Call for Panel Participants: ISECS 2019 (Edinburgh) -
Correspondence Collections from (East-)Central Europe between Textuality and Materiality

In the early modern period, letters were key instruments of long-distance communication. The popularity of the genre and the amount of letters written and especially published rose significantly over the course of the eighteenth century.
In contrast to the main present-day means of communication, eighteenth century letters were profoundly material and can be regarded as both texts and objects. In our panel, we would thus like to jointly explore the communicative, narrative dimensions of letters and the material aspects of letter writing, circulation and usage.

Whereas the western European correspondence collections seem better known to scholars, an intensive collaborative research of preserved Central and East-Central European epistolary sources is needed in order to achieve a more inclusive perspective of letter writing and related socio-cultural practices, such as gift giving, publishing, translating and transporting. Central and East-Central European archives seem to abound in unpublished and relatively little known collections of family correspondence, letters documenting patronage relationships, scholarly and friendship networks etc. A closer look may indeed reveal related bodies of texts and raise questions about forging Enlightenment, gender, religious and other identities, which fit well into the main theme of the 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment “Enlightened identities”.

We welcome papers informed by textual and material culture studies methodologies and our understanding of geographic frame is capacious. Examples of epistolary communication crossing East-West boundaries are also welcome. We invite paper proposals from both established scholars and early career researchers (including doctoral students).

Proposals should be sent to panel organizers, Veronika Čapská (vc374@cam.ac.uk) and Teodora Shek Brnardić (tshek@isp.hr), until January 15, 2019. Please provide an English abstract of ca. 250 to 400 words and a short biographical note. Once the papers are selected, the pre-formed panel(s) will be submitted to the organisers of the ISECS Congress by February 1, 2019. The final confirmation is scheduled for March 15, 2019.
Please note that membership of an ISECS-affiliated Eighteenth-Century Studies society is required to participate in the congress. For further information, visit https://www.bsecs.org.uk/isecs/en/cfp/.