Twenty-First-Century Salon/Salotto Culture for ASECS after 50

The late historian of medicine Roy Porter's plenary address at the 1998 Annual Meeting at Notre Dame would appear the exact wrong example to mine as a model for mitigating British ascendancy and fostering greater interaction among scholars in different disciplines within the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Yet, his defiantly Britocentric lecture incited an intensity and scope of scholarly debate at the conference extraordinary in my experience as a member of ASECS. I was a newly minted assistant professor and had joined several of my junior colleagues in the last row of a large, dark auditorium to hear Porter's preview of his forthcoming book, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. He proved his reputation as an "intellectual anarchist" with a spectacularly confrontational defense of what he called "the British Enlightenment project."¹ He reveled in playing the provocateur, looming on stage, calling out by name leading scholars, some of whom were present in the packed room, not merely to refute but gleefully to rebuke their arguments against the notion of a coherent, self-conscious British Enlightenment movement that gave birth to modernity. Porter's baiting worked. Scholars he had contested on stage hastened for microphones dotted across the auditorium to make their reply. This ardent academic exchange would continue beyond the bounds of the auditorium. That year, by accident or design, two of the three plenary talks and the presidential address—by Porter, J. G. A. Pocock, and Margaret Jacobs—sought to define the Enlightenment, its history, and its social, cultural, and intellectual significance. The Enlightenment itself thus became the unifying Big Question of the conference, one debated relentlessly among the membership over the course of the rest of the meeting.

To be clear, my aim is neither to endorse Porter's triumphalist thesis, nor to propose a revamping of the annual conference into an academic version of the British Parliament in the throes of Brexit. The civil exchange of ideas has rarely been more important. But I do see the benefits of a thematic organizing structure for the annual conference that would bring people of diverse disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic specializations and from different professional echelons and interest groups into the same orbit to debate robustly a common question. These mini-symposia or salons, as I propose to define them, of 90–120 minutes could conceivably constitute 20 to 30 percent of the total sessions and would receive special billing, much as the 50^th anniversary this past year gave special status to panels concerning the history and future of the Society. They offer more time to delve, to discuss, more time to profess, to defend, and to counter critical claims that are often tacit or argued neatly and without challenge in published scholarship. It is in those moments of constructive contest that the opportunity resides for us to revise our thinking and learn something new, both individually and more broadly as a discipline. Thematic rule need not tame radical and defiant discourse, but would situate discrete disputations within a larger conceptual framework that would allow for a more serious and layered examination of new ideas as well as the greater circulation of them.

This kind of thematic approach has worked for the regional and international (ISECS) affiliate conferences. I have also experienced the benefits firsthand at my home institution of Washington University, where my colleague in French, Tili Boon Cuille, and I co-convene the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, whose tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty and graduate students are affiliated with our institution and several neighboring universities. During its twenty-three-year existence, the Salon has been the most active, the most cross-disciplinary, and the most productive (in terms of publication) scholarly workshop on campus. I believe this is largely due to its ethos of professional and intellectual inclusivity and collaboration. Two decades ago, I chose the name Salon to underscore a distinct model of leadership and cultural practice reminiscent of our eighteenth-century forebears, one that would, in the ideal, supplant standard hierarchies based on academic rank, discipline, and, indeed...