British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Conference Information Service
The First Biennial Meeting  of the Defoe Society

25-26, September 2009 Hosted in Tulsa by the  Oklahoma State University

Conference Details
This inaugural conference is designed to range across the extraordinary variety of Defoe’s activities and writings and to interrogate the question of how an examination of Defoe and his work can function as a vehicle for understanding his time and place. Our aim is to provoke a fresh examination of the period, one that revisits our notions of “the Augustan Age” by considering how it might appear when viewed from a perspective that puts Defoe at the center. At the same time, we hope to prompt discussion of the place of the study of a single author in the enterprise of understanding an important literary-historical period.

Paper Proposals
We welcome panels and papers focusing on the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century that consider Defoe’s poetry, fiction, political and economic writing, satire, religious and didactic works, and so forth as well as related work by other writers from the same period. Plenaries will include presentations by internationally renowned Defoe scholars; there will also be two late night film showings in the conference hotel with discussions following.

Submission Deadlines

• the submission deadline for all session proposals is January 15, 2009
   
• the submission deadline for all paper proposals is March 15, 2009

Please send your brief abstract (no more than 1 page) to Program Chair Robert Mayer at robert.mayer@okstate.edu

You can also mail  submissions to: Robert Mayer, Department of English, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078-4069.

Location
Tulsa is an attractive, lively medium-sized city (called by the Advocate one of the gay-friendliest cities in America) situated at the conjunction of three rivers (the Arkansas, the Verdigris, and the Cimarron), with important museums like the Gilcrease, with its world-famous collection of Native American art and artifacts, four university campuses, an interesting film and music scene, and fine restaurants.

Tulsa boasts a museum of jazz – the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame (located in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District) – memorializing, among other things, the important Muskogee jazz scene. The city also has a celebrated collection of Art Deco architecture.

The host hotel, the Tulsa Crowne Plaza, which recently has been completely remodeled, will provide an excellent, and quite reasonable, setting for this meeting.

We look forward to seeing you at this inaugural meeting of the Defoe Society.