Eighteenth Century Studies events
Upcoming events
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society Conference 2025
SCOTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
a conference of the
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society
17–20 June 2025
University of Stirling
Stirling, Scotland
The annual conference of the ECSSS (www.ecsss.org) for 2025 will be held at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
Registration is now open and will close on 30 April 2025.
Register for Scots and the Environment.
Download the provisional programme.
Plenary addresses will be delivered by Richard Oram, Professor of Medieval and Environmental History, University of Stirling, on ‘We Need to Talk about “Improvement”: An
The conference will be held in the Pathfoot Building on the university campus, with a range of accommodation available in the Stirling Court Hotel and in our halls of residence, all
The Global Jane Austen Conference 2025
The conference will be celebrating and commemorating 250 years of Jane Austen at University of Southampton from July 10 to 12 2025.
In 1976, Juliet McMaster introduced an edited collection of essays resulting from a bicentenary birthday celebration for Austen in the following terms:
To celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth in October, in Western Canada, is no doubt to be guilty of a comic incongruity. But as though to compensate for the misdemeanour, the papers delivered at the conference have a common and exact focus on period and locale.
50 years after the bicentenary conference at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the scholarly landscape of Austen studies has changed. Where many monographs and edited collections of essays still maintain an ‘exact focus on period and locale’, research informed by book history, the material, archival and linguistic turns in literary criticism, postcolonial studies and adaptation theory (among others) has flourished in the intervening decades. The ever-expanding corpus of adaptations, sequels and prequels has proven fruitful territory for a consideration of Austen’s reception, in its broadest sense. Austen’s transformations into other languages and into other cultures make her a Global author.
Call for papers
We invite the international community to the port city that was Jane Austen’s home from 1806-1809 for a consideration of the Global Jane Austen. We encourage the broadest possible interpretation of the conference theme, and welcome papers on all aspects of Austen’s writing and life, her posthumous reception, her influences, and her writing alongside that of her contemporaries.
We particularly welcome papers on adaptations, translations and creative responses to Austen’s work (written and/or performed in all languages), material and textual transmission of her works, and her reception and reputation in countries outside the Anglophone world. Discussion of the Global within her works (and those of her contemporaries) is equally acceptable.
Please submit abstracts for individual papers of 250 words, or proposals for 3-person panels of 1000 words, to the conference organisers, Gillian Dow and Katie Halsey. Please submit as Word or PDF documents by email to both G.Dow@soton.ac.uk and katherine.halsey@stir.ac.uk by 1 October 2024.
View the Jane Austen Conference call for papers document.
Confirmed speakers
Susan Allen Ford; Serena Baiesi, Janine Barchas; Jennie Batchelor; Annika Bautz; Isabelle Bour; Joe Bray; Linda Bree; Inger Brody; Valérie Cossy; Richard Cronin; Carlotta Farese; Susannah Fullerton; Sayre Greenfield; Isobel Grundy; Christine Kenyon Jones; Freya Johnston; Michael Kramp; Devoney Looser; Deidre Lynch; Anthony Mandal; Juliet McMaster; Marie Nedregotten Sørbø; Peter Sabor; Diego Saglia; Rebecca Smith; Jane Stabler; Kathryn Sutherland; Bharat Tandon; Janet Todd; Anne Toner; Linda Troost; Juliette Wells.
Writing Retreat 2025
The aim of the retreat is to provide staff and students with, for the first three days, a structured programme to support intensive writing, followed by a more relaxed final day in which attendees are welcome either to relax or to continue working and writing in the lovely environs of Alexander House.
Programme
The structured programme will be facilitated by Katie Halsey and Emma Macleod. Although there is no set word target for our retreat, we hope attendees will be able to use the time as an opportunity to make meaningful progress on individual writing projects in a supportive and comradely environment.
The aim of the retreat is to provide staff and students with, for the first three days, a structured programme to support intensive writing, followed by a more relaxed final day in which attendees are welcome either to relax or to continue working and writing in the lovely environs of Alexander House.
The structured programme will be facilitated by Katie Halsey and Emma Macleod. Although there is no set word target for our retreat, we hope attendees will be able to use the time as an opportunity to make meaningful progress on individual writing projects in a supportive and comradely environment.
Monday 26 May
17:00 onwards: Arrival
18:30: Welcome, introductions and introduction to Generative Writing (Katie Halsey and Emma Macleod).
19:30: Dinner
The retreat will be self-catered, so cooking and dishwashing will form an extra ‘team-building’ exercise (menus and ingredients will be organised in advance).
Tuesday 27 May
08:00 to 09:00: Breakfast
09:00 to 09:15: Getting Motivated (Emma Macleod)
09:15 to 12:30: Intensive writing time
12:30 to 13:30: Lunch
13:30 to 18:00: Intensive writing time
19:00: Dinner
Wednesday 28 May
08:00 to 09:00: Breakfast
09:00 to 09:15: Staying Motivated, (Emma Macleod)
09:15 to 12:30: Intensive writing time
12:30 to 13:30: Lunch
13:30 to 14:00: Looking forwards: editing your generative draft, (Katie Halsey)
14:00 to 18:00: Intensive writing time
19:00 onwards: Celebration Dinner, congratulations, and R&R,
Thursday 29 May
Free time. Attendees are welcome to depart on Thursday morning, carry on working, or relax in the surroundings, as they prefer.
Friday 30 May
Depart by 10:00 Friday morning.
Writing Group 2024-2025
All meetings of the Eighteenth-Century Writing Group will take place in a hybrid format this semester. Please feel free to join on Teams if you can’t make it to campus. All meetings are Wednesdays at 13:00 to 14:00.
See the Writing Group schedule.