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SUMMARY:Lunchtime Seminar - The Odyssey of eighteenth-century scholarship 
 and the entangled emergence of the Enlightenment - Dr Jeffrey D Burson\, A
 ssociate Professor French History at Georgia Southern University
DTSTART:20191016T120000Z
DTEND:20191016T130000Z
UID:TALK130627@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:68953
DESCRIPTION:Despite the importance of the Enlightenment in this era of ren
 ewed illiberal and authoritarian tendencies\, much of the historical schol
 arship concerning it suffers from an often bewildering lack of consensus a
 bout exactly what the Enlightenment was\, how socially or geographically w
 idespread and diverse it was\, how Eurocentric were its origins\, and how 
 secular were its inceptions and outcomes. My luncheon talk interrogates th
 is lack of consensus by critically surveying the odyssey of scholarship co
 ncerning the Enlightenment in an effort to forge a more comprehensive and 
 serviceable understanding of the cultural history of the period. By adapti
 ng the paradigm of l’histoire croisée—originally employed by historia
 ns of transnational cultural exchange and identity construction—to early
  modern developments\, I hope to show how many currently regnant paradigms
  of Enlightenment study can be productively reframed as a process of cultu
 ral revolution whereby the many conflictive and discreet Enlightenments\, 
 so often the preoccupation of historical scholarship\, can be reconsidered
  in light of their entangled\, mutually constitutive\, and shared intellec
 tual genealogy. I argue that\, when viewed in such a way\, much of what ha
 s been considered the Enlightenment’s most radical\, most definitive\, m
 ost transformative\, or most secular characteristics were unintended outco
 mes of a much longer arc of intellectual history. This long-range cultural
  revolution\, although characterized by a preoccupation with moral and soc
 io-cultural reform\, often originated in debates over the religious implic
 ations of new discoveries in science\, and the fruits of European explorat
 ion\, conquest\, and colonization.
LOCATION:Combination Room\, Wolfson College
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