2024-2025
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Fiona Ritchie, Associate Professor of English, McGill University
"Four Nights in Oxford in 1815: What the End of Dorothy Jordan’s Career Can Tell Us about Women and Regional Theatre"
2021-2024
Presentations were suspended.
2020-2021
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto
"Authorship, Print, and Sedition in Eighteenth-Century England"
2019-2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Valerie Traub, Distinguished University Professor of English & Women's Studies, University of Michigan
“Mapping Sex across the Globe”
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Ellen Lockhart, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto
“Wolves in the Scale: Hearing Nature in Late Eighteenth-Century Music”
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Nick Rogers, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of History, York University
“Murder on the Middle Passage: The Trial of Captain Kimber, 1792”
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Noelle Gallagher, Senior Lecturer, English and American Studies, University of Manchester
“The Good News About Pox”
2018-2019
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Paula McDowell Professor, Department of English, NYU
"Marshall McLuhan's Eighteenth Century"
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Paul Downes, Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Political Theology in The Female American"
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Paul Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto
"Towards a Maritime History of Language in the First Age of Globalization"
Friday, September 14, 2018
Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater Emeritus, Yale University
"Unspoken Thought: The Actors Who Invented Modern Drama"
2017-2018
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Andrew O’Malley, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University
“Maria Edgeworth’s YA Fiction”
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Cynthia Wall, Professor, Department of English, University of Virginia
“Typography and the Linguistic Picturesque”
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Caryl Clark, Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto
“Haydn, Orpheus, and the French Revolution”
2016-2017
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Terry Castle, Professor, Department of English, Stanford University
“Rococophilia: The Eighteenth Century and British Modernism”
Monday, February 6, 2017
Mary Helen McMurran, Associate Professor, Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University
“John Locke’s Transmigration of Consciousness”
Monday, November 14, 2016
Steven Zwicker, Professor, Department of English, Washington University in St. Louis
“Imagining a Literary Life: Dryden dwells among Moderns and Ancients”
Monday, September 26, 2016
Marcus Walsh, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Liverpool
“Johnson’s Notes on Shakespeare”
2015-2016
Monday, March 21, 2016
Hal Gladfelder, Professor, Department of English, University of Manchester
"'Strange Monsters': Castrati and the Erotic Imaginary in Eighteenth-Century London"
Monday, February 8, 2016
Alex Hernandez, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Close to Home: The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic Tragedy"
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Colorado at Boulder
"The Last Ruins of Palmyra"
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Jayne Lewis, Professor, Department of English, University of California, Irvine
"Milton's Hair: A (Long) Eighteenth-Century Entanglement"
2014-2015
Monday, March 9, 2015
Brian Cowan, Associate Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University
“The Scribbler and the Doctor: Daniel Defoe’s Long Way with Henry Sacheverell”
Monday, February 9, 2015
April London, Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Ottawa
“Austen’s Anecdotal Inheritance”
Monday, Novmeber 10, 2014
Chantel Lavoie, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Royal Military College
"'Putting this boy into breeches': Tristram Shandy and the Ambivalent Ritual of Breeching"
Tuesday, October 18, 2014
John Baird, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Snarling Muses: Political Verse Satire of the 1730s and the Poems of Paul Whitehead"
2013-2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Leslie Ritchie, Associate Professor, Department of English, Queen's University
"Trashing Garrick"
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Morgan Vanek, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Cold and Distant: The Weather, the Imperial Family, and The History of Emily Montague"
Monday, November 11, 2013
Mary Nyquist, Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Equiano and Satanism"
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Terry F. Robinson, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Condemning Nobody: Mary Robinson and the Contentious Art of Theatrical Satire"
2012-2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Janet Sorensen, Associate Professor, Department of English, UC Berkeley
“Defoe’s Novel Languages"
Monday, February 4, 2013
Julia Fawcett, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University
“Mary Robinson and the Memory of Celebrity”
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
David Taylor, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
“Graphic Satire and the Rhetoric of the Gaze”
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Jocelyn Harris, Emeritus Professor, Department of English, University of Otago
"Sanditon, the Duke of Clarence, and Sara Baartman, the 'Hottentot Venus'"
2011-2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Erin Parker, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Accommodating the Animal"
Monday, February 6, 2012
Conrad Brunstrom, International Student Co-Ordinator, Department of English, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
"Edmund Burke and Canada"
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Toni Bowers, Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
"Clarissa’s Darkness"
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Simon Stern, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
"Fictional Origins of the Reasonable Person"
2010-2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Matthew Reeve, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen's University
"Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, and the Queerness of Gothic"
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Laura Stenberg, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Misdiagnosis: William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Narrating the Second Opinion"
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sophie Thomas, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University
"Romantic Museums: Collection and Display in the Later Eighteenth Century"
Monday, October 4, 2010
Leslie McGrath, Head of the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, Toronto Public Library
"'A desert island is a delightful place': The Influence of Robinson Crusoe on Instructional Reading for the Young in the Long Eighteenth Century"
2009-2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
"Berkeley's New Theory of Vision and Chinoiserie: Screening the Self in 18th-Century Britain"
Monday, February 8, 2010
Heather Ladd, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Manufacturing Comedy: Fictionalizing London's Book Trade in The Adventures of An Author (1767)"
Monday, November 16, 2009
Daniel O’Quinn, Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph
"Days and Nights of the Living Dead: The Handel Commemoration of 1784"
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Christopher Fanning, Department of English Language and Literature, Queen’s University
"The Encyclopedic Ethos: Authorship in British Encyclopedias of the Eighteenth Century"
2008-2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Jim Phillips, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
"The Impeachment of the Judges of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, 1790"
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Nick Rogers, Professor, Department of History, York University
"The London Earthquakes of 1750: Panic, Providentialism and the Public Sphere"
Monday, November 10, 2008
Deidre Lynch, Chancellor Jackman Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"On Going Steady with Novels"
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Neil Guthrie, Adjunct Faculty, Faculty of Law, Trinity College
"'By Things Themselves': The Legal Consequences of Jacobite Material Culture"
2007-2008
Tuesday, March 1, 2008
Susan Lamb, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Radical Dislocations: Gulliver's Captivities in the Remote Nations of Home"
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Jessica Warner, Deparment of History, University of Toronto, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto
"'This scene of dissipation and vice': Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century Portsmouth through Its Sessions Papers"
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Karen Valihora, Associate Professor, Department of English, York University
"Austen's Oughts"
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Carrie Hintz, Associate Professor, Queens University, and The Graduate Center, CUNY
"'These little private histories': Margaret Charlton Baxter, Restoration Nonconformity, and the Exemplary Woman"