#EIUHISTORY @NACBS2016

From the desk of Dr. Newton Key,

Landing at Reagan National Airport Thursday evening, my natural instinct was to take the Metro to Capitol South where I had been in residence for three months this past year for a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. But this time I was heading to Dupont Circle to stay a few nights for the North American Conference on British Studies <http://www.nacbs.org/conference>, an annual meeting of historians, literary critics, art and architecture historians, and others interested in things British, Irish, imperial, and colonial from the Medieval to the Modern era. I had read my conference program so knew that I would meet up with two Eastern Illinois University M.A. in History students, Alyssa Peterson and Michael Bradley who were presenting their posters at the session. Alyssa and Michael have written or are finishing M.A. theses under the direction of Dr. Charles Foy at EIU, on Medical Theory and the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic and on Deference, Resistance, and Assimilation in Constructing Community among Transported Convicts from London to the Chesapeake, 1754-1776.

MA in History @ EIU students Alyssa Petersen and Michael Bradley with Dr. Newton Key at their poster session in the Washington Marriott Georgetown, 12 November 2016.

I think we look quite calm considering there was an open bar right across from us. I wasn’t the only one asking about their research. And I spied Michael speaking with Dr. Tim Hitchcock, whose huge project on the Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925, has obvious links with Michael’s project.

I delivered a brief talk on “Cut-ups, the Relational Database, and Mapping the Associational Metropolis of late-Stuart London,” in the roundtable on historical cartography and early modern Britain. I want to give a shout-out to MA in History student and graduate assistant Nicholas Waller who is helping me with this project, and to Dr. Barry Kronenfeld, Geography and GIScience Center at EIU, whose class geo-referenced a 1682 map of London < http://thekeep.eiu.edu/geoscience_maps_data/1/> for this project. Many thanks too to Dr. Kronenfeld for long talks (are maps metaphors?) that helped me understand the potential of a relational database for my research questions.

I’ll finish with a selfie from about a year ago inside the Folger Shakespeare Library (also in Washington, DC) at my usual desk with the baby Shakespeare, well, technically, George Romney, The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions (ca. 1791-92) < http://collation.folger.edu/2013/12/mr-folgers-most-expensive-painting/>. I don’t know if the painting kept me focused on my research on mapping plots and feasts in London. But it did keep me from turning around too much.