Society of Early Americanists Conference 2017: Hyatt Regency Downtown–University of Tulsa Tulsa, March 2–4, 2017

In the third Harry Potter book, Dumbledore gives Hermione a "time turner" so she can attend two classes at once. Before our Portland meeting in 2019, I need to find one; otherwise, the same problem I had at the Tulsa Society of Early Americanists meeting will recur: I missed much of what I wanted to see and hear because there were always multiple concurrent sections that looked fascinating. It didn't help that my plane was ten hours late Thursday, erasing my plans for that day and causing me to miss Chadwick Allen's plenary (and I'm sure he was as brilliant as he's been at Western Literature Association meetings I've attended). In any case, the need for a time turner at SEA is a wonderful problem, one demonstrative of the growth of the meeting and the organization. Moreover, it speaks to the SEA's not making the "usual mistake" (yes, I know, Whitman's after the new 1830 SEA end date) of divisive internal tracking.

That is, at some larger conferences, attendees can focus on a secondary subject within the ambit of the organization to the exclusion of others. For example, at the SEA, in theory, a scholar on Puritanism could attend only Puritan sessions with the same cadre of comrades and never interact with the other and larger themes of the conference. The SEA makes that difficult because—while there are sessions and even sets of sessions so narrowly focused—the Conference Committee's divergence from such traditional niche subjects made such unintentional self-segregation very difficult. Session themes crossed the boundaries of demographics, region, period, gender, race, genre, and so on. From session to session, the room's demographics shifted, forcing me out of my midcareer comfort zone to meet brilliant new people studying amazing new things. Emphases on the archive, academic books, food, gaming, health, and, consistently, strategies for finding and building our own audiences and constituencies within academia and beyond continued the society's long-term commitment to rethinking the disciplinary borders of early American studies. In turn, we are engaged to continue to find more meaningful places in our universities and communities.

The constant search for new subjects and boundaries forces an early Republic and frontier scholar like me to attend to new ideas in Puritan studies, theories of transatlantic aesthetics, archive management, and such. This not only helps me keep my teaching in those areas up to date but also informs my own work as a scholar. I liked this year's emphasis on networks for that very reason. Networks describe interdependence and entanglement, and how, within the SEA's range, virtually every field of specialization is entangled with the others. Networks then define the field of early American studies more constructively than place or period. For that reason, the official extension to 1830 makes perfect sense. It brings the SEA up to the moment when modern transportation and communications technologies exploded and recomposed many of the older networks that had been in place of the two and a half preceding centuries of "early" America. After that, "hyper-colonization"—in the terms of James Belich—accelerated and globalized modern citizenship, especially as those changes most dramatically transformed settler nations such as the early United States.

Moreover, the conference's careful attendance to field-based inquiry rather than subject-based specialization has allowed the society to retain the unity and intimacy that has always defined membership. Even as the conference has grown from running two concurrent sessions in what felt like the basement of a Providence Hotel (1999?) to running seven or eight simultaneously in Tulsa, as well as conducting multiple field trips and a day-long outreach project in local schools, a sense of communal endeavor has always drawn us together. Better yet, this proliferation has never diminished the quality or the inventiveness of the work. In the last two decades, the work early American studies has become something vastly different, and thank goodness. Laura Stevens and her associates, in brief, not only did...