What is the place of enchantment in nineteenth-century America? Scholars of the secular have been accumulating a rich description of what it meant in this period to "aim for 'modernity,'" in Talal Asad's phrase. This conference asks about the persons and knowledges which appeared as excessive, even dangerous, to this project—while assuming that this excess cannot simply be described as "religion." Credulity, a frequent term of abuse in antebellum sources, meant believing too readily and too well, often with the implication of bodily mismanagement: the credulous person's nerves or brain did her down. So who were the credulous, and what did they know? Detractors saw an ad-hoc collection of gullible scientists, political patsies, occult practitioners, religious enthusiasts, fiction readers, and superstitious primitives, all of them behind the times. But how were such alleged failures distinctively modern? Did connections develop between forms of credulity at first linked only by their bad reputations? How should we understand credulity's angle on the rational—as symptom, queering, disability, doubling? Working on the assumption that modern enchantment is as much in need of historical description as secularity is, we are interested in topics including, but not limited to:
Note: Image courtesy of American Antiquarian Society
March 29, 2013 Friday
9:30am - 10:15am EDT
10:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Emily Ogden
Assistant Professor of English
University of Virginia
Jennifer J. Baker
Associate Professor of English
New York University
Jennifer L. Brady
Fellow of Academic Research, Division of Arts and Humanities
Harvard University
12:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
1:30pm - 3:15pm EDT
Lara Langer Cohen
Assistant Professor of English
Wayne State University
Dana Luciano
Associate Professor of English
Georgetown University
Vesna Kuiken
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English
Columbia University
3:15pm - 3:30pm EDT
3:30pm - 5:15pm EDT
Peter Coviello
Professor of English
Bowdoin College
John Lardas Modern
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Franklin and Marshall College
Sarah Rivett
Assistant Professor of English
Princeton University
March 30, 2013 Saturday
9:30am - 9:45am EDT
9:45am - 11:30am EDT
Jennifer Fleissner
Associate Professor of English
Indiana University
Emily Ogden
Assistant Professor of English
University of Virginia
11:30am - 11:45am EDT
11:45am - 1:30pm EDT
Christopher Hunter
Assistant Professor of English
California Institute of Technology
John Tresch
Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Jordan Alexander Stein
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
Fordham University