2022 Special Events

Welcome to the 2022 ASECS Annual Meeting, which will run from March 31 to April 2 in Baltimore, Maryland. ASECS is excited to host members for what will be our first in-person Annual Meeting since the 2019 quinquagenary gathering in Denver. In addition to a full slate of panels, we have many special events to look forward to at this year’s Annual Meeting:

Gale-Cengage is the lead sponsor of the 2022 Annual Meeting . On Thursday afternoon, there will be a panel to celebrate ASECS’s new partnership with Gale-Cengage and the launch of access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online 1 & 2 for ASECS members based in North America.

Gale also invites ASECS members to a lunch conversation (Thursday, March 31 at 1:00pm) about Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a text and data mining and visualization tool built specifically for primary sources. Using the analysis tools in the Lab, researchers can explore topics and patterns across collections including ECCO. During the session, Gale will provide an overview of the tool and case studies of how it’s been used in teaching and research at institutions around the world. The event will take place at lunch time on Thursday. Registration is being managed by Gale and space is limited. Register here! https://forms.gle/hTMhLKirWMXm4usTA

There will be a special plenary session featuring Professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who will discuss her 2019 book The Age of Phillis, which was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, among many other accolades. The Age of Phillis imagines the life and times of poet Phillis Wheatley Peters and the era surrounding her, one that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. This session is sponsored by our partners at Johns Hopkins University Press, the publisher of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

The Friday night reception this year will be dedicated to the memory of Professor Donald Mell, a longtime member, friend, and supporter of ASECS. The reception, and a special session on “Studies in Swift and his Circle,” is being sponsored by Professor Mell’s family at each of the next ten Annual Meetings.

The 38th James L. Clifford Lecture will be presented by Professor Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History at New York University. Professor Morgan's most recent book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, was published by duke University Press in 2020.

The BSECS/ASECS exchange lecture will be delivered by Chris Mounsey, Professor of Eighteenth-Century English literature at University of Winchester, who has special interests in the histories of sexualities and disabilities. Professor Mounsey's 2019 book, Sight Correction Vision and Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019.

Two pre-conference workshops to be held on Wednesday, March 30. Details HERE

Walters Art Museum Guided Tour (capacity limited to 30, REGISTER HERE). On this two-stop private tour for ASECS members at the Walters Art Museum, Joaneath Spicer, the James A. Murnaghan Curator of European Renaissance and Baroque Art, will talk about two subjects for which she is well known: first, the presence and representation of Africans in Europe, specifically the museum's newly acquired portrait of an African prince at the court of Louis XIV; and second, the Chamber of Wonders and its shifting character from the early 1600s to the 1700s.

Eighteenth-Century Game Nights (both Thursday, March 31 and Friday, April 1). An open house to explore games inspired by the eighteenth-century. For more information or to sign up for games, see http://aub.ie/asecs22games.