Recovery in the Eighteenth Century

 

November 4, 5, 6, 2010

Omni William Penn Hotel

530 William Penn Place

Pittsburgh, PA

 

The 2010 annual meeting of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hosted jointly by Duquesne University, the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, and Washington & Jefferson College.

 

Often dubbed the “Renaissance City” and 2009 host for the G-20 Summit, Pittsburgh is looking forward to becoming the “Enlightenment City” and serving as host for our C-18 Summit. We have chosen the theme of recovery to give us all an opportunity to recover people, texts, music, art, archives, history, and culture from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries.

 

Our plenary speaker on Friday afternoon will be David A. Brewer of The Ohio State University, author of The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), whose current book project, “The Work of Attribution in the Age of Anonymous Publication,” investigates the uses to which authorial names were put in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

 

We will feature the Oral/Aural Experience on the opening evening and fill the next two days with cutting-edge papers, round-table discussions, tasty lunches, book exhibits, and intellectual conversation.

 

Our hotel, built in 1916 by industrialist Henry Clay Frick, is one of the beauties of Pittsburgh. Jerome Kern wrote some of the music for Showboat in the hotel, and Lawrence Welk was named “the champagne music maker” while playing a gig there (the hotel still has the bubble machine).

 

The William Penn is walking distance from Fort Pitt, an important site in the French and Indian War, the Strip District (not what you think), the Cultural District, and some of the finest shopping and eating that the Burg has to offer. Downtown Pittsburgh is easily accessible by planes, trains, automobiles, busses, and funiculars.

 

Email suggestions for panels by 1 April 2010; they will be posted at this website. To submit a paper proposal, please contact the panel chair directly by 15 June. If you do not see a panel that matches your current academic research, email a one-paragraph abstract of your paper to the organizers by the same date.

 

Information about making conference-rate ($129) reservations at the Omni William Penn Hotel will soon be available.