Founded in 1971, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) aims to promote, support and disseminate research on the eighteenth century. The Society is a bilingual and multidisciplinary organization interested in the overall cultural heritage of an era that has played a decisive role in constituting our modernity.

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Each year, CSECS hosts a conference in one of Canada's various regions and publishes an issue of the scholarly journal Lumen. It awards a prize to the best graduate paper read at the conference (the Mark Madoff Award) and offers an annual fellowship (the D.W. Smith Research Fellowship).

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CSECS fosters a particularly rich and invigorating scholarly sociability through its annual conference and its links with the international eighteenth-century studies community. It has, notably, delegates to the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.