All events will take place at the Alexandria Lyceum. For more on the presenters, see our Speakers page.

 

THURSDAY, September 24

5:00–7:00 | Welcome & Opening Reception

 

FRIDAY, September 25

8:30–9:00 | Morning Refreshments

9:00–10:00 | Featured Session

“The Civil War and the Popular Lecture”
Ronald J. Zboray & Mary Saracino Zboray, University of Pittsburgh

10:00–10:15 | Break

10:15–11:30 | Oratorical Voice

“A Tale of Two Lucys: Remembering Oberlin’s Early Orators”
Carly S. Woods, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“‘Winged and Luminous Analysis’: The Voice of Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel”
Trudy E. Bell, University of California, Santa Cruz, & Craig B. Waff*
* Dr. Waff, formerly Senior Historian of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio, died in 2012 while conducting archival research for this project.

“The Voice Obscured: Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, and the Trouble with Translators on the Platform”
Virginia Garnett, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

11:30–11:45 | Break

11:45–1:00 | Lunch Provided

1:00–1:15 | Break

1:15–2:15 | Featured Session

“Positioning the Atlantic Lyceum”
Tom F. Wright, University of Sussex

2:15–2:30 | Break

2:30–3:45 | Commerce, Class, Identity

“Before the Lyceum: Professional Lecturing in the Early National Period, 1784–1826”
Granville Ganter, St. John’s University

“The Liberia Lyceum and the Transatlantic Contestation of Black Citizenship, 1838–1850”
Bjørn F. Stillion Southard, University of Georgia

“‘Then the Charm Is Firm and Good’: Shakespeare and the Myth of the Melting Pot in Progressive Era Manhattan”
Elisabeth H. Kinsley, Northwestern University

3:45–4:00 | Break

4:00–5:00 | Featured Session

“Oratory Brought Home: The Remaking of African American Intellectual Forums at Century’s End”
Elizabeth McHenry, New York University

 

SATURDAY, September 26

8:30–9:00 | Morning Refreshments

9:00–10:30 | Mixed Media 1.0

“Racial Science, from Page to Stage”
Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Transatlantic Performance: William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Lisa McGunigal, Pennsylvania State University

“Performances ‘Both Grave and Gay’: The Dramatic Reader in the Lyceum Circuit”
Sara Lampert, University of South Dakota

“Amy Fay and the Origins of the Lecture-Recital”
E. Douglas Bomberger, Elizabethtown College

10:30–10:45 | Break

10:45–11:45 | Featured Session

“Pale Imitation or Perverse Original: The Challenge of Race for America’s Lecture Stage”
Kirt H. Wilson, Pennsylvania State University

11:45–1:30 | Lunch on Your Own

1:30–2:45 | Institutions of Self-Making

“Lecturing and Learning in the Pages of the Nineteenth-Century Black Press”
Shirley Wilson Logan, University of Maryland, College Park

“Social Libraries: A Culture of Learning in Antebellum Virginia”
Yvonne Carignan, George Mason University

“The World’s Teachers: The Common School Classroom as a Contested Democratic Public Space”
Johann Neem, Western Washington University

2:45–3:00 | Break

3:00–4:15 | Religion and Learning

“The Role of Sabbath Schools in the Rhetorical Education of Maria W. Stewart, 1820–1830”
Monika R. Alston-Miller, University of Central Arkansas

“Secret Knowledge, Public Stage: Magic and Revolution in Joseph Smith’s ‘King Follett Discourse’”
Richard Benjamin Crosby, Iowa State University

“The Rhetoric of Pluralism and the Onus of Comparability: Swami Vivekananda on the Crowded Stage of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions”
Scott R. Stroud, University of Texas at Austin

4:15–4:30 | Break

4:30–5:30 | Featured Session

“Toward a New Interdisciplinary Analysis of Platform Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century”
Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University

5:30–6:00 | Closing Remarks