43rd Annual Meeting of SEASECS
March 2 – 4, 2017
Montgomery, Alabama

“Colonial Intersections in the Eighteenth Century”

Richard Montgomery, by Alonzo Chappel

The 43rd Annual Meeting of SEASECS, from Thursday, March 2, through Saturday, March 4, 2017, will be held at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel & Spa. Located in the historical district of Alabama’s capital, the luxurious conference hotel is mere minutes from such attractions as the Rosa Parks Museum, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the Civil Rights Memorial, the Waterfront Park, and the acclaimed Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Thursday’s events include a plenary address by Professor Melissa Hyde, University of Florida, on “The French Connection: Femmes-Artistes and the Founding Fathers.” That evening, the hotel’s Alabama Ballroom will host Professor Chris Hendricks, who will guide interested attendees through the steps of authentic eighteenth-century dance.

Friday evening’s events, offered in conjunction with the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, will begin with a walking tour of the nearby Alabama Historical Archive exhibits on local indigenous peoples, which feature some of the finest artifacts in the Southeast, led by Kathryn Braund, Hollifield Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. Professor Braund will offer a plenary address, “'The Manner of the Indian Nations’: Eighteenth-Century Accounts of the Creek Indians,” immediately afterwards on the premises. This will be followed by a Grand Reception in the Archives’s marble lobby, with the evening appropriately concluded by the sumptuous production, “The School For Bathos: A Collection of the Rarest and Most Contemptible Uglies of the Stage, Delivered with Abundant Bombast by the Rump SEASECS Players.”

The conference’s theme is “Colonial Intersections in the Eighteenth Century,” but papers on any aspect of the long Eighteenth Century will be considered for inclusion in the conference.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM. A pdf version of the conference program is available from this link; if you want to view the 2017 conference program on your smartphone or tablet, use this link to download our Guidebook version. All presenters must be active members of SEASECS at the time of the conference. Annual membership begins with the conference, and presenters can join or renew membership when registering for the conference.

Hotel Reservations: Reservations at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel & Spa can be made online through this link or by calling (800) 468-3571. Please make your reservation by January 31, 2017, in order to ensure the special rate of $165 a night. 

Blake Gerard (wgerard@aum.edu) will be responsible for the local arrangements of conference, which will be sponsored in part by Auburn University at Montgomery.

Conference Registration and Membership Renewal: Attendees may register for the 2017 conference and renew their membership online this year with our new registration system. SEASECS has moved to 100% online registration, so please use this following registration link, which will walk you through the registration process and allow you to pay with PayPal: SEASECS Online Registration.

If you have any questions, please contact our SEASECS Treasurer, Laura Miller (lmiller@westga.edu).

Graduate Student Essay Prize: SEASECS invites submissions for its annual Graduate Essay Prize competition. An award of $300 will be given for the best graduate student paper presented at the annual meeting of the society. The deadline for this year's awards is January 15, 2017 by 5:00 P.M. Please send submissions as PDF files and address any other queries about the prize to the chair of this year's committee, Denis Grélé, at ddgrele@memphis.edu. For more information, see Graduate Student Essay Prize.

Graduate Student Travel Grants: If you live outside of the Montgomery area, there are 4 travel grants of $300 each available this year. If you are interested, please send your name, institutional affiliation, email address, paper title, and abstract to Joe Johnson joejohnson@clayton.edu. The deadline for travel grant applications is November 30, 2016.

Undergraduate Teaching Prize: In 2014, SEASECS established a new Undergraduate Teaching Prize of $1000 to be awarded to the member or members who propose the best undergraduate panel for the conference, with the funds to be used at least in part to help the participating undergraduate students with expenses related to attending the conference. Submissions should consist of a letter from the SEASECS member(s) describing the panel, along with a one-page (maximum) talk proposal from each of the three or four undergraduate presenters. The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2016. Please send submissions as PDF files to Blake Gerard at wgerard@aum.edu.