Event

Ana Schwartz is the author of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (OIEAHC January 2023), a case study in the history of the desire to escape history. Since completing this work, she has been conducting research on the soul in order to write a social history of this supposedly timeless and universal property. Essays in support of these two projects have been published at American Literature, Early American Literature, New Literary History and J19, and a rare B-side is forthcoming in the volume Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies, edited by Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly, co-conveners of the 2016 MCEAS conference of the same name. Schwartz completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and since 2018 has been Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

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The McNeil Center sponsors a seminar that meets on Friday afternoons approximately twice a month between September and May, with the paper for each session circulated in advance. Over two hundred people attend at least once a year, with an average attendance of 40 to 50 at meetings held at various sites in the Delaware Valley. While most of the regular attendees are graduate students and faculty from institutions in the Philadelphia area, participants come from as far afield as Long Island, New York City, Princeton, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington. 

The McNeil Center will utilize a hybrid format for seminars in which participants may gather together at the McNeil Center building (or occasionally at an MCEAS Consortium institution host in the Philadelphia area) or attend via Zoom. All in-person attendees must comply with the University of Pennsylvania’s COVID-19 policies. Masks are optional in the seminar room. For regular updates about our seminars, please join our mailing list. Please email us at mceas@sas.upenn.edu with any questions.