Communication from June 6th, 2025
Greetings Marvellians,
I write as a follow-up to last week’s email with our Call for Papers for RSA San Francisco 2026. As usual, we will be running four panels at RSA, three topic-specific panels and a fourth that will serve as an open session. Below are the topics that the Executive Committee has decided on for our sessions in San Francisco. As always, we are hoping to cast a broad net –so please feel free to interpret all of these broadly and circulate them widely.
Our panels at RSA continue to be well-attended and an excellent forum for the exchange of ideas. Even if you do not intend to submit an abstract for one of our panels, we encourage everyone to attend if they are at RSA in February. A reminder as well to submit your abstracts for the upcoming online British Milton Seminar which will be focused on the relationship between Marvell and Milton.
Please contact me if you have any questions about the panels or our participation at RSA more generally.
Chris
Christopher D’Addario
Professor and Chair
Department of English
Gettysburg College
President, Andrew Marvell Society
Marvell and Early Modern Technologies
The Andrew Marvell Society invites papers considering Marvell’s engagements with early modern technologies. The term “technology” did not come to be squarely applied to the arts of manufacture until the eighteenth century, but the emergence of a range of what would not be considered technologies fundamentally shaped early modern literary culture. The term itself marries “making” and “language”—with techne being especially central to early modern understandings of poesis. Technologies, in every sense, appear throughout the writings of Andrew Marvell, who repeatedly turns to such figures to imagine the workings of politics and religion, the functions of nature, and even the texture of verse. Topics for submissions might therefore include: the influence of nascent technologies on Marvellian thought and expression; Marvell’s own use of technology; the impact on Marvell of the technologies of print culture; the way in which Marvell interacted with theories of poetry as technology. Please send a brief abstract (150-200 words) and an abbreviated cv no later than August 1, 2025 to the following email: [email protected]. Please send any questions to Chris D’Addario at this email.
Thomas Hobbes and the 17th-Century Literary Imagination
The Andrew Marvell Society invites papers on any aspect of Thomas Hobbes’s influence on the seventeenth-century literary imagination. Not only was Hobbes close with a number of important seventeenth-century poets and writers, including those associated with the Cavendish circle in the 1640s and 50s, his philosophies and distortions of them took on oversized cultural prominence as the century wore on. In his own writing he maintained an abiding interest in aesthetic form and epistemologies of language. Topics for submission might include Hobbes as literary figure; the influence of Hobbes’s moral and political thought, his natural philosophy and theories of knowledge, or his aesthetic theories; Hobbes’s cultural presence and its impact on seventeenth-century writers, and especially Marvell and Milton. Please send a brief abstract (150-200 words) and an abbreviated cv no later than August 1, 2025, to the following email: [email protected]. Please send any questions to Chris D’Addario at this email.
Teaching Marvell Today: A Roundtable
The Andrew Marvell Society invites discussants for a roundtable on the opportunities and challenges of teaching Marvell and other seventeenth-century poets to today’s students. We invite participants to give a brief 5- to- 7-minute presentation on their experiences: Where does Marvell and other poets stand in your program’s curriculum? What purposes might teaching Marvell and other poets serve, especially as their place in humanities curricula comes under pressure? What strategies have met with particular success and how might we engage students anew with this material? How might we rethink our approaches to teaching Marvell in the present moment? Discussions of innovative pedagogies and novel contexts are especially welcome. Please send a brief abstract (100-150 words) and an abbreviated cv no later than August 1, 2025 to the following email: [email protected]. Please send any questions to Chris D’Addario at this email.
Andrew Marvell: Open Session
The Andrew Marvell Society invites papers on any aspect of Marvell’s poetry or prose, for an open panel at RSA 2026 in San Francisco. Please send a brief abstract (150-200 words) and an abbreviated cv no later than August 1, 2025, to the following email: [email protected]. Please send any questions to Chris D’Addario at this email.