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@elizagiardina.bsky.socialSep 18, 2026, 10:20 PM

#c18th #asecs #asecs27

@bethanyqualls.bsky.socialSep 11, 2026, 12:08 PM

@elizagiardina.bsky.social & I are co-chairing an #asecs27 roundtable about "Spheres: Then and Now," very broadly construed. Some #c18th ideas:

Étienne-Louis Boullée’s cenotaph for Isaac Newton
Hot air balloons
London’s time ball
Globes in Milton, maritime history
Habermas public vs private

Spheres: Then and Now, a call for papers for a roundtable at American Society of #18thC Studies 2027 Description: Étienne-Louis Boullée’s proposed cenotaph for Isaac Newton. Hot air balloons. London’s time ball. Globes—poetic and terrestrial—in Milton and maritime history. Habermas’s idea of public vs private social space. Expansive and holistic by their very nature, spheres appeared across the long and deep eighteenth century. Both literal and physical, spheres and circles theorized material, philosophical, spatial, artistic, and social interactions in the period, containerizing concepts in ways we often take for granted in the twenty-first century. This roundtable (emphasis on round) seeks to bring together the eighteenth century’s variety of spheres from around the world, exploring their wider uses and multimedia appearances. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that consider spheres, balls, circles, and other roundness as a way to explore everything from transatlantic exchanges to coterie publishing circles, from circuits of meteorology and ocean currents to masquerade balls. How did/do spheres shape our ideas of the eighteenth century, its people and discourses? What makes the sphere particularly suited for discussions of anchored social spaces, then and now? How do spheres impact maritime exploration, Greenwich Mean Time, and other nautical orientation methods? What do spheres construct and why do we keep coming back to them, over and over, even as building physical spheres is famously a difficult task? Where do spheres show up and surprise us? Where do they feel so obvious as to be not worth notice? Together we hope to circle around these questions—metaphorical, spiritual, physical—approaching but never quite reaching a center.