What is an Internet-based conference without addressing the Internet’s favorite topic: cats!? This panel seeks papers interested in exploring eighteenth-century cats in their many facets and figurations. Cats abound during this period: from big cats in the natural histories, moralizing cats in fables and children’s stories, mysterious and symbolic cats in the art of Fragonard or Chardin, to real-life cats in the lives of Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole.

Cats posed a challenge to Enlightenment thinking and represented diverse modes of existence during the period. It was Rousseau who claimed “the cat, enemy of all constraint, [a]s useful for characterising liberty.” From cultural perspectives, cats could represent a variety of topics, such as: domesticated pets, objects of torture, experimentation, and amusement, materially useful mousers, symbolic free agents, as street food, muses of philosophy and poetry, or dangerous predators from the “New World.” This open-ended panel challenges panelists to tackle topics such as, but not limited to:

• Cats and Gender (associations with women and children, old maid tropes, sexuality and fertility, female subjectivity/objectivity)
• Cats and revolution (liberty, slavery, obedience, domestication, freedom versus torture)
• Cats and labor (skills, jobs, use-value, luxury versus labor, class)
• Cats and Science (vivisection and other experiments such as Lunardi’s balloon flight)
• Cats and the Atlantic World (predators, mousers on ships, posing threats/aids to colonists)
• Cats as vermin (massacres or street clearings)
• Thomas Gray’s On the Death of a Favourite Cat and any other artistic iterations of the poem
• Cats in fables (morality, education, kindness, pain, religion, transmutation)
• Author cats (Walpole, Johnson, Christopher Smart, and so on)

Keywords: Art History/Architecture/Visual Culture, Childhood/Children/Youth, Cultural Studies, Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies, Global/World/Any Country, Culture/Globalization, Material Culture

https://asecs.org/sessions2025/#PanelAbstracts