English’s Paul Keen is the 2013 Davidson Dunton Research Lecturer
English’s Paul Keen is the 2013 Davidson Dunton Research Lecturer
Doctor Syntax and Bookseller – Thomas Rowlandson
Professor and Chair in the Department of English, Paul Keen will deliver the 2013 edition of the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture.
Established in 1983, the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture enables distinguished Carleton University faculty scholars to share their research findings with the academic community and the general public.
This lecture is named for Carleton’s fourth and longest-serving president, A. Davidson Dunton, who led the University from 1958 to 1972.
Keen’s talk is titled “Hanging by a Thread: Social Media and Literary Value in a London Field, August 1754.” It will explore the ways that eighteenth-century writers responded to the pressures and possibilities of their day by forging a vision of literature that spoke directly to the challenges that were at the heart of their experience of modernity. As we struggle to redefine many of our most fundamental cultural assumptions in the face of a new information revolution driven by rapidly changing technologies of writing today, we have much to gain by considering the wit and insight with which these earlier writers responded to similar demands. In an age when humanities teaching and research face unprecedented pressures, knowing more about the long history of this struggle to define what we do in the context of broader social and political dynamics has become more important than ever.
The selection committee for the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture is chaired by the Vice-President (Research and International), and includes the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and the Deans of Arts and Social Sciences, Engineering and Design, Public Affairs, the Sprott School of Business, and Science.
Paul Keen
Paul Keen is the author of Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2012) and The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge UP, 1999). His edited books include The Radical Popular Press in Britain, 1817-1821 (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780-1832 (Broadview Press, 2004), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (with Ina Ferris, Palgrave, 2009) and The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth Century Print Culture (Broadview, forthcoming 2013).
The 2013 Davidson Dunton Research Lecture will be held in the conference room(s) on the second floor of the River Building on April 9th at 4:00 p.m.