#ASECSat50 Highlights

This year was my eight time at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and I think I can say confidently that it was one of my favorites. It was held in Denver from March 22-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt Downtown, just two blocks away from the 16^th Street Mall, with beautiful views of the Rockies from the 38^th floor reception rooms.

The View

For me, one of the highlights of the scholarly side of things was George Haggerty’s panel on “Queer Sites,” on Friday, March 23 at 11:30am. Presenting on the session were Caroline Gonda, Chris Roulston, Stephen Shapiro, and Fiona Brideoake—basically, a power session. One of the things I love most about ASECS is the fact that at any given moment, I can be in the same room with several people whose scholarship has been crucial to forming my own ideas. Caroline, Chris, and Fiona, as well as George, have published wonderful works on doing queer readings of eighteenth-century texts and persons, and they have influenced my projects immensely. It was a delight to hear the panelists discussing sites of queerness in the eighteenth century.

Caroline presented on Strawberry Hill and the damning ways in which Anne Damer’s presence there has been minimized or ghosted by current curators—as if Terry Castle’s “Apparitional Lesbian” had been published just yesterday rather than 25 years ago. Chris presented on Anne Lister and Eliza Raine and their time at a boarding school for girls in York, thinking about how the boarding school becomes a frame narrative for reading Lister’s later relationships with women. Stephen presented on gay male cruising grounds in Paris, especially the Tuileries, and how arrest reports for sodomy can tell us a lot about the class and power relations between wealthy men who solicited sex for money from lower-class men. Finally, Fiona told us all about A La Ronde, an ornamental cottage in Devon that I really really want to visit now. It was the home of two cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, who resisted pressures to marry and eventually even created a spinster colony for impoverished unmarried women. Fascinating!

Other highlights from the conference included: meeting the witty and multi-talented Stephen Guy-Bray and hearing him recite Latin like a boss; hearing Rivka Swenson describe Cupid as a “bro god”; learning from Hannah Chaskin that Charlotte Lennox’s character in Euphemia moves her friend’s portrait from room to room so she’s never without her (queer much!?); being inspired by John Beynon to think about Aphra Behn’s History of the Nun as campy (does he know about our forthcoming issue from ABO journal on eighteenth-century camp??? I hope you all do!); listening to

Annual contribution to #ASECSshoes

Declan Kavanagh in a Q&A remind us that heterosexuality has a history—an inspiring idea and important to remember!; learning from John Tatter about Stowe and its gardens which I totally want to visit now; reading aloud part of “Mira’s Picture” for Erin Drew’s presentation on the non-feminine, anti-patriarchal female body; finding out from Leah Benedict that electricity is sexy by the end of the #c18; rethinking the linguistic aspects of disability/abnormality/deviancy in the eighteenth century with Rebecca Shapiro and Kevin Joel Berland; and hearing Declan’s talk on the poetics of impairment in libertine poetry.

Not to toot my own horn, but the session I was on, “Queer Swift,” was also pretty great. Jeremy Chow made us re-think Gulliver’s Travels through simian representation and queer lactation; Julia Ftacek reminded us that we cannot neglect our trans students when teaching embodied texts like “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” and Abby Coykendall pushed against “queer” Swift to ask “Is Gulliver straight?” (answer: not really!). I presented on queer abjections in Swift’s excremental poems—though for ISECS I’m thinking a touch of camp might be in order to round out this analysis.

Aside from the academic side of things, ASECS is great for alternative types of socialization, and Friday and Saturday night provided ample opportunities for that. Friday night took several of us to Charlie’s in Denver, a very campy gay dance club with a Western theme. Shirtless cowboys roamed the rooms with trays of Jell-o shots; seven foot tall drag queens stalked through the club, eventually performing for an avid crowd (damn those girls got some mad flexibility!); and the DJ mixed top 40 with country western and hip hop while we danced and danced. It was an epic night to enjoy queer kinship with several folks from the gay and lesbian caucus and their allies.

Saturday night was ASECS Karaoke at Voicebox Denver, organized by the superlative Gena Zuroski, the karaoke queen. Out of the 800 ASECS attendees, I would hazard a guess to say at least 100 of them showed up at one point or another to belt out tunes, socialize, and relax after three full days of conferencing. It’s hard to explain if you don’t like karaoke, but the mood was jubilant, relaxed, and very campy. When you’re singing karaoke, it doesn’t matter if you’re a grad student or a full professor: you’re there for the diva performance: everyone sings along with you because you’re all in it together.

I will stop there. I would say “see you next year,” but this year, I can say: “See you this summer!” ISECS Edinburgh, here we come!

City of Angels: Reflections on ASECS 2015

A week ago I had just gotten back from LA and the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Last year’s meeting was in Williamsburg, Virginia, so it’s a bit hard to beat, from a historical perspective, though Los Angeles has its own charms, including delicious ethnic food, glittering sky scrapers, funky bookstores, and lots of big city glamour.

The famous/infamous Westin Bonaventure hotel.

Of course, I don’t really go to ASECS meetings for the glamour—unless you count the fashion styles of some of our most prominent scholars as “glamour,” which I do. President Kathleen Wilson gave her presidential address wearing a canary-yellow confection that would not have been out of place in Megan Draper’s closet on Mad Men, while John Richetti and Srinivas Aravamudan duked it out sartorially for the title of best-dressed dandy. I’m still deciding whether pink socks (John) trumps polka dot scarf and pork pie hat (Srinivas).

Scholarly fashion aside, this year’s conference was another personal success—and not just because I both presented a paper and chaired a roundtable, thought that was part of it. It was my fifth time at the annual meeting, which meant that there were ever more familiar names and faces to reconnect with, many wonderful folks from Twitter to finally meet in person, and an even greater sense of scholarly community to experience. Being the lone eighteenth-centuryist in my department in Texas, I enjoyed being surrounded by eighteenth-centuryists, even if I don’t always see eye-to-eye with them all.

My first ASECS was the meeting in Vancouver, and I still remember how wonderful it felt to share the first forays into my dissertation project with other people and get positive feedback. Last week, it still felt good to get positive feedback on the paper I gave and later on the roundtable I had assembled and chaired. Validation is an important part of the conference experience: our task is often a lonely one, and we need conversation and external validation in order to keep us going.

At the same time, conferencing also opens our eyes or, less dramatically, simply reminds us that there are people working in the same time period and perhaps even on related projects whose approach is diametrically opposed to our own. If you are like me, and you try to go to a couple of panels every day, then you are likely to hear papers that seem boring, irrelevant, or even wrong to your personal point of view and methodology. Those moments are difficult because they remind us that our own methods and objects of study are not the only ones out there; we are part of a larger constellation of projects and questions and areas of study that thrives on difference, not sameness.

Aside from the more esoteric side of conferencing, there is also a very pragmatic side. We come to conferences to meet people, not just ideas. I was fortunate enough to take advantage of the “Speed Mentoring” offered at this year’s conference, and there I met Kirsten Saxton, who, in about half an hour, listened to my questions, gave me great advice, and made me feel more confident about the next step in my career. I thus began my conferencing at ASECS with the sense of the humanness of conferences. I also ended it that way when I attended the Women’s Caucus annual luncheon on Saturday.

At the luncheon, in addition to getting to reconnect with my outside reader and wonderful mentor Kristina Straub, I simply basked in the sense of being surrounded by intelligent, capable, friendly, scholarly women, whose presence reminded me of how central women’s and gender studies is to my work and my sense of myself as a literary scholar.

My web of connections had some extra sparkle this year because of the presence of several people from my doctoral institution, Stony Brook University, including President Kathleen Wilson. Kathleen has always been a wonderful scholar, but many people might not also know that she is an incredibly generous friend, mentor, and colleague.

Before I get too gushy though, I will finish up my reflections on some of the panels I attended—and I tried to attend as many as my travel-addled brain could handle. Thursday I presented on the “Queer Richardson” panel, and it was an excellent set of papers, if I do say so myself. I spent the afternoon volunteering at the Women’s Caucus book sale table, which meant getting to chat with various attendees to who stopped by to take a look at the books for sale, including other SBU Alums, Devoney Looser and Jenny Frangos.

On Friday, I attended a panel on the role of missionaries in cultural and political developments, mostly because a colleague from my home department was presenting. I ended up learning a lot on a topic that I didn’t know much about, something I always appreciate. Kathleen’s presidential address on producing Sheridan’s plays in colonial milieus was fascinating, and I followed it up with the transgender studies in the eighteenth-century panel. Chris Roulston’s paper on Anne Lister was tender, reflective, and inspiring.

Saturday I took the morning off to catch up with some friends; after the Women’s Caucus luncheon I attended one more session: a workshop run through the “Re-Enlightenment Labs” project (Cliff Siskin and William Warner) which was interesting in part because it was a workshop, not a panel or roundtable. Between this “lab” and earlier discussions at our table at the luncheon, I’ve started thinking about how we might shake up the “usual” modes of conferencing. Even if the topic of the “lab” was not something I would have chosen myself, I found the idea of having a discussion (rather than just listening to others read papers) fascinating and refreshing.

I finished out Saturday in LA with a trip to The Last Bookstore and a delicious tapas dinner with some amazing people. I strolled over to the Walt Disney Concert hall, shopped for Andy Warhol postcards at the MOCA shop, and tried to ignore the urine stench in Pershing Square. It seems that the seedier side of downtown LA is still there, just a few blocks away from the sleek shine of the Westin Bonaventure and the stately hush of the LA public library.

Although conferencing is a heady mixture of inspiration, exhilaration, exhaustion and, at times, disappointment, it always leaves me reinvigorated in the end. I return to my own little patterns and habits, but my thoughts trace new paths and my research takes on new meaning.

Walt Disney Concert Hall.
I had to do a little sight-seeing at least!

Professionalization: Successful Conferencing

Going to conferences is an excellent way of learning more about your field, expanding your knowledge in a given area, getting inspiration, as well as meeting people who might help you in your research. More generally, they are important to staying informed of the direction in which things are going in your field, the major issues and ideas coming to the fore, as well as showing others that you are an active researcher.

All of these principles hold true for us eighteenth-century folk, and we are lucky to have some really wonderful conferences in our field. I have been to meetings of ASECS, Northeast ASECS, Canadian SECS as well as Southeast SECS, and each venture has been a success. In part, this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned in my previous post about this year's ASECS meeting in Williamsburg, VA, eighteenth-century scholars are, generally, a friendly and enthusiastic bunch. Additionally, we are well-organized; there is a regional eighteenth-century conference for several different regions in the US as well as several international and author-based conferences. Even if you only went to eighteenth-century specific conferences, you could still probably go to a different conference every month!

As an added perk, many renowned scholars in the field regularly attend these conferences. Rarely do you walk into a room at ASECS without recognizing the names of several people on their name tags from articles and books that you've looked up and read during your research. Of course, how to meet these people and get their help is another question.

Conferences can be daunting, especially if you are a graduate student or a junior scholar. ASECS is fairly large--over 900 people registered for the most recent meeting. How does one navigate a conference successfully? What does it mean to "network" at these functions? How can you still have a good time while you "work"? I've put together some tips here as suggestions for how to make the most of your next conference.

1. It's the people, not the topic. When choosing what panels to attend, make sure to pay attention first and foremost to the people on the panel rather than the topic. If there is a panel on a topic that relates to your research, but you've never heard of the scholars on the panel, it's quite possible that  the panel will be useless for you. Frequently, people present on topics that are new to them; it's possible that you may know more on the topic than someone who is new to it. If, however, you go to panels to hear people whose work and research you know and admire, it is likely you will learn more and gain more useful knowledge and insight into your research, regardless of whether the topic is in your specific area or not.

2. Be a friend, not a fan. When meeting scholars whose works you've read and admired, resist the urge to be a "fan" and compliment the person on past books and articles. Conferences are stressful for all of us, so during breaks between panels or at receptions, people just want to be friendly. Discuss books, movies, the restaurants in the city the conference is held in--but don't be pushy about discussing scholarly topics and research. It can seen counter-intuitive, but trust me, the best way to "network" at a conference is to befriend someone. If you really want to talk research, here's how to do it...

3. Bring up research at an appropriate moment. If you're desperate to get input on your topic from a star in your field, or you just want some face time with someone, there are a couple of different methods for doing this.
     a. Get someone to introduce you. Ask a friend, colleague, or mentor to introduce you to the person in question as someone who does "similar research." Usually this will lead the senior scholar to ask the junior scholar (you!) about what you do. Focus on your topic; again, don't seek to pander, flatter or be a fan. Pretend you are on the same level; remember: at a conference, you basically are.
    b. Approach the person after their talk. It is customary for people to approach scholars after the Q&A on a panel. If there is a line, this may not work. If the line is short, hang in there! At this juncture it's ok to tell someone you enjoyed the talk, it reminded you of x text or theory, or it relates to a project you are working on. If the person responds well, that can lead to further conversations, exchange of contact info, etc.
    c. Approach the person during a reception. If you attended someone's talk but didn't get the chance to talk to him/her afterwards, find the person during a reception. Introduce yourself, mention that you heard his/her talk, and respond to it in some way as in letter b.

In each of these examples, though, keep it brief unless the person you are speaking to asks you questions. If the conversation changes to other topics, go with it or leave and work the room....which brings me to my next point...

4. Go to the receptions and work the room. At receptions it is expected that most people will talk to a variety of people. The first time at a particular conference, you'll probably find a group you like and stick to them, but resist the urge to stay in one corner. This is why it's important to attend a variety of panels, especially your first time at a conference. At the receptions, work your way around the room, talk to people who were on your panel, on panels you attended, or who you recognize from other events. Don't be afraid to talk to people casually at the bar or to pop in and out of conversations. Everyone is doing it, and no one will be offended. If you are in a great conversation with someone, eventually someone else is going to interrupt. It happens! That's why it's important to follow my next tip...

5. Network after the conference, too. If you met someone interesting at the conference, you had a great conversation, you heard an interesting paper--don't let that experience go to waste, especially if you are intent on brokering new contacts and networking. Email those people a week or so after the conference. Don't email the next day, as many people have to travel and then catch up on work and family obligations. Don't wait too long, either, though, as you don't want people to forget you. The ideal time is about 1-2 weeks after the conference. Send a quick email, remind the person who you are and what you talked about, request a copy of their paper or bibliography or offer a copy of yours, whatever. This will help solidify your contact, even if you don't hear from or speak to this person until next year's conference.

Final thoughts: As important as it is to "network" at conferences, don't forget to make friends, too. Real friends--people you enjoy talking to and hanging out with, regardless of what they can "do for you." Remember that eventually senior scholars will retire; you need to have friends and colleagues from your peer group to hang out with, commiserate with, and keep in touch with. It will make your experience more fun (it's always nice to have someone to have dinner with!), more natural and relaxed, and help you out in the long run as well.

Conference Sociability & Sensibility: ASECS 2014, Colonial Williamsburg

This year's convention for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies was held in Colonial Williamsburg last week, and, as usual for me, it was a great success. Of course, the fact that it was in a historically-appropriate location certainly helped; it was decidedly easier to feel that one had magically stepped into the world of the eighteenth century when just a short walk from the conference venue there is an entire village of reenactors wearing full-on eighteenth-century garb! (Cleveland last year was fun, but not nearly as atmospheric.)

Just a regular day in Ye Olde Williamsburg!

Like many conferences,of course ASECS can be tiring, frenzied, and frustrating. Unlike most other conferences I've been to though, I find ASECS also unusually welcoming, friendly, and fun, in addition to extremely useful for expanding my own scholarship and making new friends and contacts. This year's conference was particularly enhanced by the masquerade ball organized by the Women's Caucus as a fundraiser for the prizes the Caucus awards every year.

I don't think anyone knew quite what to expect from the masquerade ball...How many people would dress up? Bring masks? Be game for the merriment? Would anyone show up? I was curious as, I think, was almost everyone else. Personally, I've always been a big fan of costumed parties, so I knew I would go no matter what. Luckily, many people at the conference seemed to be of my bent, because when we arrived at 9:30 in the evening, the room was already half full, only to become fuller!

We're ready to have a ball!

There were people in all manners of costume, many from the eighteenth century and the Regency period, with a smattering of various other forms of costume, disguise and masque. Some people went all out with head-to-toe costumes (as, for example, one person came as Charles II, complete with buckles on his shoes, a long dark curly wig, and a stuffed dog to represent the King's favorite spaniel!), while others opted to add a mask or a wig or a fancy hat to a fancy dress, and that worked too.

I was pleasantly surprised to realize that in my costume and mask, some people really could not recognize me at all; at one point, I was even mistaken for someone else. The reason this pleased me was because it made me realize that our little experiment in eighteenth-century sociability was true to the original: masquerades allow one to become someone else, to go incognito, to trick people around us! Eighteenth-century novels are full of examples of characters who go to masquerades and talk to friends (or enemies) without realizing who they are. As a modern-day reader, these examples always seemed improbable to me. How could Clarence Hervey, for example, not recognize that he is speaking to Belinda and not Lady Delacour in the masquerade scene in Belinda? Surely he would notice the switch of costume! The ASECS masquerade ball proved me wrong--in a good way!

Aside from illustrating an eighteenth-century truism, however, the ball had another magical side to it: it threw all of us scholars together, without regard to seniority, age, gender or any other quality, and (with, no doubt, the help of a little alcohol) put us all on the dance floor together in a jumble of bodies and energy that made the conference more human and enjoyable than just about any other scholarly event I've ever been to. It was a reminder that we are all people, all wanting to have a good time, and, of course, that we eighteenth-century folk are some of the funnest and game-est people in the academy! Additionally, like an eighteenth-century masquerade, it also created a "world turned upside-down," where we could all experiment a little with who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.

Of course, there were other highlights to the conference. My paper on Catherine Vizzani and eighteenth-century dildo poems received a lot of great feedback during the Queer Transnationalism panel, which made me very happy. I reconnected with many wonderful scholars that I have met at previous conventions--and I managed to meet several more wonderful scholars whose works I admire and whose ideas have had an impact on my own scholarship. I had dinner in an eighteenth-century tavern, learned how eighteenth-century shoes were made, and bought myself some prints of eighteenth-century macaronis to put up on my walls. I walked the streets of Colonial Williamsburg, which, despite having an air of Disney about it, is beautiful and wonderful and, last weekend, was already showing signs of spring which seems that it may finally be arriving.

I could live here. It's adorable!