Research Leave has given me the time to travel to the annual conference of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) this year. I’ve never been before, and am looking forward to meeting both old acquaintances and other people whom I only know through their books. I’ll be giving a paper on character theory, drawn from my book manuscript, and chairing a roundtable on tragedy in the Enlightenment.

This post is about that roundtable. Despite my best efforts, it is a roundtable of men (known as a ‘manel’ in academic slang). My efforts included accepting every woman who applied to join the session, but ASECS allows scholars to apply to multiple sessions simultaneously – so once the post-acceptance shuffle was over, I was left with 5 brilliant but male colleagues. Out of overall hundred sessions, we are one of only 6 without a female or nonbinary speaker.

I think the only way out of this is to acknowledge it as an issue, and to chair the session in such a way that, even if everyone sat at the front is male, everyone in the room, regardless of gender, feels able to participate. Here’s how I propose to do it.

First, encouraging participation. I asked all those contributing to the roundtable to provide me with a question about tragedy. Each contributor will deliver his answer to the question they submitted, but then I’ll ask everyone else present to provide their own answers too. This offers something of a balance between expertise and plurality. For the curious, the questions are as follows:

• ‘”With madness, as with vomit, it’s the passerby who receives the inconvenience.”  Granting Orton’s premise, how did actors and singers on the Enlightened stage make the protagonist’s madness tragic?’
• ‘How did Enlightenment thinkers view the difference between ancient and modern tragedy?’
• ‘How did discussions of the emotions that were thought to operate in tragic drama change during the eighteenth century?’
• ‘Why would one look to opera to revitalize or renew tragedy in the eighteenth century?’
• ‘How does the Haitian Revolution contribute to a transatlantic approach to tragedy?’

After spending a little over half the panel discussing these questions, we’ll then move into an even more open session, where I’ll welcome any questions from the floor and hopefully create an environment where everyone feels they can participate. As questions may not be forthcoming, I have three of mine, two of which are ‘elephant-in-the-room questions’ since they come directly from the nature of those making up the panel:

• How is tragedy gendered in this period?
• How did eighteenth-century tragic dramatists engage with new/different social classes?
• What next for tragedy in the eighteenth century?

I’ll find out in less than a week if this is enough.