The Graduate Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies was founded in 1992 with the support of ASCES. We host a luncheon and annual meeting during ASECS's national conference, organize panels of professional and scholarly interest to our members and the larger community, have a mentoring program to connect graduate students with scholars in their areas of interest, award a mentoring prize to recognize outstanding faculty, and generally promote the "next generation" of eighteenth-century scholars.

Official Caucus Listservs and Groups

The Caucus has a thriving web presence in a variety of locations. Here's where to find us.

• Since 2000, ASECS has had a Graduate Student list-serv through Florida State University. The ListServ is the first clearing-house of information about ASCES activities of interest to graduate students. To sign up, please visit https://lists.fsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gradstudents_asecs
• The Caucus also maintain a Google Group (ASECS-GCS) for Caucus members. You can request an invitation to this group by clicking on the link above.
• Our Facebook Group can be found by searching for "ASECS Graduate Student Caucus"
• Our Reading Group brings students from across the country together once a month to discuss various eighteenth-century texts (scholarly and primary). It was formerly hosted on Blogspot (archives remain there), but future discussions will take place on the Google Group.

Current Call for Papers

Caucus Panels at 2010 ASECS
Re-Invigorating Nature(s) in the Long Eighteenth Century (Graduate Caucus Scholarship Panel) Kate Parker, c/o English Dept., Washington U. in St. Louis, Campus Box 1122, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis MO 63130; Tel: (314) 229-4249; E-mail: klparke@gmail.com

It has long been accepted that the age of enlightenment invited a radical reinterpretation of the role humanity plays in the world. In recent years, scholars have sought exits from the dominant version of this narrative, in which the eighteenth century installs man as the master over nature. This panel invites new approaches to understanding the slippery and protean concept "nature" that so comes to dominate the eighteenth-century imagination. Nature's evolving role in this period informs virtually everything: from the newly-explored territories of the human body and its unchartered passions, to the relationship of that body to a responsive natural world, to the question of how "natural" bodies relate to the "artificial" bodies of commodities and things that circulate freely with one another.

Possible topics for the panel include, but are by no means limited to: the animation and "secret life" of things, objects, and trinkets; Nature, botany and gardening; sensibility, sentimentality and the passions; new approaches to the sublime; the role of the New Science; new approaches to georgic and pastoral poetry; ecofeminist and ecocritical approaches in this period; the relationship of "natural" beauty to artifice; exoticism and the transnational understanding of "Nature" in the eighteenth century. The panel particularly welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and approaches that illustrate connections between our contemporary ideas of "Nature" and those of the period.

(Not) Knowing Our Place: The Long Eighteenth in the Twenty-First Century (Graduate Caucus Professionalization Roundtable) Jarrod Hurlbert, English Dept., Marquette U., Coughlin Hall, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881; Tel: (208) 249-0356; E-mail: jarrod.hurlbert@mu.edu

Stanley Fish's recent New York Times review of Frank Donoghue's The Last Professor cautions us that the institutional value of the humanities seems in a steep decline from which we can expect no bailout. What Fish calls a "perennial debate" about the humanities' value stems from a tendency to view literary study as elective and softly abstract instead of integrative and instrumentally practical. But is a humanist education really so insular? Because we do not produce products but rather thinking individuals, is there a place for intellectual arm-wrestling in the (post)post-modern U.? As eighteenth-centuryists, we are trained to see humanism as a pervious discipline and to see education itself as robustly interdisciplinary. In the tradition of the "Long Eighteenth," extraordinary value is placed on the various, on the peripheral, and on the mixed: in the dialogism of its poetry, in the heterogeneity of its novels, and in the diversity of its philosophies.

This panel asks senior and junior scholars to assess the value of the humanities in the current academic climate from such a perspective. The panel thus asks scholars to blend their own practical advice with a thoughtful consideration of what they imagine to be the institutional and academic fate of the humanities in the twenty-first century. We particularly welcome perspectives that draw connections between humanist approaches to education in the eighteenth century and how they intersect with such interdisciplinary approaches today.

GSC News

Current Call for Papers: Caucus Panels at 2010 ASECS. "Reinvigorating Nature(s) in the Long Eighteenth Century" and "(Not) Knowing Our Place: The Long Eighteenth in the Twenty-First Century." See full details on left.

In Memoriam: On June 13, our first Graduate Student Caucus Chair, Hans Turley, passed away. Hans taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He was the author of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York University Press, 2001). We remember him for his contributions to our field and our graduate community.

ASECS HOME

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Site
Maintained by Vickie Cutting - asecs@wfu.edu
Page Updated July 27, 2009