Encounters, Affinities, Legacies: the Eighteenth Century in the Present Day

A two-day international, interdisciplinary conference and arts festival: Friday 28th & Saturday 29th June 2013

Keynote speakers:

• Professor Donna Landry (University of Kent)
• Professor Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London)

As the field of eighteenth century studies continues to boom within the academy, the eighteenth century - invoked around names like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith - is becoming an increasingly frequent interlocutor in contemporary debates in the international media about society, democracy, human rights, and the economy.  Whilst social and political commentators are reading our present in dialogue with our eighteenth-century past, cultural appetites for the eighteenth century on page, stage, and screen continue to grow: powerful suggestions that intertwined discourses like (E)nlightenment and modernity, central to so much eighteenth- and twentieth-century thought, remain vital to the social, political and cultural construction of our contemporary moment.  This interdisciplinary academic conference and arts festival seeks to explore the complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the ‘long’ twentieth century, from 1900 to the present.