MIDDLE ATLANTIC CONFERENCE ON BRITISH STUDIES

                                                   ANNUAL MEETING

                                    MARCH 22, 2003, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

                                                PROGRAM OF PANELS

 

 

                                                            ***

SESSION ONE: 9:30-11:15

 

(I) Oppression and Resistance in Late Medieval England

 

Chair: Samantha Kelly (Rutgers University)

 

Ilana Krug (University of Toronto), “Wartime Corruption and Complaints of the English Peasantry”

 

Peter Larson (Rutgers University), “The Bishop of Durham’s Widows: A Failed Attempt at Seignorial Exploitation After the Black Death”

 

Caroline Dunn (Fordham University), “Damsels in Distress or Partners in Crime? The Abduction of Women in Medieval England

 

Comment: James Masschaele (Rutgers University)

 

(II) Politics, Crisis and Revolution in 18th-Century Britain and the Atlantic World

 

Chair: Rachel Weil (Cornell University)

 

Gerard Siarny (University of Chicago), “England in Europe: Divided Politics and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession”

 

Mark Wallace (University of St. Andrews), “Scottish Freemasonry, 1725-1808--The Culmination of Crisis: Lodge Conflict, Financial Distress, Political and Religious Agitation”

 

Aki Kalliomäki (University of California-Santa Cruz), “Revolution Revisited: The United Irishmen in the Early American Republic

 

Comment: Nicholas Rogers (York University)

 

(III) Colonial Ideologies During the Inter-War Years

 

Chair: Brian Shipley (Rutgers University)

 

Diana Shull (University of Colorado), “Protecting ‘Our’ Land and Nation: William Joynson-Hicks’ Political Career and the Discourse on Englishness”

 

Daniel Stephen (University of Colorado), “West Africa at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924-1925”

 

Marc Matera (Rutgers University), “‘The Magic of Fear’: British Response to Ògù Umùnwaànyi Women’s War of 1929”

 

Comment: Catherine Candy (Raritan Valley College)

 

 

SESSION TWO: 11:30-1:15

 

(I) Politics, Ideologies, and Asia in Early Modern Britain

 

Chair: Alastair Bellany (Rutgers University)

 

Martine van Ittersum (Harvard University), “Imperialist Ideologies in Early Modern Britain: ‘Grotian’ Rights Theories and The English East India Company”

 

Philip J. Stern (Columbia University), “Statemaking and Sovereignty and the East India Company-State in the Late Seventeenth Century”

 

Andrew Mackillop (University of Aberdeen), “British Provincials and the Rise of Militarism in South Asia, 1750-1800”

 

Comment: Kumkum Chatterjee (Penn State University)

 

(II) Gender, Work, and Authority in Victorian Britain and the Empire

 

Chair: Andrew August (Penn State-Abington)

 

Anne Clendinning (Nipissing University, Canada), “Engendering the Gas Industry: Women, Sales, and Domestic Technology”

 

Elizabeth Prevost (Northwestern University), “Negotiating the Nuptial Divide: Single Women and the Problem of Marriage in the Mission Field”

 

Sascha Auerbach (Virginia Commonwealth University), “‘A Right Sort of Man’: Gender and Authority in the Victorian State Education System”

 

Comment: Mary Procida (Temple University)

 

(III) Old Left and New Left: 20th-Century Cultural Debates

 

          Chair:  David Silbey (Alvernia College)

 

Stephen Brooke (York University, Canada), “The Body, Sexuality and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s”

 

Lawrence Black (Westminster College), “The Enormous Condescension of Prosperity: The British Left and Affluence in the 1950s and 1960s”

 

Guy Ortolano (Northwestern University), “Recasting the ‘Two Cultures’”

 

Comment: William Lubenow (Stockton State College)

 

LUNCH

 

 

SESSION THREE:  2:30-4:15

 

(I) Medicine, Mathematics and Music: Forms of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century

 

Chair: Ann Coiro (Rutgers University)

 

Devin Griffiths (Rutgers University), “Harmonizing Milton: Seventeenth-Century Musical Science and Areopagitica’s Branching Epistemology”

 

Melanie Holm (Rutgers University), “Mathematics, Empiricism, and Experimentation: Paradise Lost and the Search for Truth in Seventeenth Century England

 

Stephen Greenberg (National Library of Medicine), “Thomas Sydenham and the Professionalization of English Medicine”

 

Comment: Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

 

(II) The Unruly Victorian Family Before the Bar

 

Chair: Nancy Ellenberger (US Naval Academy)

 

Ginger Frost (Samford University), “Enforcing (Im)Morality? Judges, Violence, and Cohabitation in the Criminal Courts, 1850-1905”

 

Gail Savage (St Mary's College of Maryland), “Defining the Boundaries of Marital Sexuality: Bigamy, Incest, and Sodomy in the Divorce Court, 1857-1907”

 

Martin Wiener (Rice University), “Trials for Domestic Homicide: Another Front in the Victorian War on Drink”

 

Comment: George Robb (William Paterson University)

 

(III) Imperial Informants: Missionaries, Spies, and Company Men, c.1795-1930

 

Chair:  Randolph Trumbach (Baruch College, CUNY)

 

Jodi Bartley (Marquette University), “Capital Crimes and the Chinese Trade: British Perceptions of the Chinese Legal System from the Letters of Sir George Thomas Staunton”

 

Anne Marie Stoner-Eby (University of Pennsylvania), “Sinews of Empire? Correspondence Between African Anglicans in the Periphery and English Anglicans in the Metropole, 1880s-1920s”

 

Priya Satia (University of California-Berkeley), “The Unofficial Mind of British Agents in Arabia, 1900-1914”

 

Comment: Patrick McDevitt (SUNY-Buffalo)

 

 

PLENARY SESSION: 4:30-5:30

 

Lynn Lees (University of Pennsylvania), “Creating a ‘Middle Ground’: British Colonialism in Southeast Asia, 1850-1940”

 

RECEPTION