A new era for the SEASECS Gazette

SEASECS 2023 recap, graduate essay winners, and a look ahead to 2024

Welcome to the new SEASECS Gazette! If you’ve been acquainted with the organization for a while, you may be aware that for many years we had an annual newsletter. The last publication was in 2017, but we are excited to be relaunching here on Substack, where we hope to reach a wider audience and to be more accessible to our readers. We also plan to stay in more regular contact; if you are a subscriber, you can look for the newsletter to show up in your inbox about once a month during the academic year. 

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SEASECS 2023 Recap

On February 16-18, the 49th meeting of SEASECS was held in Decatur, Georgia. Many thanks to Joe Johnson and Martha Bowden for their masterful work overseeing the local arrangements and program! As always, we were treated to a program packed with exciting panels and entertaining events. 

On Thursday evening, Misty Anderson delivered a riveting plenary address, “Demanding Entertainment: A Producible Interpretation of Such Things Are,” which included delightful performances by Paula Backscheider, Martha Bowden, Chris Hendricks, J. Ereck Jarvis, Michael Rex, and John Vance, who enacted scenes from Acts 1 and 5 of Elizabeth Inchbald’s play. Following the plenary, Clayton State University music faculty Kurt Zeller, Francisca Maxwell, and Sean Vogt put on a captivating concert at nearby Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. Their all-eighteenth-century program included works by Mozart, Handel, Hadyn, and others. 

Perhaps the highlight of the conference was the dramatic reading of Inchbald’s The Married Man, performed by Clayton State theater students and SEASECS Players Misty Anderson, Martha Bowden, and Dan Ennis. The students treated us to a Q&A afterward in which they discussed how they approached their eighteenth-century characters and brought them to life, as well as how the SEASECS audience’s response differed from that of their previous performance at Clayton State. (We laughed a lot harder at the jokes!)

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New Board Members

At our business meeting, Jonathan Mercantini (symbolically) passed the gavel to Patty Hamilton, who will serve as our president for 2023–2025. Thank you to Jonathan for serving the organization so well these past two years! (And for many years before.) We also held elections for vice president, treasurer, and two new at-large board members. The full slate of officers and board members is as follows:

President: Patty Hamilton (English, Union University)

Vice President: Nathan Brown (French, Furman University)

Secretary: Lacy Marschalk (English, University of Alabama in Huntsville)

Treasurer: Arthur Kölzow (French, Texas A&M University)

Archivist: Brian Rindfleish (History, Marquette University)

Digital Media Manager: Diana Solomon (English, Simon Fraser University)

Past President: Jonathan Mercantini (History, Kean University)

Journal Editor: E. Joe Johnson (French, Clayton State University)

Graduate Student Member: Andie Ferniany (English, University of Mississippi)

At-Large Board Members: Ziona Kocher (English, University of Tennessee–Knoxville), Elizabeth Kuipers (English, Albany State University), David Eick (French, Grand Valley State University), Bridget Donnelly (English, Middle Tennessee State University), Karissa Bushman (Art History, Quinnipiac University), Lindsay Dunn (Art History, Texas Christian University)

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Graduate Student Essay Award Winners

The SEASECS Graduate Student Essay Prize Committee announced that the winner of this year’s prize is Andrea Ferniany of the University of Mississippi. The committee wrote that Ferniany’s essay, “Disability and Feminine Performance in Frances Burney’s Camilla,” offers a clearly defined and well-situated contribution to critical conversations about Camilla. The text analyzes the character of Eugenia through the prism of disability and gender studies. This intersectional approach attempts to tease out the way Eugenia’s search for her authorial voice as a disabled woman reframes the period’s popular conceptions of femininity. The discussion effectively applies recent theorization of femininity and draws thoughtfully on extant scholarship about disability in Camilla. 

The committee also gave honorary mention to the essay by Alexandra Sausa, “Neurodivergence in Jane Austen’s Emma: The Narcissitic Heroine, Her Social ‘Blindness’ and ‘Blunders’.” The committee felt that the essay used a compelling theoretical frame to craft an interesting and innovative analysis of Emma, blending both primary and secondary texts on neurodivergence to create a critically engaged study.

Congratulations to both Andie and Alexandra!

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Looking Ahead: SEASECS 2024

Our 50th annual conference will be held at Furman University from February 29–March 2, 2024. Furman is located in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, just outside Greenville. Conference organizers Nathan Brown and Daniel Worden have another full slate of exciting activities planned, and they are accepting panel topic proposals until Friday, May 19. 

Finally, we’d love to hear from you! We will be featuring member news in next month’s issue, so if you have news to share, please visit our new Google Form, through which you can submit any personal or professional updates, calls for papers, event information, job postings, or anything else of relevance to our membership.

Thank you for reading!