Introduction: Scholarship in a Time of Crisis

Abstract

Abstract: As specialists of the artifacts of the age of empire, eighteenth-century scholars are distinctively positioned and privileged to interrogate the enduring conception (and misconceptions) of the Enlightenment. Written in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, "Scholarship in a Time of Crisis" takes up this ethical responsibility by engaging with the direct present-day consequences of systemic violence rooted in the eighteenth century, made more explicit during the capitalist strain of the pandemic. Together, through lived experience and expertise, these contributors look beyond the canon to find future-oriented modes of reparation imagined by the thinkers of this time.