Mode/Matter/Publics/Persons: New Books in Eighteenth-Century Studies

Join us for a wide-ranging conversation about four new books in literary studies from Penn Press, on subjects ranging from theater and performance studies to fashion and historical fiction, and from the history and philosophy of science to animal studies.  Participating authors include Timothy Campbell (U. of Chicago), Lisa Freeman (U. of Illinois at Chicago), Heather Keenleyside (U. of Chicago), and Helen Thompson (Northwestern U.). James Chandler (English, U. of Chicago) and Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern U.) will join as respondents.

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About Timothy Campbell: Timothy Campbell is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where his research focuses on British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as visual- and material-cultural studies and the history and theory of fashion.  In recent work he has addressed subjects ranging from the history of the fashion plate to Romantic-era antiquarianism and from the eighteenth-century portraiture of Sir Joshua Reynolds to the present-day conceptual dress art of Christian Boltanski.  His first book, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740-1830, which connects the birth of a consumer society with the rise of historical self-consciousness during the long eighteenth century in Britain, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016.  His essays have appeared in English Literary History, Romantic Circles Praxis, and in an edited volume entitled Rethinking Historical Distance; and he has held fellowships at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

About Lisa A. Freeman: Lisa A. Freeman is Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where her research focuses on Restoration and eighteenth-century British Literature and on theater and performances studies.  Her new book, Antitheatricality and the Body Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), investigates the publics that are called into being, cultivated, and set in competition with one another as an integral part of antitheatrical controversies beginning with William Prynne's Star Chamber Trial in 1634 and ending with the Supreme Court decision in NEA v. Finley in 1998. Her previous book, Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage explored the cultural work of dramatic genres and their role in the production of a notion of identity organized around character.  Her essays have appeared in journals including Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation as well as in essay collections such as The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830 and the forthcoming multi-volume Cultural History of Theater.  She has held fellowships at the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the Virginia Historical Society, and Chawton House Library.  She is currently working on a new book, The Novelty of Progress and on a series of essays related to the dramatic criticism of Elizabeth Inchbald.

About Heather Keenleyside: Heather Keenleyside is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where her teaching and research focuses on eighteenth-century British literature and philosophy.  She is the author of Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth-Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and the editor of the “Animals” volume of British It-Narratives 1750-1830. Her essays have appeared in ELH, Critical Inquiry, and in the edited collection, Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered. She has held fellowships at the Huntington Library and at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

About Helen Thompson: Helen Thompson is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University.  She teaches eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature, the history of science, and second-wave feminism and science fiction.  Her book, Fictional Matter:  Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), argues that early modern chemical conceptions of matter shaped empirical science and the eighteenth-century novel. Thompson’s first book, Ingenuous Subjection:  Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), argues that women’s obedience in the conjugal sphere was framed by women novelists as a political practice.  Thompson has published essays in journals including ELH, Eighteenth Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.  She has received fellowship assistance from The Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the Alice Berline Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation.  She is at work on a project entitled “Alchemy’s Culture:  Radical Change in Restoration-Era England.”