Reading, Writing, and Remembering: Presidential Address for the Eighth Biennial Society of Early Americanists (SEA) Conference in Savannah, Georgia, 2013

Academia is hierarchichal in nature; you wait your turn, cheerfully grumbling about your elders, confident that you will not make the mistakes they made. When it’s your turn, you think, things will be very different.

And yet when it’s your turn, things get complicated indeed.

I am a product of the SEA, through and through. I attended the very first SEA conference just down the road in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1999, as a newly minted assistant professor, new mother, and bewildered pseudoprofessional. I paced the halls of the conference hotel with my colicky baby the night before my paper (and let me apologize now to those patient conference-goers who had the misfortune of having rooms adjacent to mine), worried in equal measure about whether my paper would be well received and whether it was really too much to have asked my patient husband to hole up in a hotel room with that inconsolable infant.

Any conversation that occurred about the inaugural nature of that conference and even, to a certain extent, of the SEA as an organization folded seamlessly into my sense of the inaugural nature of my own career; I don’t remember anything about firstness except my own firmly held conviction that nobody in the world had ever experienced anything like what I felt.

What I found at that first SEA conference, though, was community, and that community has grown, year after year. As I look around the room today I see so many familiar faces, people who have returned for every conference, sharing their work and their experience and above all their passion for our discipline. We come together every two years for specialized conversations we often don’t find at our home institutions, and in the halls of various hotels and conference centers (and over the years some of them have been quite luxurious!) we launch projects, forge collaborations, establish networks, and above all celebrate the great delight we all share in discovering each others’ work and finding out the ways our field changes and expands and develops. I have known some of the people at this conference for over fifteen years; they have read my manuscripts, counseled me through promotions, and listened patiently as I shared my various woes and triumphs. My senior colleagues took me seriously even when I didn’t think I had much to offer; they supported me, advised me, and encouraged me and my work. I don’t know when it is that one becomes senior, but I believe I am now in that category, and while I need the counsel of others perhaps more than ever, I also find I have much to share with others. One way or another we find our constantly evolving professional roles and as we figure out how we can best support each other, we shape the field as it currently exists and for generations to come.

This year’s program contains many familiar names—established scholars who have defined much of what we think we know about early American studies. And right alongside those names are newcomers—graduate students, perhaps, or those who are just finding their way to the SEA. And I am delighted to say, there are a great many of these names. The community we have built is, I hope, a welcoming one. Some of the dearest, most familiar faces aren’t here any more, but others have come along, and if we remain welcoming and dynamic and generous with each other we continue to work in the spirit in which this organization was founded. In the waning moments of my SEA presidency I have been thinking a great deal about SEAs past and how we might think about SEAs future.

For most of my career I have been secure in the knowledge that we early Americanists are a particularly rarefied group whose interests remain profoundly uninteresting to the rest of the world. Few of our departmental colleagues find our kind of research particularly stimulating or the kinds of texts we...