Eighteenth-Century European Culture – The University Seminars

Founded
1962
Seminar Number
417

This interdisciplinary seminar hosts speakers ranging from established scholars to early-career researchers who present works-in-progress that explore and redefine eighteenth-century European culture. Our interests range from material culture to textual history, national traditions to colonial formations, historicist practice to theoretical investigation, and we therefore seek to query, expand, and innovate eighteenth-century studies. Like our guest speakers, our membership is drawn from a wide variety of institutions and disciplines: history, literature, philosophy, political science, music, history of science, and art, as well as national traditions. The Seminar’s offerings are varied in scope, and occasionally our Seminar hosts special events, such as a symposium on the intellectual origins of freedom of speech (2007, 2008) and a 50th anniversary retrospective of the Seminar (2014). Recently our Seminar has hosted, in addition to full-length talks, roundtables on science studies (2011), comparative orientalisms (2011), the quantitative eighteenth century (2016), rediscovering race (2017), and human rights (2019).

Past Meetings

Chair
Stephanie Insley Hershinow
stephanie.insley@gmail.com

Rapporteur
Lilith Todd
ldt2120@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

09/21/2023	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	Napoleon’s Nemesis: Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and the Origins of Liberalism Helena Rosenblatt, CUNY, Graduate Center Abstract Abstract Despite the growing scholarship on Madame de Staël, not much has been said about her relationship with Napoleon. The relative inattention to Madame de Stael is odd when you consider the reputation she enjoyed in her own lifetime. Regarded as one of the most important French writers of all time and the most politically powerful salonnière, she was, at one point, probably Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon. When she arrived in London in June of 1813, after the 10 year exile that Napoleon imposed on her, she received a heroine’s welcome. It was said that there were three powers in Europe: England, Russia and Madame de Staël. My paper will describe this enmity and suggest that there is much that we can learn from it.

10/12/2023	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	Imoinda and Oroonoko’s Signed Language Jason Farr, Marquette University Abstract Abstract This talk explores how attention to the early history of English deaf education illuminates the signed language shared between Imoinda and Oroonoko of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Behn portrays these characters’ visual transmissions as a silent language that is distinctive from–but no less important than–the spoken languages that otherwise populate the narrative. Readerly attention to the multimodal, multisensory dimensions of deaf and disabled sociability helps us to understand Oroonoko’s ambivalence regarding audism/ableism, colonialism, and enslavement. The long history of American Indian Sign Language, however, offers a stirring counternarrative to the seeming inevitability of these violent systemic arrangements.

11/09/2023	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	,

12/07/2023	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	,

01/18/2024	ZOOM 7:00 PM	,

02/08/2024	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	,

03/21/2024	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	,

04/18/2024	Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM	,

Seminars

Meeting Schedule

Abstract

Abstract