2008-2009


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2007-2008

January 30
Joe Drury; WIP / Practice Job Talk, 5-7pm, FBH 401.

February 28
Claudia Johnson (Princeton University): WIP. 5-7pm, FBH Grad Lounge.

March 5
Kathleen Lubey (St. John's University, Queens, NYC): WIP. 5.30pm, FBH Grad Lounge.

April 23
Joseph Roach (Yale University): Title, Time and Location TBA.

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2006-2007

September 28     401 Fisher-Bennett Hall     
Emily Anderson (USC), "Fiction 'as' Performance: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective on Grammar, Genre, and Selfhood."

October 12
Dramatic Reading: Nathaniel Lee, The Rival Queens (1667)

October 19
Myra Lotto (UPenn), WIP

November 9
Dramatic Reading: Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb (1730)

Friday, November 17
Symposium: Reading Alexander Pope: From "fatal Sheers" to "unwilling ears"
Please visit the website for more information.

November 30
Joe Drury (UPenn), WIP: "Puppets, Pantomime and Stage Machines: Fielding and the 'Conservation of Character'."

December 14
Dramatic Reading: Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689)

February 22
Michael Gamer (English, UPenn), WIP: "Mary Robinson and the Art of the Dramatic Comeback" *5:30 p.m.*

March 15
Gabriel Cervantes (English, Princeton) WIP: Title TBA.

March 29
Stuart Curran (English, UPenn), "Charlotte Smith: Intertextualities." *Fisher-Bennett room 224*

April 12
Anna Foy (English, UPenn) WIP: "From English Laureate to Englished Virgil: John Dryden and the Common Weal"

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2005-2006

October 27
Dahlia Porter (UPenn), WIP: "Method, Form, and Format in Lyrical Ballads."

November 10
Ronald Paulson (Johns Hopkins University), "Fielding, Hogarth, and Cruelty" [English Department Lecture Series].

November 15
Beth Fawkes Tobin (Arizona State University), "Wampum Belts and Tomahawks on an Irish Estate: The Collected Exotic Object and the Construction of Eighteenth-Century Imperial Identities" [co-sponsored with the Atlantic Studies Seminar].

December 1
Jennifer Snead (UPenn), WIP: "Epic for an Information Age?: Pope's Dunciad of 1743 and the Theater Licensing Act."

February 2     
Susan Greenfield (Fordham University), "The Absent-Minded Heroine: Or, Elizabeth Bennet has a Thought."

February 9
Jared Richman (UPenn), "Blake's Milton 'Re-membered, Graved and Press'd'."

March 23     
Arnold Markley (Penn State), "The Many Faces of the Man of Feeling: the 18th-Century Hero and the 1790s Novel of Reform."

April 5
Discussion: Horace, Satire II and Epistle II; Alexander Pope, Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated, Satire II.1 (1733), Epistle II.2 (1737), Epistle III.1 (1737).

April 27
Kate Davies (University of York, UK), "Revolutionary Correspondence: Women's Letters, 1760-1800."

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2004-2005

September 30
Matthew Rubery (Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow, UPenn), WIP: "Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News."

October 28
John Richetti (UPenn), Discussion of Daniel Defoe's poetry.

November 11
Marc Redfield (Claremont Graduate University), "Terrorism and the Humanities" [English Deaprtment Lecture Series event]; workshop on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

January 11
Paul Youngquist (Penn State University), "The Afro Futurism of DJ Vassa"

February 2
A dramatic reading of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizzaro (1799).

February 17
Bill Galperin (Rutgers University), WIP: "'Describing What Never Happened': Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities."

March 17
Helen Thompson (Northwestern University), "Ingenuous Subjection: Eighteenth-Century Women's Political Difference."

May 19
Brett Wilson (College of William and Mary), WIP: "Maudlin Whigs: On Women Who Cry (and Worse) at Cato."

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2003-2004   Reading theme: Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory

September 23
Discussion: Joseph Addison, "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) from Spectator No. 411-421; excepts from Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711)

October 7
Marco Roth (Yale), WIP: "Renovating Virtue: The Problem of Happiness in Wordsworth's Poetry."

October 21
Discussion: David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," "Of Tragedy," "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing" from Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1742-54).

November 11
Scott Krawczyk (UPenn), WIP: "Collaboration in the Wordsworth and Aikin Households."

November 17
Henry Abelove (Wesleyan University), "The Patriot's Song."

December 2
Discussion: William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753).

January 20
Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

February 3
Scott Krawczyk (UPenn), WIP: "Siblings in Love: The Wordsworths' Collaborative Relationship."

February 19
Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa), "Melancholy and the'Narrative Situation' of History in Post-Enlightenment Scotland."

March 2
Jennifer Snead (UPenn), WIP: "The mind in motion: A review of Harriet Kirkley's A Biographer at Work: Samuel Johnson's Notes for the "Life of Pope" (Bucknell 2002)."

March 19
Michael McKeon (Rutgers University), "The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge."

March 24
William Galperin (Rutgers University), WIP: "Jane Austen's Histories of the Present."

April 6
Juliet Shields (Ohio State University), WIP: "Scotland's to be a bryde."

April 20
Atalntic Studies Seminar: Linda Colley (Princeton, History), "Moving Beyond the Atlantic: Reconstructing 18th century global lives."

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2002-2003   Reading theme: The Long Poem in the Eighteenth Century

September 26
Discussion: James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-30).

October 10
Susan Stewart (UPenn), discussion of her "Introduction to 18th-century poetry."

October 24
Discussion: Mark Akenside, Pleasures of the Imagination (1744).

November 7
Brett Wilson (UPenn) WIP: "Cato, Gender, and the Marketing of Ideology."

November 21
Discussion: James Macpherson, Fingal of Ossian (1761-1762).

December 5
Michael Gamer (UPenn), WIP: "Hippodrama" and "Introduction" to the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of Romantic-Period Drama.

January 17
Paul Youngquist (Penn State), 12pm WIP: "Romantic Dietetics! or Eating your Way to a New You"
4:30pm Lecture: "Imperial Legs: Byron, Prosthetics, War Wounds, and National Identity."

February 6
Discussion: William Cowper, The Task (1785) and "Lines Written During a Period in an Asylum" (1774).

February 13
Jeffrey Cox (University of Colorado), "Cockneys in Tuscany."

March 6
Discussion: Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno (c. 1756-8)

March 21
Susan Manning (Edinburgh University), "Grounds for Comparison: A Place for Style in Transatlantic Studies."

March 27
Discussion: Samuel Johnson, London (1739) and Vanity of Human Wishes (1749).

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