The Eighth Biennial Conference of the Defoe Society

Discoveries and Improvements, 1660–1740
Thursday, July 3–Saturday, July 5, 2025 (Lichfield Guildhall, Staffordshire, U.K.)

Keynote Lecture
“Crusoe and Gulliver at 300”
Dr. Paddy Bullard (University of Reading)

Call for Papers
Daniel Defoe’s General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–6) captures the interest in understanding the past by way of looking to the future in the era from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century. This was an age pulled between the belief that human understanding should be focused on a better comprehension of the past (the revival of ancient learning or investigation of national antiquity) and the belief that it behoved moderns to improve upon the past, embracing invention and innovation. New discoveries in science and industry intersected with an ‘improving’ ethos in economics, agriculture, and technology. The British were discovering political rights while pursuing the ‘improvement’ of ‘discovered’ lands overseas, though also close to home, such as after the Civil War settlement of Ireland and then the Anglo-Scottish union. The theme of the conference can be interpreted very broadly by speakers, either to reflect on how ideas of discovery and improvement inform our approach to the Restoration and early eighteenth century, or to organise their own academic work as generating new findings (discovering) or developing existing understanding (improving). Presentations on either researching or teaching the period 1660–1740 are welcome too. This is an interdisciplinary conference, very much open to all scholars of the period. Papers on Daniel Defoe are welcome, but that is not a requirement.

Here are some suggested areas of focus, not exhaustive:

• The ideologies of discovery and improvement as these relate to the writings of Daniel Defoe or his contemporaries (to be construed broadly).
• Geographical discovery and improvement, including how this informs colonial and racial ideologies.
• Concepts of improvement and amelioration with respect to society or politics (such as constructions of gender, social rank, or rights).
• New discoveries in the period, in scholarship, intellectual enquiry, industry, or technology.
• Improvement and discovery in the wider arts: literature, visual culture, the plastic or performative arts.
• Improvements on existing scholarly frameworks, or new discoveries about the Restoration and early eighteenth century.
• New discoveries in bibliography, book history, or biography as these relate to the writerly culture of the period.
• Notions of self-improvement or self-discovery, including reform movements, religious awakening, histories of the emotions.

The deadline for paper and completed panel proposals is March 17, 2025.

Send a proposal of 200 words for a 20-minute presentation to Nicholas Seager, n.p.seager@keele.ac.uk. Informal enquiries are welcome too. If proposing a panel (three 20-minute or four 15-minute papers), the organiser should send the three abstracts with the names and email addresses of the panellists. Alternative format sessions, such as workshops, are also welcome (please be clear about technology and space needs). Those attending the conference must be members in good standing of the Defoe Society.

Presidential Panel Call for Papers: “Endings”
This panel invites you to think about how Defoe ends novels, poems, political pamphlets, scenes, sentences, and even lives. Close readings of his prose and verse are encouraged. Or, theoretically, how does he conceptualize ending, as extinction, destruction, disappearance, death, or finale? In this time of collapse, during which we feel that a way of life is ending, and that traditions, institutions, and revered principles and the documents that communicated them may soon be gone, can we find a sense of solace (or not) — or a spirit of resistance and new beginning — in how Defoe conceived of endings? Please send your brief abstracts/ideas and titles to Katherine Ellison at keellis@ilstu.edu by April 30, 2025.

Lichfield is a historic cathedral city, just north of Birmingham. It is a trove for eighteenth-centuryists, with the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum and Erasmus Darwin House among its treasures. The twelfth-century cathedral is a short walk from the fifteenth-century Guildhall, where the conference will take place. Lichfield is easily reachable by public transport from London, as well as from Manchester, Birmingham, and East Midlands Airports.

Fuller details of travel, accommodation, registration, and bursaries will be provided nearer the time.

Past Conferences

The Seventh Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Atlantic Routes and Roots (organized in partnership with the Early Caribbean Society)
July 11–14, 2023 (San Juan, Puerto Rico)

The Sixth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Crusoe at 300: Adaptations, Afterlives and Futures
July 10–12, 2019 (University of York)

The Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Tolerance and Intolerance in the Age of Defoe
September 7–9, 2017 (New Haven, Connecticut)

The Fourth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Nature in the Age of Defoe
July 22–23, 2015 (Bath, UK)

The Third Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
Global Defoe: His Times and His Contemporaries
August 9–10, 2013 (Normal, Illinois)

The Second Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
The Culture of Grub Street
July 14–16, 2011 (University of Worcester, UK)

The First Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society
September 25–26, 2009 (Oklahoma State University)

Information for Sponsors