The Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon is housed in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. It is comprised of scholars from all four major academic institutions in the area, including Washington University, Saint Louis University, Webster University, and the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Our members hail from a wide variety of departments, including Italian, French, Spanish, German, English, History, Philosophy, Art History, and Music. The Salon meets on a monthly basis throughout the academic year to exchange faculty works in progress and its participants have an active research and publication record.

Each year, we invite a guest speaker to lead a Salon discussion of a work in progress and to give a public lecture on an interdisciplinary topic. Recent guest speakers have included Drs. Paula Findlen, Professor of Italian History and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford, Michael McKeon, Professor of English at Rutgers, Dena Goodman, Professor of French History at Michigan, Downing Thomas, Chair of French and Italian at Iowa, Thomas Christensen, Chair of Musicology at Chicago, Charles Dill, Professor of Musicology at Wisconsin-Madison, Deidre Lynch, Professor of English at Indiana, Mary Sheriff, Chair of Art History at North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Londa Schiebinger, Professor of History of Science and Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford.

The Salon helped host the Midwest American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (MWASECS) conference in 2004 and currently has plans to host the International Staël Conference proposed by the Germaine de Staël Society for Revolutionary and Romantic Studies (USA) and the Société des études staëliennes (France) in 2008-09.

For more information about our group you are welcome to consult our semester schedule, our list of current active members, and our presentation/publication archive, or contact Professor Tili Boon Cuillé at tbcuille@wustl.edu.