The 2017 EC/ASECS Presidential Address By Eugene Hammond First of all, profound thanks to Emily Kugler for coordinating this year’s EC/ASECS conference. Managing a conference requires the full gamut of skills, from managing a diminutive budget constantly in flux, to negotiating as a novice with hotels who negotiate for a living, to persuading one’s university to make a few concessions in their usual access policies, to keeping faculty busy elsewhere with their teaching on time with their conference tasks, to mastering technology and emergency technology repair, to guessing when and how important coffee is to participants, to keeping cool under pressure, to giving up much of your leisure for a year. I’ve only scratched the surface. I have coordinated only two conferences in my career, and they were the most taxing professional experiences I’ve had. Doing this work is satisfying at the end when you see your conference take intellectual shape, but until that climax many, many times you doubt your common sense for having agreed to do this job. Second, it is moving to be back here at Howard where we held a funeral service for Maurice Bennett, my officemate at the University of Maryland in the early 80s, and who died of AIDS in the early 90s. Third, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to this organization, EC/ASECS, that saved me during the 14 years that I left university teaching to teach high school; EC/ASECS has consistently been a collection of people and of scholars, not of ranks. I’d especially like to thank Linda Merians, Jim May, Cal Winton, Mary Margaret Stewart, Beth Lambert, Don Mell, Ashley Marshall, Nancy Shevlin, John Radner, and Robert Hume who encouraged me and my work on Jonathan Swift during the years that I had no other obvious academic tether. I know many other EC/ASECS participants who have felt the same openness to all that is particularly characteristic of this society. I’d like use my presidential remarks this afternoon to reflect for a few minutes on where we are (physically and historically), and on why we’re here. Just a year ago (Fall 2016), we were moving fairly comfortably along a continuum that included our first African-American president and that seemed to promise our first female president. Terrorism was a serious, unsolved problem, but our society and particularly our universities and colleges were becoming gradually more open, more diverse, and more international in their faculties, their students, and their curriculum. Now (Fall 2017) that political climate has changed utterly. Our “Whig” sense of inevitable progress has been shaken, exposing at the same time significant weaknesses, blindnesses, and even smugness in our college and university micro-climate. When last year I finished several years of seemingly total immersion in my biography of Jonathan Swift, I suddenly realized that I was distressingly out of touch with the political and social present. Such a feeling or approach is no longer a luxury that we can afford. Since our last election, as our activity in the present becomes more urgent, I think a lot more about extra-professional things, starting with grass roots involvement in our chosen communities, that I believe 2 The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, March 2018 we should be doing. It’s encouraging to see how many others, particularly young people, are coming to the same conclusion. Our professional role in our country is, I think, among the grass roots activities that we should be re-examining. In all our colleges and universities, not just 18th-century enrollments but humanities enrollments across the spectrum are plummeting. At Stony Brook where I teach a rumor has been circulating among students this semester that the humanities are going to be eliminated. In fact a technology course (a good idea in itself) has replaced one of the humanities courses in our general education requirements, general education credit for AP courses allows many of our students never to even set foot in our buildings, and American parents are becoming reluctant to allow their students to major in liberal education subjects. When I started as an Assistant Professor at Maryland in 1977, or shortly after, we had Shirley Kenny, Cal Winton, Vin Carretta, Sue Lanser, Leo Damrosch, Paula McDowell, and myself teaching the 18th century. We taught The Age of Pope, The Age of Swift, 18th-Century Drama, The 18th-Century Novel, English Literature 1700 to the Present, and 18th-Century Special Topics courses. Now it is rare to be assigned a course that has more than one 18th-century work in it. EC/ASECS still has plenty of members, but societal forces are pushing us in a shrinking direction. At the same time that we are shrinking professionally, the average American has become less inclined to listen to us, or to our laments. Just at the time when our voices are more crucial than ever to our larger society, we are resented for our tenure, for our summer freedom, for our advocacy of diversity and international perspectives, and even if we have none of the above, for our health insurance. To begin to rebuild a bridge over the widening gap between ourselves and the general public, I find myself thinking back to my reasons for deciding during the 1960s to study and to teach, first literature, and then more specifically 18th-century literature. My principal motive was to help students get beyond their narrow time and place, a time and place that they are not even able to see the narrowness of unless they are challenged to read outside their country and outside their century. I was torn in 1969 when I began graduate study between specializing in Shakespeare, in 18th-century English literature, or in African literature. I finally chose the 18th century for its wit, its political engagement, its intellectual standards, its journalism, its rapid expansion of a reading public, the rise of the novel and its frequent celebration of undervalued views, and its enlightenment (for better and for worse). Soon I joined EC/ASECS, which broadened my interests with the opportunity it provided to learn more about music, art, history, Diderot, Goethe, The French Revolution, the settling of Pennsylvania and the other colonies, and what we now call the Black Atlantic. Now, even when our opportunities to teach the 18th century are diminished, we can still fulfill our original motives, and teach a wide variety of works that were ignored in that early curriculum: the Japanese Burmese Harp, the Indonesian This Earth of Mankind, the Nigerian The Joys of Motherhood, the Vietnamese When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Fortunately, book popularity hasn’t taken as much of a hit as we feared it The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, March 2018 3 might. Human nature hasn’t changed. Most of our students still have a hunger for good writing and reading courses. I know from talking with you that the people in this room teach these and even more creative options. In fact, we keep the 18th-century alive by showing our colleagues and our students that the openness we have been inspired by in the 18th century has led us to exercise that openness in many and creative ways – administration, women’s studies, African-American studies, and various colonial and post-colonial studies. Still, 18th-century studies themselves have infinite resonances in modern life. Even as determined a curmudgeon as Swift offers us thought-provoking views on a number of issues still very much relevant, such as 1) reining in a popular general; 2) co-existing with religious fundamentalism; 3) thinking globally while acting locally; 4) helping people enter into the economy though micro-loans; 5) standing up for women; 6) standing up against colonialism; and 7) expecting the best from ourselves and others. Since Jonathan Swift has been the principal focus of my 18th-century study, I’d like to conclude with three excerpts from my recent biography of Swift, all of which I hope illustrate ways in which we can use the texts we teach from the 18th century to intrigue our students into pursuing intellectual and emotional pleasures beyond their usual ones. My first excerpt is from my preface, which shares with readers the pleasures of research; the second is from Swift’s youth and illustrates the serendipitous pleasures of scholarship and the frequent near-invisibility of women in the public record; and the third is from Swift’s prime and shares the pleasures of trying to shake up conventional interpretations of the past, in this case of the nature of Swift’s friendship with Esther Johnson, that have with the help of Swift’s early editors such as Deane Swift naming Swift’s letters to Esther Johnson a Journal to Stella acquired unhelpful hardened arteries. From the Preface On a cool, sunny Saturday, July 16th, 1994, in Glasnevin, a suburb just north of Dublin, where I was trying to find out what had become of Delville, Patrick Delaney's 11-acre estate where Jonathan Swift was often entertained during the 1730s, I stopped at a bridge over the Tolka River, along which I knew the estate had lain, and saw a man in an Irish-wool sweater looking down over the bridge into the river, counting, he presently told me, the trout that were just beginning to return. I interrupted him, as I had so many people in the past few weeks, to ask for help, in this case to ask whether he had ever heard of a Delville estate or of anything now named Delville. He hadn't, but he introduced himself as Joe Stone, a supervisor for the Telephone Company, and he offered to take me to the neighboring Catholic church where he thought that the sacristan, Frank, might know.