Nora Pat Small, professor in the history department, is the first speaker for the EIU Literature Conference this year.

The English department and the Illinois Humanities Council will sponsor the conference titled “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter.'”

The 18th annual conference starts today and ends Friday.

Small’s lecture, which will be given today, is titled “Sketches of Place: Hawthorne’s New England.”

Small will establish an “architectural context” scene in which Hawthorne worked.

“I’m setting the scene for Hawthorne’s New England,” Small said.

David Raybin, professor in the English department, said every year, the conference focuses on one book or author.

“In previous years, the literature conference has focused on Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales,’ Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Jane Austen’s novels, Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’ and many other wonderful and important books and writers,” he said.

During the conference, Hawthorne experts will give lectures.

“On Friday morning, our speaker is Dr. Gordon Hutner of the University of Illinois, one of the nation’s leading Hawthorne scholars and the editor of ‘American Literary History,’ the most important academic journal focusing on American Literature,” Raybin said. “Dr. Hutner’s topic is ‘Scarlet Literacy: Pedagogy and 19th-Century American Literature.'”

Hawthorne lived from 1804-1864; this is an area that both Hutner and Small enjoy studying.

“The late 18th and early 19th century are my areas of expertise,” Small said.

The architecture of New England, during Hawthorne’s lifetime from 1804-1864, experience many changes since New England industrialization, Small said.

“New England experiences heavy industrialization: waterways, dams, the textile industry,” Small said. “Hawthorne will oftentimes write about places he lived, and these places become key in a piece.”

Christopher Hanlon, coordinator of the English graduate program and the English department’s professor of antebellum literary history, said Hawthorne’s life seemed to have a role in his writings.

“Hawthorne was certainly engaged in the political present of his region and of the country, but he was also fixated, in some ways, upon the national past,” Hanlon said.

Certain events were evident in Hawthorne’s writing.

“Hawthorne’s family immigrated to the colonies in 1630, and he had a great-great-grandfather who was a great persecutor of Quakers, and a great-grandfather had been a magistrate presiding over the Salem Witch trials,” Hanlon said. “These facts seem to have haunted Hawthorne and provided impetus for his fiction.”

Small’s lecture will be at 7 tonight in the Grand Ballroom in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union. It will be followed by a reception at 8.