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Taylor Institution

Keynote Speaker: Professor Susanne Kord (Chair of German, University College London)

Since the 1970s, feminist criticism has rediscovered a vast body of literary works by eighteenth-century women and uncovered a great deal about the diverse roles that women played in eighteenth-century society and culture, as authors, actresses, translators, and public figures. Studies of women’s writing have challenged our understandings of genre, periodisation, and authorship, and gender has become an integral part of any discussion of individual identity.

Organised by Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford (RECSO) and the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), this conference aims to take stock after fifty years of important scholarship and to seek out exciting new methodologies for researching women’s writing and identities in the long eighteenth century (c. 1680-c. 1820). We hope to encourage dialogue between disciplines and languages and would welcome papers from researchers and graduate students working in any national tradition and in fields from literature and history to philosophy, music, visual arts, and sociology.

Organisers: Joanna Raisbeck (joanna.raisbeck@some.ox.ac.uk) and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (kelsey.rubin-detlev@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk)

More information: https://c18womenauthorshipidentity.wordpress.com/

10.00-11.30 Opening Remarks and Keynote Lecture (Room 2, Taylorian Institution)
  • Susanne Kord (University College London): ‘A Tale of Women, Authorship, and Identity, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes Relating to Bibliography and Ideology, and Ending With A Modest Proposal for A New Methodology, Related by Herself’
11.45-13.15 Panel 1: Disowning Female Authorship? (Room 2, Taylorian Institution)
  • Ros Ballaster (Mansfield College, University of Oxford): ‘Authoring adultery between theatre and novel: the case of Eliza Haywood’
  • Kim Simpson (University of Southampton): ‘By a Lady of Quality or By the Author of–: Amatory Anonymity, Affiliation & Advertising’
  • Delphine Fayard: ‘Mademoiselle Malcrais de la Vigne: a case study of eighteenth century trans-gender women’s self-fashioning in the light of modern gender studies’
13.15-14.15 Sandwich lunch and tours of exhibition on eighteenth-century women’s writing (Voltaire Room, Taylorian Institution)
14.30-16.30 Panel 2: Pushing the Limits of the Female Persona (Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building)
  • Regina Schmid (Herriot Watt University): ‘In Quest of “Women’s Paradise” – Friederike Brun’s (1765-1835) travels and writings’
  • Claudia Georgi (University of Göttingen): ‘Maria Graham’s Travel Writing on India: Female Scholarship and Colonial Implications’
  • Paul Kerry (Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford): ‘Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’
  • Natasha Simonova (University of Oxford): ‘“My patronesses, my correspondents”: Gender and Authorship in the Richardson Circle’
16.45-18.00 Panel 3: Anthologising Women Writers (Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building)
  • Christine Gerrard (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford): ‘How and why we anthologise eighteenth century women’s poetry’
  • Kathleen Keown (Lincoln College, University of Oxford): ‘To anthologise, or not to anthologise? Navigating Mary Jones’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1750)’
  • Cathryn Charnell-White (Aberyswyth University): ‘Welsh Women’s Poetry in the long Eighteenth Century’
18.00-18.30 Drinks Reception