Citizen of the World

In many respects, our recent conference ‘Citizen of the World’ was inspired by the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Paine in 2009. The anniversary saw renewed scholarly and popular attention directed towards Paine, particularly in Britain and the United States. In Thetford, Lewes and New Rochelle Paine was feted and commemorated; in Glasgow, Simon Newman and Peter Onuf organized a very successful international conference reasserting the significance of Paine’s life and ideas to the ‘founding fathers’ generation; and three years later, in 2012, Iona College (New Rochelle, New York) launched the Institute of Thomas Paine Studies with another international gathering of Paine scholars. As organizers of ‘Citizen of the World’, we hoped to contribute to this resurgent interest in Paine. But, at the same time, we also wished to turn attention specifically towards Paine’s long and lingering legacy. As early as 1892, Moncure Conway, the author of the first scholarly Paine biography, noted that whilst Paine’s life up to 1809 was certainly fascinating, his subsequent life, that is, his afterlife, was even more thrilling. With this in mind, we hoped that the conference would explore Paine’s ‘thrilling’ post-mortem influence amongst and within different cultures and communities, at different moments in time. Taking our cue from the maxim that historians need to engage not just with the historical past, but also with historical memory, we sought contributions from those currently researching how Paine’s words and ideas had been appropriated, invoked, used and abused in the two centuries since his death. In doing so, we also hoped to gather together scholars from different disciplines and nations, as well as those at different stages of their careers. The response to our call for papers was everything we hoped, and by November 2013 we had an outstanding programme of papers and presentations.

Art history · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History