Distance 2020
Posted on 11 September 2020
The impact of Coronavirus the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) and institutions across the world has been immeasurable. With the Centre’s postgraduate community spread far and wide due to lockdown measures, many students understandably felt disconnected from the academic world. The Postgraduate Forum Team – Kurt Baird, Sharon Choe, Holly Day, and Rachel Feldberg – established an international partnership with the Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture research unit (ERCC) based at the University of Melbourne to combat this feeling of disengagement.
As an international conference, ‘Distance 2020’ was a direct response to how these new restrictions on our day-to-day lives could develop our understanding of the long eighteenth century. The move to virtual events provided an opportunity to work alongside the ERCC and experiment with the traditional conference format. Alongside our ERCC contact, doctoral student Francesca Kavanagh, we developed an online conference that aimed to bring together international postgraduate communities that might otherwise never have the opportunity to meet. By the end of the first week of the conference, we welcomed 153 delegates from 59 different institutions across 13 countries: Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, Algeria, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, and the USA.
The two-week conference ran a mixture of live events and pre-recorded papers to account for the multiple time zones. The opening plenary, ‘Action at a Distance: Global visions and technologies of the French Revolution’, was delivered by Dr. Mary Fairclough (University of York, CECS). We also offered three workshops during the first week: Dr. Miriam Ross (University of Victoria, Wellington) offered a Virtual Reality workshop ‘Are we fully virtual yet? VR technologies, locations, and bodies’, Prof. Jon Mee (University of York, CECS) led the second workshop on ‘Romantic Transports’, and doctoral student Amy Wilcockson (University of Nottingham) ran a workshop on ‘Navigating the Archive: Developing Research Methods’. To foster a greater sense of community between our delegates, we also ran two socials: ‘Palaeography Pandemonium’ and ‘An Interactive 18th Century Quiz’, hosted by two students at CECS, Holly Day and Hazel Lawrence.
The pre-recorded papers by our 40 postgraduate speakers from across the globe were released on the second day of the conference. These were collated into 13 broad panels: ‘Distant Families’, ‘Global Powers’, ‘Transnational Identities’, ‘Embodiment, Illness, & Medicine’, ‘Imagined Landscapes’, ‘Distant Pasts & Imagined Worlds’, ‘Mobility and Domestic Space’, ‘Recording Journeys’, ‘Revolution, Reform, & Radicalism’, ‘Networks of Knowledge’, ‘Mapping Sociability & Exchange’, ‘Performing Identities’, and ‘Homosociability and Queering the Past’.
Delegates had the opportunity to listen to as many papers as they wished throughout the conference, and were encouraged to ask questions on comment boards created for each panel. During the second week of the conference, we held ‘Live Q&A’ sessions in light of a traditional conference where panellists can expand on their research in front of a live audience. These were well attended and many of the conversations were then continued after the panel session on the comment boards. The conference then closed with a plenary delivered by Prof. Deirdre Coleman (University of Melbourne, ERCC) titled ‘the “fair creolian”: white women in the eighteenth-century Caribbean’.
‘Distance 2020’ aimed to bring together an international postgraduate community during a time of crisis. The live events in total drew an audience of 500, with an aggregate of 216 delegates attending the 13 ‘Live Q&A’ sessions. The overall engagement with the conference was outstanding, with a minimum of 74% (113 out of 153) delegates attending at least one event and/or watching pre-recorded papers. We successfully developed a template for online conferences that we hope will ensure further engagement with postgraduates all over the world who study the long eighteenth century.
As a conference team, we are particularly grateful to all our postgraduate speakers who took the time to record a diverse range of engaging papers, without which this conference could not have taken place. We also would like to extend our gratitude to Prof. Gillian Russell and Brittany Scowcroft at CECS, and Dr. Anita Archer at the ERCC, without whom the organisation of such an ambitious event would not have been possible.