Panels I and II

Panel I: 10:30-12:15 (Hamilton 603)

Histories of the Discipline

Chair/moderator: Marina Graham

A moderated discussion of short selections from Adam Smith and Hugh Blair on rhetoric and belles lettres, along with brief excerpts by Thomas Miller (The Formation of College English), Gauri Viswanathan (Masks of Conquest) and Maureen McLane (Romanticism and the Human Sciences). Readings will be available via a wiki (we will also make a few hard copies, available in 602) – details to follow.

Panel II: 2-3:30 (Hamilton 603)

Digital experiments

Chair/moderator: Alice Boone

Each panelist will bring something from a digital database – a text, a list of hits, an example of interface – and narrate or explicate some possibility opened by technological change for research and reading. Several eighteenth-century collections are widely used: ECCO, EEBO, the Sabin Americana collection, and other periodicals. Aside from convenience in retrieval and dissemination, how does our use of these media transform our processes of investigation as well as our objects of study? How do we take advantage of the things they let us do that are not traditionally a strength of English studies?

Guest Panelists:

Mary Kate Hurley on blogging and literary studies

Ashley Brinkman on the boons and banes of searching EEBO

Ivan Lupíc on the classical page in the digital age