Our 2020 conference was cancelled. The program remains on the site for informational purposes.
Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies
2020 Annual Meeting
William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA
April 18-19, 2020
Saturday, April 18
8:30-9:00am Registration and Coffee
Registration Area: Second Floor Lobby of Tucker Hall
SESSION ONE: 9:00-10:30am
1. Shifting Standards of Morality and Religiosity in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
Room: Tucker 220
Deborah L. Bauer (University of South Florida), “Unintended Consequences: Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, the Adaptation of Marriage, and Shifting Norms of Religiosity in the Eighteenth-Century Gulf South”
Spencer Wells (University of Virginia), “Judgments Private and Public: Church Discipline and Freedom of Conscience in Colonial America”
Kyle Brinster (St. John’s University), “A Perpetual Covenant: Work, Play, and the Sabbath in Seventeenth Century America”
Chair/Comment: John Howard Smith (Texas A&M University-Commerce)
2. Imperial Caring: Gender, Labor, and the Health of the Empire
Room: Tucker 221
Martha Groppo (Berea College), “Hardy but not Healthy: Frontier Medicine, Pioneer Practitioners, and the Faltering ‘Heart’ of Empire, 1880s-1930”
Catherine Babikian (Rutgers University), “Making Nursing Overseas: Creating ‘Modern’ Nursing Schools in the Caribbean and Africa, 1930-1950”
Satyasikha Chakraborty (The College of New Jersey), “British Imperial Women in South Asian Princely Households: Civilizing Mission or Domestic Labor?”
Chair/Comment: Andrew August (Penn State, Abingdon)
3. Maternal Obligation across the Long Eighteenth Century
Room: Tucker 222
Collen M. Seguin (Valparaiso University), “‘The Mother gave place to the Saint’: Lady Trevor Warner, Motherhood, and Recusant Sanctity”
Michelle Renee Henault (University at Albany), “‘The Most Severe Affliction That Can Attend a Family:’ Infertility, Manhood, and Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century England”
Judith Broome (William Paterson University), “Tried at the Old Bailey: Murdering Mothers in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Chair/Comment: Marilyn Francus (West Virginia University)
SESSION TWO: 10:45-12:15pm
4. Imperial Relationships: The Dynamics of Power in the Empire
Room: Tucker 220
Carol Biederstadt (Union County College), “George Orwell: Anti-Imperialist or Paradoxical Orientalist?”
Muhammad Mirza (Aga Khan University, United Kingdom), “Power Dynamics in Colonial India: The British Colonisers, ‘Hereditary Ṣūfīs’ And ‘Native State’ Of Bahāwalpūr (1833-1899)”
Charles V. Reed (Elizabeth City State University), “The Bambatha Revolt and the Quest for an Empire of Justice, 1906-08”
Chair/Comment: Chris Bischof (University of Richmond)
5. Religious Belonging and Puritan Sociability in British North America
Room: Tucker 221
Mark Mulligan (College of William & Mary), “Warned Out of Rhode Island: Strangers in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Providence”
Irina Khruleva (Moscow State University), “Debating the Empire’s Religious Character: Anglican-Puritan Controversy on Establishing the Episcopacy in North America in the Eighteenth Century”
Chair/Comment: TBD
6. Four-Nations Britain: Tensions Within and Beyond
Room: Tucker 222
Alison Hight (Rutgers University), “Particularity, Uniformity, and the Expansion of Higher Education in Four-nations Britain and its Empire”
Amanda Haziz Ginsberg (Rutgers University), “State on the Line: The Coloniality of Lateral Surveillance in the United Kingdom”
Nick Sprenger (Rutgers University), “Empire and its Outrages: Policing, Violence, and the Colonial Archive in Nineteenth Century Ireland”
Comment/Chair: Carol Summers (University of Richmond)
12:15-1:15pm: Lunch
Room: Second Floor Lobby of Tucker Hall
1:15pm: Plenary Roundtable
“Engaged and Inclusive Research and Teaching in British Studies”
Room: James Blair 206
Chair: Chris Bishof (University of Richmond)
Marisa R. Cull (Randolph-Macon College)
Brendan Gillis (Lamar University)
Elizabeth Polcha (McNeil Center)
Penny Sinanoglou (Wake Forest University)
SESSION THREE: 3:00pm-4:30pm
7. Creating Value in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Room: Tucker 220
Jennifer Egloff (Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy), “Trust in Numbers: Seventeenth-Century Atlantic Merchants and Mariners”
Heather Welland (State University of New York, Binghamton), “‘Disaster Capitalism?’: Britain and the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake”
Alexandra Macdonald (College of William & Mary), “Value and the Eighteenth-Century Auction”
Chair/Comment: Tim Alborn (Lehman College)
8. The Politics of Health: Diagnosing Illness and Legislating Disability, c. 1720-1995
Room: Tucker 221
Katie Wooten (Furman University), “King George III: Crazy, yet Royal”
Emily Bowlus-Peck (University at Buffalo, New York), “Societal Influences on the Rise of the Eighteenth-Century London Public ‘Lunatic’ Hospitals”
Chair/Comment: Katie Hindmarch-Watson (Johns Hopkins University)
9. China, Chemical Weapons, and the Perceived ‘Threat’ of Immigrants: The Shifting Perceptions of the British Government, 1939-1969
Room: Tucker 222
Mark Crowley (University of Utah), “Anglo-Chinese Cooperation during the Second World War”
Peter Thorsheim (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), “Before Agent Orange: Chemical Defoliants and Crop Destruction as Tools of Empire”
Brett Bebber (Old Dominion University), “Establishing the Race Relations Edifice: Investigating Migrant Life in Britain in the 1960s”
Chair/Comment: Amy Limoncelli (William & Mary)
5:00pm-6:00pm: Plenary Address
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University), “Collecting the Future: Photography, Waste and the Industrial Revolution”
Room: Tucker 127A
6:00pm: Reception and Drinks
Room: James Blair Hall 206 (History Department Library)
Sunday, April 19
8:30-9:00am: Registration and Coffee
Registration Area: Second Floor Lobby of Tucker Hall
SESSION FOUR: 9:00-10:30am
10. Writing Women: Labor, Politics, and Social Order
Room: Tucker 220
M. Dale Booth (Rutgers University), “Billingsgate Brutes: The Amorphous Political Currency of Fishwives in British Satirical Works”
Ann Robbins (Converse College), “Charmed by One ‘So Unhackneyed in the World’: The Rousseauvianesque Language of Evelina”
Chair/Comment: TBD
11. Engineering Victory: Social and Economic Interventions, c. 1937-1948
Room: Tucker 221
Kelly Spring (University of Southern Maine), “Feeding Europe Under British Rationing: Relief Efforts for the Continent After the Second World War”
Carol Summers (University of Richmond), “Savings Propaganda in the British World During the 1940s: The Squander Bug and Beyond”
Tiffany Beebe (University of Colorado, Boulder), “Rejuvenating Industry on Tyneside: Refugee Industrialists in the ‘Special Areas’ of the Northeast of Britain”
Chair/Comment: Brett Bebber (Old Dominion University)
12. The Business of Early Empire: Courts, Constitutions, Memory
Room: Tucker 222
Benjamin Herman (Pennsylvania State University), “Trans-Atlantic Tobacco Trials: The Court of Requests and the Tobacco Trade, 1625-1649”
Daniel Bottino (Rutgers University), “Fantasies of Empire: English Colonization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Maine”
Richard LeBlanc (Cornell University), “John Locke and the British Empire in Nova Scotia”
Chair/Comment: TBD
SESSION FIVE: 10:45am-12:15pm
13. Small Acts, Big Consequences: Loyalty, Authority, and Later Eighteenth-Century Empire
Room: Tucker 220
Daniel Boone (Independent Scholar), “Road to Victory: The Strategic Importance of the Battles of Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse”
J. Patrick Mullins (Marquette University), “The Great Commoner as Regicide: William Pitt, Charles Wilson Peale, and the Commemorative Art of the Stamp Act Repeal”
Anthony Parent (Wake Forest University), “Julius Soubise, Equestrian”
Chair/Comment: Timothy Jenks (East Carolina University)
14. The Tudors and Stuarts: Pragmatism, Public Perception, and Popular Memory
Room: Tucker 221
Steven Casement (Pennsylvania State University), “Motivated by Fear: Elizabethan Pragmatism, English Foreign Policy, and the Dutch Revolt”
Derek Taylor (University of Buffalo, New York), “George Conn’s Biography of Mary, Queen of Scots and Its Relation to His Papal Embassy”
Amanda Wrenn Allen (High Point University), “The Queen who Caused the English Civil Wars? Henrietta Maria’s Role in Pro-Parliamentarian Media during the English Civil Wars”
Nathan A. Earle (Pennsylvania State University), “From Witchfinder General to The Devil’s Whore: Screen Dramatizations of the English Civil War Since the 1960s”
Chair/Comment: Stephanie Koscak (Wake Forest University)
15. Fake News and Flawed History in Modern Britain
Room: Tucker 222
Daniel Ritschel (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), “‘Fake History?’: The Curious Narrative of ‘Left-Wing’ British Fascism in the 1930s”
David Reagles (Bethany Lutheran College), “All News is Fake News: Malcolm Muggeridge’s Fan Mail and the Rejection of Media”
Connor Donnan (University of Pennsylvania), “No Irish Need Apply: The Question About Anti-Irish Discrimination in Baltimore, 1840-1865”
Chair/Comment: Reba Soffer (California State University, Northridge)