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Friday Seminars

The Center Seminar

The McNeil Center sponsors a seminar that meets on Friday afternoons at 3 PM approximately twice a month between September and May, with the paper for each session circulated in advance. Over two hundred people attend at least once a year, with an average attendance of 40 to 50 at meetings held at various sites in the Delaware Valley. While most of the regular attendees are graduate students and faculty from institutions in the Philadelphia area, participants come from as far afield as Long Island, New York City, Princeton, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington. 

Until further notice, seminars will convene via Zoom only. To get access to the seminar papers and Zoom links, or to join our mailing list, please email us at mceas@sas.upenn.edu.

Seminar Schedule Archive: Click Here

Spring 2022 Seminar Schedule

14 January: 

Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University

Insanity, Race, and Property Rights in the Early Republic

11 February:

María Esther Hammack, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

‛Reclamando su Libertad’: Freedom Fighters on the Mexico-US Global South

25 February:

 

Kieran O’Keefe, George Washington University and 2021-2022 MCEAS Society of the Cincinnati Fellow

As Though he had been a Whig: The Post-War Reintegration of the Hudson Valley Loyalists

4 March:

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Stanford University

The Benighted Soul: Africana Religions and the Diabolical in the Time of Revolution

11 March:

Emily Gowan, Boston University and 2020-2021 MCEAS Barra Dissertation Fellow

‛Reader, Be Assured This Narrative is No Fiction’: Harriet Jacobs, Sentimental Fiction, and the U.S. Abridgment History of Pamela

8 April:

Allison Guess, Williams College

‛For [Being] a Rogue and Because He Lied to His Lord’: The Groundings of Black Rebellion in Hispaniola, the Disremembered and Disavowed History of a Unified and Black Santo Domingo

22 April:

Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue University

The Sketch Book and the Rise of the Mass-Mediated Image

6 May:

Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts Boston and McNeil Center for Early American Studies

Alphabets, Typefaces, Grammatologies: Writing and Translation in the German Atlantic