Barrett Kalter
Department of English
End-of-Year Fellowship Report for 2007-08

During my fellowship year I revised and expanded my book manuscript, “Modern Antiques: Imagination, Scholarship, and the Material Past.”  This project investigates the influence of non-narrative modes of historical inquiry--chronology, textual scholarship, antiquarianism--on literary representations of the past in eighteenth-century England.  With the time provided by the Center’s course reduction, I wrote the introduction and completed revisions of the first and fourth chapters of the manuscript.  I also conducted research for a related project on ambience in the Gothic novel, which I presented at the annual national conference in the field of eighteenth-century studies.  My review essay on recent studies of British material culture was written in the fall and is forthcoming in the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction.  I am grateful for the Center’s support and the opportunity to participate in the seminars and events that made my fellowship year such a lively and productive experience.       

Publications
“Shopping, Collecting, and Feeling at Home: Recent Work on Eighteenth-Century British Material Culture.” Review essay on Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance. ed. Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant; Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the           
Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850; Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830. ed. John Styles and Amanda Vickery.  Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20 (Spring 2008): 495-503.

Conference Presentations
 “Horace Walpole’s Historical Visions.” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montreal, October 2008.    
           
 “Gloomth.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Portland, OR, March 2008.      

 “Reading Walpole in the Dark: The Gothic and the Public Sphere.” Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Kansas City, October 2007.

Current department website

Center for 21st Century Studies

Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Interim Director