LAPASEC 2025
Class in the Long Eighteenth Century: Britain and Beyond
We are delighted to announce the LAPASEC 2025 conference in Essen, 4-6 April 2025!
For updates, follow us on @lapasec_ude and @lapasec.bsky.social!
The Conference
We are delighted to host the LAPASEC 2025 conference in Essen from 4-6 April, 2025. LAPASEC has long been familiar to many eighteenth-century scholars as a well-loved series of French-German conferences. Its primary focus is the literature and culture of the British Isles in the long eighteenth century, but it is also open to eighteenth-century topics relating to France, Germany and further afield. The conference used to alternate between Landau and Paris (hence LAPASEC = Landau-Paris Symposia on the Eighteenth Century). For more information on LAPASEC, please click here.
This Year's Topic: Class in the Long Eighteenth Century: Britain and Beyond
Organisers
LAPASEC 2025 is organised by its Essen-Duisburg hosts Christoph Heyl, Anjali Rampersad and Christian Feser as well as Rémy Duthille and Tristan Coignard from the Université Bordeaux Montaigne.
Programme
Click here for our programme!
Keynote speaker: Professor Penelope J. Corfield
We are honoured to announce that Penelope J. Corfield, Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, is going to give the keynote address at LAPASEC 2025.
Professor Corfield specialises in the history of Georgian Britain and Ireland, while also engaging with critical theory and methodological approaches to historical inquiry. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an elected Member of the Academy of Europe/Academia Europaea, and holds a Research Fellowship at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Newcastle, UK. From 2008 to 2010, Professor Corfield served as President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), and as the President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) from 2019-2013.
Her scholarship on eighteenth-century Britain encompasses a wide range of themes, including urban history, social class, gender roles, modes of social interaction, the emergence of professional identities, and electoral history. Her comprehensive analyses of this period in particular and her approaches to historiography in general are presented in a host of publications, most recently The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 2022) and Becoming a Historian: An Informal Guide (co-authored with Tim Hitchcock, University of London Press, 2022).
For more information on Penelope Corfield, please visit her personal website.
Conference Venue
Dating back to 1883, our conference venue Essener Hof is the oldest hotel still in existence in Essen, presenting an intriguing mix of Gothic and neo-classical architecture as well as much more recent stylistic features. Conveniently situated right in the heart of Essen, a short walk from the train station, it is a great location to make our conference a pleasantly convivial experience.
Funding
We are honoured to be funded by the Université franco-allemande / Deutsch-Französische Hochschule / Franco-German University (FGU), a network of affiliated universities from France, Germany and other countries. For more information on the FGU, please click here.
We also thank the Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales (IFRA/SHS) for their generous support of the conference!