Lectures and Symposia

To honor Professor Gipson, the Institute invites scholars to give occasional lectures and to participate in annual symposia on various topics in eighteenth-century studies. Please join us for this semester's events.

Fall 2022

Thursday, December 1, 2022

12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Maginnes Hall, Room 342

The Empire's Pharmacy: The Real Protomedicato, Materia Medica, and A Collected Spanish Empire

Tim Betz

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

Spring 2022

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

4:15 p.m.

STEPS 101

Cannibalism, Luxury, and Revolution: The Global Pacific in the Eighteenth Century Novel

Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University

Fall 2021 Colloquium Series

Friday, December 3, 2021

12:00-1:30 p.m.

Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/3gipson

Moderated Q&A

Dangbe, White Cannibals, and West-African Spiritual Consumption in the Early Eighteenth Century

Sean Anderson

A Collected Empire: Pedro Franco Dávila, The Royal Cabinet of Natural History, and Spanish Imperial Power

Tim Betz

Friday, November 5, 2021

12:00-1:30 p.m.

Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/gipson2
Moderated Q&A

Childless Motherhood: The Birth of Black Futures in The Female American and The Woman of Colour: A Tale

Angelica DeDona

At Once Captive and Captor: Unreliable Narrators and the Imperial Project of the Anglo-American Proto-Novel

Arush Pande

Friday, October 1, 2021
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/1gipson
Moderated Q&A

The Limits of Accommodation: Reconciling belief, Civic Obligation, and Religious Liberty in Colonial Pennsylvania

Samuel Alonzo Dodge

Fake News in Revolutionary Kentucky

Jay Donis

Enlightened Priestcraft: Clericalism and the Separation of Church and State in 18th c. Britain

John Parks

Spring 2021

Virtual Seminar Series
Race in the Eighteenth Century

Friday, May 7, 2021
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/chimingyang
Moderated Q&A

Racialized Porcelain, Animality, & Asian “White Matter”
Chi-Ming Yang
University of Pennsylvania

This talk will elaborate on the multiple registers of chinoiserie at work in an ostentatious, even monstrous, pair of eighteenth-century Sèvres “elephant head” porcelain vases currently housed at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. How do such luxury objects draw from early modern natural history, the Allegories of Four Continents, and the “white matter” of Asian material culture to create a multi-sensory experience of wonder or revulsion? Decorative objects have much to tell us about the history of East-West exchanges as they shaped the emergence of racial thinking and the ongoing legacies of racial ornament today.

Virtual Seminar Series
Race in the Eighteenth Century

Friday, April 2, 2021
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/sashaturner
Moderated Q&A

Race, Gender, and Caribbean Medical Encounters
Sasha Turner
Johns Hopkins University

Co-sponsor
Africana Studies Program

Virtual Seminar Series
Race in the Eighteenth Century

Friday, March 5, 2021
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/sharonblock
Moderated Q&A

Creating Race on Colonial American Bodies
Sharon Block
Department of History
University of California at Irvine

Fall 2020

Fall Virtual Colloquium - Third in the Series

Friday, December 4, 2020
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/gipson3
Moderated Q&A

What Kind of Republic Would We Have?: Political Ideology and the Transforming of Religious Liberty in Revolutionary Pennsylvania

Samuel Alonzo Dodge

Spiritual Monarchs: Non-Jurors and the Development of Separation Between Church and State

John Parks

Settling Ireland: The Colonial Question in the Long 18th c.

Nick Stark

Fall Virtual Colloquium - Second in the Series

Friday, November 6, 2020
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/gipson2
Moderated Q&A

Understanding Unconventional Drag in Representations of Irish Fortune Hunters

Naashia Naufal

The Two Clarissas: Virginia Woolf and an 18th Century Room of One’s Own

Molly Porter

Affliction and Affection: Illness and Nursing in Frankenstein

Ashlee Simon

Fall Virtual Colloquium - First in the Series

Friday, October 2, 2020
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Virtual: Registration Required - ZOOM: go.lehigh.edu/Gipson1
Moderated Q&A

The Mortality Among Us: Quantifying Death and Measuring the Success of Government in Eighteenth-Century America

Kristin Tremper

The Fall of British Sovereignty, the Rise of American Sovereignties

Jay Donis

Western Cherokees and the Indian Removal Era

Austin Stewart

Fall 2019

"The Surprising Origins of Radical Abolitionism" (co-sponsor)
Monday, September 23, 2019
4:30 p.m.
Linderman Library, Room 200

Dr. Marcus Rediker
University of Pittsburgn

For more information click here...

Spring 2019

"I Have No Master: Marriage and/as the Transatlantic Slave Trade"
Thursday, March 28, 2019
4:10 p.m.
STEPS 290

Dr. Patricia A. Matthew
Montclair State University

For more information click here...

Spring 2018

"Writing Freedom: Abolitionist Women's Fiction Before the U.S. Civil War"
Monday, April 9, 2018
4:10 p.m.
STEPS 101

Dr. Holly M. Kent
University of Illinois, Springfield

For more information click here...

Fall 2017

"The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands"
Thursday, October 12, 2017
4:10 p.m.
STEPS 280

Dr. Ann M. Little
Colorado State University, Fort Collins

Co-Sponsors: Humanities Center and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

For more information click here...

"Jane Austen at 200"

Free One-Day Symposium/Registration Required
Friday, September 22, 2017
9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Roemmele Global Commons, Williams Hall

For more information and to register, click here...

Image: Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen, circa 1810 - National Portrait Gallery London

Spring 2017
"Coerced Reproduction and Enslaved Men: Manhood and Community"
Thursday, February 23, 2017
4:10 p.m.
STEPS 101

Dr. Thomas A. Foster
DePaul University

For more information, click here...

Fall 2016
"Wildness without Wilderness: The Nature of Empire in French colonial North America"
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
4:10 p.m.
Williams Hall, Room 351

Dr. Christopher Parsons
Northeastern University

For more information, click here...

Brown Bag Series - History Department
"Voters and the Whig Oligarchy in Early Eighteenth Century Britain"
Co-sponsor: Gipson Institute for Eighteenth Century Studies

Thursday, November 3, 2016
12:00 p.m.
Maginnes Hall, History Common Room, 3rd floor

Dr. Chris Dudley
East Stroudsburg University

For more information, click here...

Spring 2016

“Fama and the Founding Father: Frontier Rumors in the Seven Years' War”
Thursday, March 24, 2016
4:10 p.m.
STEPS, Room 280
Reception following / Free and Open to the Public

Dr. Gregory Dowd
Professor of History and American Culture | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

For more information, click here...

Fall 2015

"The Song Cycles of BEACHY HEAD based on Charlotte Smith's 1807 poem, Beachy Head"
Friday, September 11, 2015
4:10 p.m.
Zoellner Arts Center, Room 145
Reception following / Free and Open to the Public

Kathryn Cowdrick, Mezzo Soprano | Eastman School of Music | Rochester, NY

Amanda Jacobs, Piano | Composer/Playwright | Seattle, WA / Rochester, NY

Professor Elizabeth Dolan, Lecturer | Lehigh University |Bethlehem, PA

Co-sponsors: Department of English, Humanities Center and Department of Music

Spring 2016
CANCELLED-The Many Captvities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeastern Borderlands
Thursday, February 25, 2016
4:10 p.m.
Williams Hall, Roemmele Global Commons

Ann Little | Associate Professor, History | Colorado State University

Humanities Center - "Relatives" Series
Co-sponsor: Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies

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Lectures and Symposia

Lectures and Symposia