Papers

By Jack Lynch,
Rutgers University

I've been delivering anywhere from three to a dozen conference papers a year. I can't easily post all of them, but here's a selection. Make of them what you will.

• "Preventing Play: Annotating the Battle of the Books" (13 October 1994, EC/ASECS, Penn State) – My maiden voyage. A longer version appears in Texas Studies in Literature & Language 40, no. 3.
• "Babel and Empire in Paradise Lost" (CMERS, 22 October 1994, Binghamton)
• "Studied Barbarity: Johnson, Spenser, and Literary Progress" (8 April 1995, ASECS, Tucson)
• "Authorizing Ossian" (5 October 1995, MWASECS, Minneapolis)
• "Brave New Worlds: A Brief History of Twenty-First Century Literature" (11 April 1996, Cum Laude Society of Chestnut Hill Academy)
• "The Ground-Work of Style: Use, Elegance, and National Identity in Johnson's Dictionary" (29 September 1996, NEASECS, Worcester)
• "Workshop of Filthy Creation, Cyberspace Division" (15 November 1996, NASSR, Boston)
• "Hideous Progeny, Version 0.4 Beta" (28 December 1996, MLA, Washington, D.C.)
• "False Refinement and Declension: Johnson on the History of the Language" (12 September 1997, Johnson Centre, Birmingham)
• "Johnson and the Revival of Learning" (25 October 1997, EC/ASECS, Ursinus)
• "The Web of Disorderly Erudition: Electrifying the Eighteenth-Century Classroom" (3 April 1998, ASECS, Notre Dame)
• "Orientalism as Performance Art: The Strange Case of George Psalmanazar" (29 January 1999, CUNY Eighteenth-Century Studies Group)
• "Splendide Mendax: Fakes and Fakers in the Age of Johnson" (16 March 1999, Providence College)
• "Horry, the Ruffian, and the Whelp: Three Fakers of the 1760s" (20 May 1999, Columbia Eighteenth-Century Seminar)
• "The Search for Respectability: Cutting-Edge Anxieties in a Digital Age" (28 December 1999, MLA, New York)
• "I Believe Hardly a Word of It: Fact, Fiction, and Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Narratives" (10 March 2000, CUNY Eighteenth-Century Studies Group)
• "Pyrrhonism and Paranoia: Recognizing a Fake When You See One" (18 March 2000, Princeton Eighteenth-Century Conference)
• "Betwixt Two Ages Cast; or, Just How Long Is the Long Eighteenth Century?" (13 April 2000, ASECS, Philadelphia — salve, magna parens)
• Patrick Hume on Paradise Lost and the Creation of the English Classic" (19 April 2001, ASECS, New Orleans)
• "Justifying a Third Edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: What's New, What's Needed, What's Not?" (20 April 2001, ASECS, New Orleans)
• "Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever" (27 April 2001, Johnson Society of the Central Region, Milwaukee)
• "What's in a Name? Shakespeare's Strange Afterlife" (13 December 2002, Rosenbach Museum & Library)
• "Judging Websites by Their Covers: Seeking Authority in Cyberspace" (29 December 2002, MLA, New York)
• "Reading Johnson's Unreadable Dictionary" (15 January 2004, Boston Athenæum)
• "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary" (25 August 2005, Johnson and the English Language conference, Birmingham)
• Shakespeare Their Contemporary? The Case of Macbeth, 1660–1818" (7 April 2006, British Literature & Culture, 1660–1800: A Symposium in Honor of Eric Rothstein)
• "Pope's Thames" (14 July 2006, Literary London, Greenwich)
• "Doing Shockingly Well; or, This Is Not a Eulogy" (27 Feb. 2008) — a recollection of my good friend Lana Schwebel, killed in an auto accident in Russia in summer 2007