BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.3//EN
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:498@1718.ucla.edu
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250409T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250409T130000
DTSTAMP:20250310T232226Z
URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/wip-edgeworth-belinda/
SUMMARY:Works-in-Progress Session: Transatlantic Book History: Black Humor 
 in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda
DESCRIPTION:\nPresented by Erin Severson\, Ph.D. Student\, University of Ca
 lifornia\, Los Angeles\n\n\nHosted by the Early Modern Research Group\n\nO
 nline event via Zoom\nTo register\, please visit: https://ucla.zoom.us/mee
 ting/register/iISb0vh0TDiwV7SWDigUWQ\n\nThe praxis of transatlantic book h
 istory is contingent on one’s ability to conduct extensive research on t
 he material conditions of the trade in both books and bodies—which were 
 treated as interchangeable commodities in the eyes of racial capitalism. T
 ransatlantic book history is a method of inquiry which interrogates nation
 al borders while also enabling us to reckon with the material and cultural
  relationship between literary production and human capital. When it comes
  to an investigation of black humor through the lens of material culture\,
  we are dealing with stringently policed geographical and ideological bord
 ers. As Sean D. Moore points out in Slavery and the Making of Early Americ
 an Libraries: British Literature\, Political Thought\, and the Transatlant
 ic Book Trade\, 1731–1814 (2019)\, London functioned as the capital of e
 ighteenth-century America. Likewise\, thinking in terms of what Joseph Rez
 ek terms the “print Atlantic” unsettles national borders\, which are o
 ften reinforced because of the political value of distancing Britain from 
 the violence of American plantation slavery.\n\nThis research forms part o
 f Erin’s dissertation project\, which constructs a history of black hum
 or through the lens of transatlantic book history. Black humor\, as a refe
 rence both to a comical disposition and a condition of embodied\, even pat
 hologized identity (via humoral medicine and melancholy)\, can be traced t
 hrough both African diasporic Blackness and the historical process of “b
 lackening” the Irish (England’s first and most proximate colonial proj
 ect). Other chapters will deal with canonical writers Jonathan Swift and L
 aurence Sterne\, as well as the lesser-known Ignatius Sancho\, who is prim
 arily remembered as the first Black Briton to vote. The chapter on Anglo-I
 rish author Maria Edgeworth and the complicated editorial history of her n
 ovel Belinda brings questions of Irishness\, Creole identity\, and black h
 umor in conversation with gender. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth ce
 ntury\, Maria Edgeworth intervenes in the acculturation of blackness and i
 ts rapidly shifting valuation through what may be understood as a proto-fe
 minist lens. She engages issues of blackness or black humor—defined as t
 hat which not only implicates “blackness” but also carries a tinge of 
 morbidity—from the unique perspective of an Irish woman writing to a tra
 nsatlantic audience. Attempting to grapple with the treatment of blackness
  in Belinda\, which tends to manifest primarily in a comical register (tho
 ugh never devoid of the persistent threat if not explicit act of violence)
 \, this paper crafts a working definition of black humor to accommodate th
 e ways in which racialized discourse intersects with issues of gender.\n\n
 Erin Severson earned her master’s degree from the University of Oxford
 \, which she attended as an Ertegun Scholar for the Humanities in 2020–2
 021. Her research interests center around eighteenth-century satire\, earl
 y modern Atlantic medicine\, and the history of the book. At Oxford and UC
 LA\, she organized conferences with an emphasis on archival methods and th
 e material culture of the early modern period. Immersed in the world of ra
 re books\, she has worked in special collections libraries\, on behalf of 
 booksellers\, catalogers\, and private collectors in a variety of roles\, 
 always pushing for accessibility in some of the academy's most elite space
 s. Her dissertation brings together the satiric bite of Jonathan Swift’s
  “A Modest Proposal\,” the sentimental ironies of Sterne\, and the pal
 liative humor of Ignatius Sancho in an investigation of comic violence fro
 m the perspective of transatlantic book history.\n\n\n\nImage: Title Page\
 , Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s copy of Belinda by Maria Edgeworth\, Vol.
  I\, Bodleian Library\, Arch. H e.190
CATEGORIES:Lectures
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20250309T030000
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
END:DAYLIGHT
END:VTIMEZONE
END:VCALENDAR