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The Enlightenment Group stemmed from a panel discussion organised at Mount Royal University for the 300th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's birth in 2012.
The E-Group (for short) is an interdisciplinary group of Mount Royal University scholars involved in the study of the Eighteenth Century.
We organize a yearly symposium involving scholars from other institutions and students currently taking classes related to the Enlightenment period.
Contact: aeche@mtroyal.ca
Enlightenment Symposium Series 9
February 7, 2025
Visions of the Future in the long Eighteenth Century: Progress, Change, Reform
The eighteenth century was perhaps the first age in which significant numbers of European thinkers could emancipate themselves from the weight of the past and the authority of antiquity. But how did their new understandings of the past influence their visions of the future? For instance, looking back in time and reflecting on the chain of generation or events, Voltaire concluded that the future remained uncertain while still connecting it with hope. Did these thinkers foresee a future of gentle progress and moderate reform? Or did they anticipate a radically different sort of society, perhaps revolutionary change? Were they awaiting an eschatological transformation or merely thinking of their present reality slightly removed? What literary styles, artistic images or musical motifs accompanied these new visions?
9:30 – 10:00am Welcome Coffee
Session 1
Michele Holmgren (ENLA/MRU): “Dearest mother conceive…”: The North American gestation of a United Irishman
Aida Patient (ENLA/MRU): Margaret Cavendish and Science Fiction: Descriptive, Predictive, Extrapolative Dimensions
11:00-11:15 am Break
Session 2
Antoine Eche (ENLA/MRU): A Future without Slavery?
David Clemis (HUM/MRU): The Spiritual and the Material: the Enlightenment's Shifting Metaphysics of the Future
12:15-1:15 pm Lunch break
Session 3
Diana Paterson (ENLA/MRU): The Enlightenment by Swedenborg
Martin Wagner (UofC): Writing on the Right Side of Literary History: Some Notes on Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s Farce Voltaire on the Evening of His Apotheosis (1778)
2:15-2:30 pm Break
Session4
Karim Dharamsi (VP Academic/MRU): Vico’s Fantasia and the Age of Civil Self-Reflection: A Reading of the Scienza Nuova (1744)
Guy Obrecht (Gen Ed/MRU): Handel's bust, reflections on the emergence of the individual and futurity
3:30-3:45 pm Break
Roundtable
The Future of Writing The Enlightenment Past: Where Do We Go from Here?
Jeff Suderman (HUM/MRU): Facilitator
4:30 pm Adjournment
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