ASECS 2025 (Held Online)
Round Table: The Legacies of Morris Eaves
Co-Chairs: Wayne Ripley, Winona State University, wripley@winona.edu; Tom Hothem, University of California, Merced, thothem@ucmerced.edu.
Weekend: March 28/29
This panel invites participants to reflect on the life and work of the William Blake and Romanticism scholar Morris Eaves, who passed away in the spring of 2024. Eaves was the co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and a co-founder of the William Blake Archive as well as the author of books and articles on Blake, art history, technologies of visual reproduction, digital humanities, and editorial theory.
Eaves opened new interdisciplinary vistas of scholarly inquiry that were attuned to the relationship of print production, visual culture, and changing modes of technology. His book The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992) positioned Blake in a variety of interrelated contexts—aesthetic, chalcographic, technological, religious, economic, and political—to show that Blake was engaged with debates that were both central to the eighteenth century and, as it happens, newly pertinent to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Eaves similarly understood how changes in technology demanded, in his phrase, a new “editorial settlement.” By helping to create and maintain the Blake Archive, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, Eaves posited a new model of the scholarly edition for the digital age and helped to advance the idea of the digital humanities.
Contributors to this panel are welcome to explore any aspect of Eaves’s thought in relation to the eighteenth century, and/or to offer personal reflections. We appeal especially to Eaves’s students, colleagues, and readers in asking participants to examine our field’s current interdisciplinary trajectory in relief of given work(s) from the Age of Blake. Participants should engage cultural production as rigorously and specifically as possible, certainly in the spirit with which Eaves approached such work.
Please submit abstracts of roughly 300 words to both Tom Hothem (tehothem@gmail.com) and Wayne C. Ripley (wripley@winona.edu) by September 20, 2024.
Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Digital Humanities, Editing, Material Culture, Visual Culture/Studies