Common Sense at 250: Legacies of Democracy from Paine to Today
2026-01-09 - 2026-01-10 | Lewes and Sussex, England and virtually via Zoom
In-person Registration Links
FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026 at the University of Sussex — In-person registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/common-sense-at-250-legacies-of-democracy-from-paine-to-today-tickets-1760714497459?aff=oddtdtcreator.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2026 at Bull House, Lewes — In-person registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/common-sense-at-250-legacies-of-democracy-from-paine-to-today-tickets-1769369715449?aff=oddtdtcreator. (please note in-person registration is currently limited to conference presenters at this time, virtual registration is open to all).
SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2026 at the White Hart, Lewes — In-person registration for the evening reception: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/common-sense-at-250-day-two-closing-reception-tickets-1838344390559?aff=oddtdtcreator.
*Please note that due to the historic nature of the buildings, in-person registration capacity is limited for the sessions at Bull House on Saturday, January 10, and for the closing reception that evening at the Headstrong Room at the White Hart. Please notify us if you are no longer able to attend so the spot may be opened to others on the waitlist.
Conference Program
Friday, January 9, 2026: The University of Sussex
Coffee and tea: 9:00am- 9:30am
Sponsored by the University of Sussex

Session One: 9:30am – 11:00am
“Paine, Commemoration, and the Politics of Memory”
Chair and Commentator: Scott Cleary
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2xSvh8BqTUKQ63NdnerNUw

Josh Dight, “Common Sense as Cultural Memory in the radical ‘paper pantheon’, 1831-1849”

Lyne Hervey-Passée, “Ink, Imagination, and Algorithm: Returning to Common Sense” (virtual)

Anthony Kalume, Title forthcoming

Robert Wolff, “America at 250: Historical Originalism, Fractured Imagination, and Public Memory”

Session Two: 11:15am – 12:45pm
“Paine and the Lasting Language of Revolution”
Chair and Commentator: Michael Jonik
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_d55nn8qWQ7SVYzWNjDjiBQ

Lucas Barcos Rodrigues, “From Swine to Citizens: The Radical Afterlives of Paine in the British Swinish Multitude”

Silvia Guselli, “Liberty Applied and Contested: Twain, Callahan, and the Ideological Afterlife of Paine’s Common Sense”

Catherine Packham, “‘Words of sound’: Common Sense, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Legacies for Political Speech”

Emily Sneff, ““Es ist jetzt unter der Presse”: German Translation in Philadelphia in 1776” (virtual)

Lunch break: 12:45pm – 2:15pm (on your own)

Session Three: 2:30pm to 4:00pm
“Common Sense in Conversation: Influence and Authorship in the Atlantic World”
Chair and Commentator: Liz Covart
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Xr31hmB8Rzm9iy35ESacXQ

Jon Chandler, “Continental Republicanism: Paine, Print, and the Politics of Place, 1775–1777″

Tom Cutterham, “Common Sense, Civil Liberty, and the Transatlantic Revolutionary Tradition”

Adam Lebovitz, “Thomas Paine’s Maritime Imagination”

Karen Racine, “The Cause of All Mankind: Thomas Paine and Spanish American Independence”

Session Four: 4:15pm to 5:45pm
Plenary with Greg Claeys: “Thomas Paine and the Three Revolutions that Weren’t”
Chair and Commentator: Iain McDaniel
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_49kf0Om2RgK_iuUknw3a-g

Reception: 5:45pm – 7:00pm
Sponsored by the University of Sussex

Saturday, January 10th, 2026: Bull House, Lewes
Coffee and tea: 8:30am- 9:00am
Sponsored by the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University

Session Five: 9:00am – 10:30am
“A Template for Democracy: Common Sense and Civic Life”
Chair and Commentator: Joseph Adelman

Leanne O’Boyle, Common Sense and Public History

Nicole Mahoney, Common Sense and Women’s and Gender History

Jeanne Sheehan Zaino, Common Sense and Contemporary Politics

Please note that this session includes a live recording for a special episode of the Ben Franklin’s world podcast that will be publicly available and there is no virtual option.

Session Six: 10:45am – 12:15pm
“Common Sense and Evolving Democratic Institutions”
Chair and Commentator: Emma Hart
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wWiilXotRq20KVbLmS5IqQ

Samuel Burry, “Paine and Intergenerational Rights: From Common Sense to Agrarian Justice”

Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, “From Common Sense to Constitutional Balance: Thomas Paine and the Bicameral Turn after the French Revolution” (virtual)

Colin Manton, “Reform, Radicalism, and Reaction: Bright Politics, 1832”

David Williams, “Democracy and the Two Times of Common Sense”

Lunch break: 12:15pm – 1:45pm (on your own)

Tour of the Town of Lewes: 1:45pm-2:15pm (please meet at the entrance to Bull House)

Session Seven: 2:30pm – 4:00pm
“Revolutionary Legacies in Lewes”
Chair and Commentator: Leanne O’Boyle
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rnRk1eZSTR6Vh_qw7bxCFQ

Deborah Gage
Rebecca Stott
Paul Myles
Barbara Keal

Session Eight: 4:15pm to 5:45pm
Keynote with Danielle Allen, “Thomas Paine: The Junius Years”
Chair and Commentator: Nora Slonimsky
Virtual registration: https://iona.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_81-mpDJ1SjS9_vXD3rK3Aw

Reception: 6:00pm – 7:30pm
The Headstrong Room at the White Hart
Sponsored by the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University

Read the Call for Papers here.

This conference has been generously supported by the Lapidus Initiative for Early American Inquiry at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, the University of Sussex, and Thomas Paine: Legacy. The contributions of these organizations play a vital role in advancing our understanding of Thomas Paine and the early Atlantic world in which he lived and worked.

Quaff & Quill: Book Talk with Zara Anishanslin
2026-01-21 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, 20 Sicard Drive, New Rochelle, NY, 10801, United States
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence.
Join the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies for a talk with Professor Zara Anishanslin (University of Delaware) about her new book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard, 2025) to learn about an extraordinary cohort of artists whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.
Light refreshments will be served.

This is a hybrid event. Please join us in person or online via Zoom.
CLICK HERE FOR IN PERSON REGISTRATION
Thomas Paine Cottage Museum
20 Sicard Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10804
Driving Directions
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE ZOOM WEBINAR
Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association

Quaff & Quill: Book Talk with Jacqueline Beatty
2026-03-11 18:00 - 19:00 | Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, 20 Sicard Drive, New Rochelle, NY, 10801, United States
Join us for a Women’s History Month program with Professor Jacqueline Beatty (York College of Pennsylvania) about her new book In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America (2023) to learn about women’s agency in early America and how their dependent status – rather than their independent status – enabled them to achieve financial and legal protections.
In Dependence explores the ways in which women in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston manipulated their legal, social, and economic positions of dependence and turned these constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Although the law and social custom established restrictions on women’s rights and behavior, early American women were not completely powerless in their dependent state. By using legislative petitions, divorce cases, marriage settlements, equity cases, probate records, manumission deeds, freedom suits, almshouse records, and charitable institutional files, In Dependence demonstrates that women defined their relationship with the patriarchal state—the colonial, revolutionary, and early national governments and organizations helmed by elite men—in terms of their multifaceted dependencies.
Light refreshments will be served.

This is a hybrid event. Please join us in person or online via Zoom.
CLICK HERE FOR IN PERSON REGISTRATION
Thomas Paine Cottage Museum
20 Sicard Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10804
Driving Directions
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE ZOOM WEBINAR
Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association

Quaff & Quill: Book Talk with Jordan B. Smith
2026-04-15 18:00 - 19:00 | LaPenta School of Business, Henry Lecture Hall, Iona University & Virtual via Zoom
Join the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies for a talk with Professor Jordan B. Smith (Widener University) about his new book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity (2025) to learn the complex history of rum, from its production to its consumption, and from its origins in the Caribbean to its impact on the Atlantic world.
It was strong. It was cheap. It was ubiquitous. Fermented and distilled from the refuse of sugar production, rum emerged in the seventeenth-century Caribbean as a new commodity. To conjure something desirable from waste, the makers, movers, and drinkers of rum arrived at its essential qualities through cross-cultural experimentation and exchange. Those profiting most from the sale of rum also relied on plantation slavery, devoured natural resources, and overlooked the physiological effects of overconsumption in their pursuit of profit. Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.
Light refreshments will be served.

Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association.
For in person registration, click HERE.
To register for the Zoom webinar, click HERE.

This program is produced with support from the Lapidus Initiative for Early American Inquiry and the “Common Sense and the Constitution: Civic Engagement in the Spirit of 1776” initiative from the American History and Civics Education – Seminars (AHC-Seminars) Program at the Department of Education.

Quaff & Quill: Book Talk with Emily Sneff
2026-04-22 18:00 - 19:00 | LaPenta School of Business, Henry Lecture Hall, Iona University & Virtual via Zoom
Publishing for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation’s founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.

Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.

Light refreshments will be served.

Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association.
For in person registration, click HERE.
To register for the Zoom webinar, click HERE.
This program is produced with support from the “Common Sense and the Constitution: Civic Engagement in the Spirit of 1776” initiative from the American History and Civics Education – Seminars (AHC-Seminars) Program at the Department of Education.

Quaff & Quill: Book Talk with Jack Kelly
2026-04-29 18:00 - 19:00 | Ryan Library and via Zoom
Join the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies for a talk with historian Jack Kelly about his new book, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (2026) to explore two of Paine’s essays–Common Sense and The American Crisis–that turned a rebellion over taxes into a true revolution. Kelly’s tribute to 250th anniversary of American independence, the book is a riveting reflection on the power of words and belief.
Light refreshments will be served.

Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association.
For in person registration, click HERE.
