Paul Yachnin, Professor of English, McGill University; Title of talk: "Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England." Description: --"How can we best describe the socio-political dimension of the play Hamlet?" The ideas about artistic and intellectual works and public making that are emerging from the Making Publics project can yield an answer to this question likely to be more historically and critically illuminating than either old-style or new-style readings for ideological content. A focus on public making will be able to explain the play's socio-political dimension in terms of meaningful practices rather than textual meanings and in terms of the social agency of things such as performances and books rather than the agency of writers like Shakespeare. Such a focus is not at all to exclude textual meanings or artistic agency, but only to shift the interpretive task away from what could be called the imaginary field of literary public utterance."

Dena Goodman, Professor of History, University of Michigan; Title of talk: "Habermas and Feminist Scholarship: Going Beyond the Public Sphere" Description: Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been informing scholarship in eighteenth-century studies for the past twenty years. German scholars took note of it when it appeared in 1962, but it was not until the French translation (1978) and especially the English one (1989) appeared, that it began to play an important role in the interdisciplinary and transnational field of eighteenth-century studies. The publication in 1988 – a year before the English translation of Habermas – of Joan Landes’s Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution meant that from the beginning, the question of gender has been central to debates about Habermas and the public sphere as these have developed in eighteenth-century studies, just as Habermas and Landes have been central to the “cultural turn” in the history of women and gender in the eighteenth century, and to the interdisciplinary “cultural” ground at the intersection of women’s studies and eighteenth-century studies as this has taken shape. In other words, as debates on Habermas and the public sphere have taken gender as a central topos and problematic, Habermas and the public sphere have been equally central to debates concerning women and gender in the eighteenth century. In this talk, I would like to give a brief account of where this interest in Habermas, the public sphere, and women and gender in the eighteenth century has taken us and to suggest where we should go from here. I will draw on my own current research on women and letter writing in eighteenth-century France for examples of how Habermas can take us in new directions. In particular, I will propose that we leave the public sphere behind and take more seriously what Habermas has to say about privacy.

Each presenter will speak for 40-50 minutes, with a 10 minute discussion after each talk; Ken Hiltner and William Warner will be our faculty respondents, and Eric Nebeker and Laura Miller will be the EMC graduate respondents. The colloquium will conclude with a roundable discussion followed by a reception.