Étienne-Louis Boullée’s proposed cenotaph for Isaac Newton. Hot air balloons. London’s time ball. Globes, poetic and terrestrial, in Milton and maritime history. Habermas’s idea of public vs private social space. Expansive and holistic by their very nature, spheres appeared across the long and deep eighteenth century. Both literal and physical, spheres and circles theorized material, philosophical, spatial, artistic, and social interactions in the period, containerizing concepts that we often take as given in the twenty-first century. 

This roundtable (emphasis on round) seeks to bring together the eighteenth century’s variety of spheres from around the world, exploring their wider uses and multimedia appearances. We invite interdisciplinary contributions that consider spheres, balls, circles, and other round-ness as a way to explore everything from transatlantic exchanges to coterie publishing circles, from circuits of meteorology and ocean currents to masquerade balls. How did/do spheres shape our ideas of the eighteenth century, its people and discourses? What makes the sphere particularly suited for discussions of anchored social spaces, then and now? How do spheres impact maritime exploration, Greenwich Mean Time, and other nautical orientation methods? What do spheres construct and why do we keep coming back to them, over and over, even as building physical spheres is famously a difficult task? Where do spheres show up and surprise us? Where do they feel so obvious as to be not worth notice? Together we hope to circle around these questions—metaphorical, spiritual, physical—approaching but never quite reaching a center. 

We especially welcome work that is interdisciplinary, multimodal, or global in focus. Please email Elizabeth Giardina at elizabethgiardina.phd@gmail.com with any questions. 

Submit an abstract to this roundtable through the ASECS Annual Meeting and Membership portal at https://www.xcdsystem.com/asecs/abstract/abstract.cfm

You do not need to be an ASECS member to submit an abstract through the portal. However, you must be a member to present at the conference. Please note that the panel chair cannot submit the abstract on your behalf. 

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) is pleased to announce our Call for Papers for the 57th Annual Meeting, to be held April 1–3, 2027 in Portland, Oregon.  

The Society, established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the long eighteenth century, the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. More information here: https://asecs.org/2027-annual-meeting/