Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon
The Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon is a faculty works-in-progress group housed in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. It is comprised of scholars from several academic institutions in the area, including Washington University, Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the St. Louis Art Museum. Our members hail from a wide variety of departments, including Italian, French, German, English, History, Art History, Music, and Performing Arts. We meet on a monthly basis throughout the academic year to exchange works-in-progress and our participants have an active research and publication record. The Salon also welcomes dissertating graduate students and those pursuing the Early Modern Graduate Certificate.
Each year, the Salon invites esteemed guest speakers to participate in workshops or colloquia, to lead a discussion of a work in progress, or to give a public lecture on an interdisciplinary subject. Topics of recent Salon workshops and colloquia include “The Affect of Artificial Humans: Models, Images, and Automata,” “Material Culture, Thing Theory, and It-Narratives,” “Enlightenment Science and Religion,” “From Metaphysics through Mad Science,” and “Absolute, Alternative, and Inconvenient Truths.” This year’s colloquium, entitled “Economies of Exchange: Signs, Bodies, Theories, Things,” will feature presentations by Rebecca Spang, Sowande’ Mustakeem, and Corey Tazzara.
The Salon helped host the Midwest American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (MWASECS) conference in 2004, the International Staël Conference in collaboration with Clemson University in 2008-09, The Enlightenment Pope: Benedict XIV, 1675-1758 conference in collaboration with Saint Louis University in 2012, and the Consuming Passions: Economies of Desire in French Literature and Arts, 1100-1815 conference in 2013. This year we are collaborating with Performing Arts to bring NEH awardees Wendy Arons and Natalya Baldyga to campus. Our activities have been supported by a Faculty Seminar Grant from the Center for the Humanities at Washington University renewed annually for the years 2011-18.
