Join us on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 5:00 pm ET in the Cox classroom of the Reeder Media Center, lower level of Swem Library, as we welcome Rebecca Brannon.

Professor Brannon will discuss “‘Be pleased with the Retirement which you are dismissed into’:  The Joys and Tribulations of Late Life.”

When Cotton Mather encouraged men to “Be pleased with the Retirement which you are dismissed into,” he did not consider retirement to be either ideal or universal. Fast forward a century and John Jay would celebrate retirement as a period of “Leisure and Tranquility” that he and others “most ardently desire.”  In between is the story of how retirement went from a forced firing due to old age to a sought-after part of late life.

Rebecca Brannon is an associate professor at James Madison University.  She published From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists with the University of South Carolina Press in 2016.  She also co-edited The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon (2019).  Her co-edited A Cultural History of Old Age in the Era of Enlightenment and Revolution (1650-1800) is due out from Bloomsbury in 2024.   She is currently writing a book on the experience(s) of getting old in the wake of the American Revolution, which is supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities this year.

The OI holds between three and six colloquia per semester to discuss projects (usually a postdoctoral book chapter or article) in progress. The paper is pre-circulated and available by request. Although only postdoctoral work is presented, graduate students at all levels are warmly encouraged to attend the sessions and participate in the discussions.

To receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper you must register in advance. All colloq participants are expected to have read the paper before the discussion and are asked to refrain from sharing the papers with others. We thank you for your observance of this request.

REGISTER HERE