Crisis, Continuity, and Transformation in Eighteenth-Century Studies

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Birmingham Eighteenth-Century Centre, we invite proposals for contributions to a conference (to be held 26-27 June 2025) that will reflect on the past, present, and future of our field. At this conference, we hope to investigate how three contrasting sets of narratives—those of crisis, continuity, and transformation—have shaped the understanding of the eighteenth century in both our scholarly traditions and the public mind. How should we think about the century’s relationship to concepts like democracy, political economy, or science; to the categories of race, gender, and class; or to the problems of state, empire, and nationhood? What is coherent in the study of the eighteenth century as such? Whether through crisis, continuity, or transformation, can it still be understood as a distinctive borderland between the early modern and the modern worlds?

Looking back on our two decades as well as forward to our future, we also encourage introspection about crisis, continuity, and transformation in the field itself. Public interest in our period is strong, at least as measured by the popularity of fictionalizations like Hamilton or Bridgerton. Our journals and learned societies are in good health. Yet like most fields in the humanities today, we must confront the challenges posed by declining interest and investment in the work of scholarship for its own sake. How might we mobilise interpretations of the eighteenth century to keep pace with the demands of the twenty-first—or, perhaps, to resist and reshape them? What use is the study of the eighteenth-century today, and where might we be in another twenty years?

We welcome ideas for single fifteen-minute papers, or for whole panels in any format. Please send a c.200-word abstract, along with a one-page CV for each participant, to becc@contacts.bham.ac.uk, by Friday 1st November 2024. We particularly welcome papers by scholars at any career stage that will take the opportunity to offer bold interpretive claims, make theoretical interventions, and/or address our field’s relationship to other areas of scholarly or public interest. Proposals by scholars from marginalised backgrounds are warmly encouraged. Some funding will be available to support participants’ expenses in cases of hardship; please outline your needs when making your proposal.

This conference will incorporate the annual meeting of the Midlands Eighteenth-Century Research Network, an initiative co-led by BECC and our colleagues at Warwick University’s Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre.