galveston, IN 46932
 

23. "Teaching Crèvecoeur: Beyond 'What Is an American?'"

Nearly every American literature, American studies, and American history teacher either assigns or regularly invokes Crèvecoeur's famous question-and-answer in Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer. Early Americanists in various disciplines are usually familiar with the entire text and know it to be a complex book, best understood in its entirety. How can the book be taught more effectively, either using more substantial excerpts or assigning the entire work or even teaching it alongside Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America and/or More Letters?

Scott Peeples, peeplesl@cofc.edu
Dept. of English
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
843-953-1993
 

24. "Filming Early America"

Papers welcomed on how historical films or film adaptations affect scholarly and pedagogical approaches to early America. Panelists might address, but are not limited to the following questions: Do historical films complement or compete with our written documents of history and historical figures? How does a film of a non-fiction text alter the discussion of film adaptation? How are historical films or film adaptations of literary texts used in the classroom? Participants invited from all fields, including English, history, religion, film, theater, and communications.

Alan J. Silva, silvaaj@jmu.edu
Department of English
MSC 1801
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA  22807
(540) 564-6412
Fax: (540) 568-2983
 

25. "The Colonial-Era Archaeology of Tidewater Virginia and Eastern North Carolina"

This session will present an overview of colonial-era archaeology in southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. Among others, sites of interest that have been worked on in this region include the recent discovery of the original Jamestown Fort site, the ongoing search for sites related to the 1580s English colonization efforts on and around Roanoke Island, and ongoing work at Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina. Looking at these sites in context with one another can help develop a picture of the material culture that was brought from Europe to this predominantly British region of exploration and settlement.

E. Thomson Shields, shieldse@mail.ecu.edu
Dept. of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353
 

26. "Spanish Writings From and About the Colonial 'Borderlands'"

This session will bring together people working on the cross section of works in Spanish about places which are now part of the United States. While these works have been explored at previous conferences (SEA and others) in the general context of non-English writings, little has been done to examine whether or not there is an overall Spanish tradition of writing about its "borderland" territories, those lands at the northernmost reaches of the Spanish empire in America (la Florida, Nuevo Mexico, Texas, California, etc.). Bringing together scholars researching works from and/or about these various regions would serve as a way to begin examining the possible interrelationships between writings concerning these varying regions at various times, but which all are now part of the United States.

E. Thomson Shields, shieldse@mail.ecu.edu
Dept. of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353
 

27. "Textual Apparatuses of Early-American Elections"

Papers in this session will address any of the various textual phenomena associated with elections in early America. Materials discussed might include: election sermons; addresses to electors; newspaper coverage, comment, or intervention; circular letters in printed or manuscript form; pamphlet materials; satires; broadsides; and cartoons, among others. The intended focus is on printed or manuscript materials and on their place in the public sphere rather than on election rituals such as parades, dinners, etc.

Frank Shuffelton, fcsh@troi.cc.rochester.edu
Dept. of English
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
 

28. "The Day After: When Doomsday Fails to Come"

This panel examines what happened when the long train of doomsday prophecies during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-centuries FAILED to come true. Put in another way, how did millenarians and utopians of all stripes adjust to these disappointments? Encouraged are proposals on such topics as the aftermath of Hispanic-American escahatologies, of the failure of Cromwell's Interregnum, of the rampant speculations in the 1690s, of the demise of the Great Awakening, of the disappointments in the French Prophets, of the French-Indian War, of the American and French Revolutions as signs of the coming of a political messiah, and the like.

Reiner Smolinski, rsmolinski@gsu.edu
Department of English
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
FAX: 404-651-1710
Ph.: 404-651-2900
 

29. "The Salem Witch Trials: Criticism and Pedagogy"

Papers invited on any aspect of teaching and researching the Salem Witch Trials. Fresh, innovative approaches to the subject particularly encouraged. Send a one-page abstract and brief biographical statement to

Zabelle Stodola, kzstodola@ualr.edu
English Department
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
2801 S. University
Little Rock, AR 72204
Fax: (501) 569-8185
 

30. "Parallaxes: Early Americanists Reading Pynchon Reading Early America"

Any approach to Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon that explores the concerns of early American studies. Topics might include anachronism and historical fiction, Pynchon's use of sources, retrospective prophecy, Enlightenment philosophy, science, religion, politics, paranoia, conspiracy theory, the novel's reception, implications for popular images of early American culture and famous figures (e.g., Washington, Franklin)--or, of course, further investigations into the history of the Learned English Dog, the poetical works of Timothy Tox, etc.

Timothy Sweet, tsweet@wvu.edu
Department of English
PO BOX 6296
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26506-6296
 

31. "Sites of Transgression: Quaker Texts, Colonial Contexts"

This session will focus on the variety of Quaker texts that operated within colonial American society, texts which clearly represent Quakerism's transgressive challenges to the political, religious, and social institutions of seventeenth-century New England and the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic. The term Quaker texts most immediately designates published and manuscript writings; but it also embraces the other rhetorics of speech, embodiment, and behavior through which early Friends expressed themselves. Specifically, the panel will address this religious group's presence and influence on early American literary and cultural production, offering nuanced readings of Quaker practices and discourses in the context of colonial culture. In a sense, despite a history marked by early persecution and continuing difference, both Quakers and colonies can be read as connected sites of transgression. As they contended for the chance to realize their vision and agency on early American ground, both engaged in complex negotiations with English norms, cross-cultural audiences, and diverse regimes of power and authority. This panel is intended to articulate a range of transgressive sites, variously located in corporeal, geographic, and textual realms, and to draw on a range of interpretive, theoretical practices.

Michele Lise Tarter, tarter@tcnj.edu
Department of English
The College of New Jersey
P.O. Box 7718
Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
609/771.3115
 

32. "Theorizing Conspiracy: Suspicion and Paranoia in Early America"

Based on recent scholarship, one might think that postmodern writers had invented conspiracy theory after 1950 in America, but it is hardly an artifact of recent creation. As Richard Hofstadter, Bernard Bailyn, David Brion Davis, and others remind us, cultural paranoia and conspiracy scares were in fact crucial forces which helped create the new Republic. Can we use the postmodern analyses of post-war American suspicion and fear to supplement our examination of early American culture and its examples of the Citizen Genet Affair and Pontiac's Conspiracy? What connections and/or differences can we find between conspiracy theories and their textual uses between the different time periods? In what ways was cultural paranoia used to support the dominant discourse(s) in early America? Was conspiracy theory ever used to create "alternative" narratives that could be used to challenge the standing power structures? What is the connection of the discourse of conspiracy and cultural paranoia to public discourse? How are literary and conspiratorial plots connected? While papers on the early Republic are especially encouraged, any papers on conspiracy, paranoia, and suspicion in early American culture will be considered.

Riley Vann, rvann@bigplanet.com
English Department
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26506
 

33. "Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Early-American Responses to Disease"

The 200th anniversary of Arthur Mervyn provides occasion for reevaluating early American responses to disease. Fever epidemics generated a flood of communication, from street-corner rumors to medical and political debate, from sanitary legislation to sermons, from familiar correspondence to novels. This panel invites papers that explore early American textual, social, political, and material cultural treatments of disease, contagion, fever, or epidemic; revisit modern critical and historical understandings of fever narratives; or consider underexamined texts and contexts, including the roles of race, class, gender, colonialism, and nationalism in Brown's novel and/or contemporary imaginations of disease and cure.

Bryan Waterman, waterman@fas.harvard.edu
History and Literature
Harvard University
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA  02138
OR
Joanna Brooks, brooks.j@mail.utexas.edu
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1164
 
 
 

34. "To the Shores of Tripoli: Slavery and Liberty in Non-Native American Captivity Narratives"

Rather than seduction, captivity is the primary trope of early-American print culture, and this panel invites more discussion of non-Indian narratives: slave narratives, prisoner-of-war narratives, criminal narratives, shipwreck narratives, even other forms of travel narratives.

Dan Williams, egdew@olemiss.edu
Dept. of English
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
662-915-3175

35.  RELIGION, RADICALISM, AND THE RESPONSE TO AMERICA

How did transatlantic movements and diverse North American conditions encourage or inhibit religious radicalism in early America?  What was the relationship among different kinds of radicalism--social, political, religious?  This panel is interested in the consideration of native, European, or African radical responses formed in or transmitted to the societies of colonial and early national America.

Christopher Grasso,  cdgras@wm.edu
William and Mary Quarterly
PO Box 8781
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8781

36.  IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH: SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF HEALTH CARE IN EARLY AMERICA

As different peoples encountered one another in early America, they formed new environments of sickness and health. In the broadest sense, this panel asks how the challenges of affliction were perceived and met within this setting. Papers are invited to focus on practices and social relations of health care with regard to any number of influences: climate and native plants; indigenous and immigrant knowledges; cross-cultural contacts; the construction of race, gender, ethnicity and age; and the social imperatives of family and community life.

Please send hard copy of proposals as well as email.

Ben Mutschler,  bmutschler@orst.edu.
History Department
Milam 306
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-5104.

37.  SEX IN THE CITY

Enlightenment ideology labeled cities sites of luxury and corruption. Did sexual demographics, practices, and cultures in American provincial cities parallel those of eighteenth-century European cities?  Did a sexual underworld emerge on the western rim of the circumatlantic world? If not, why not?  Was there a transatlantic sexual culture or did distincitve population mix, sexual opportunities and practices develop in relation to particular conditions in the Western hemisphere? This panel is interested in papers that address sexual practices in early American urban settings.

Fredrika J. Teute,  fjteut@wm.edu
OIEAHC
P.O. Box 8781
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8781

38.  THE WORLD OF THINGS AND THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE

Studies of visual and material culture reveal numerous ways that men and women advanced ideologically charged projects in North American imperial situations. People in New World settings employed appropriation, adaptation, resistance, persistence, syncretism, hybridization, and creolization. Formal analysis can offer a useful tool for identifying and analyzing these strategies. This panel looks for case studies of one or more objects or classes of objects to elucidate the interpenetration of the world of things and the world of imperial projects.

David Steinberg,  djstei@wm.edu
OIEAHC
P.O. Box 8781
Williamsburg, VA 23187

39.  SENSIBILITY IN THE FOREST

During the years of the early republic, the need to create a new polity with a political center led both to practical institution-building and to pastoral dreams. This panel seeks papers that investigate the many ways in which Americans envisioned and sought to create perfected worlds in -- or outside of -- their new nation, and the interaction of those plans for improvement or escape with the political, cultural, and social developments of the republic.

Catherine O. Kaplan,  cokaplan@aol.com
Senior Fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
46B North Bedford St.
Arlington, VA 22201