Calendar

Keynote Speaker: Eileen Hunt Botting – University of Notre Dame

Women have had a far deeper and more extensive influence on the history than is commonly realised. Far from confining their interests to questions of gender and domestic matters, women have been writing on all aspects of philosophy for as long as such a discipline can be identified. Indeed, it is often surprising just how much high quality philosophical and political thought women have produced throughout history given that so few of the writers are known outside of a few specialist departments.

Across history, women’s writing is now being recovered not as marginal but as theoretically important in its own right. Amongst the many names one could list, we might think of Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan from the Middle Ages; Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Mary Astell in the Early Modern Period; Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as Olympe de Gouges and Sophie de Grouchy, in the revolutionary period of the Enlightenment; to say nothing of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth amongst the numerous slave and abolitionist writings of the nineteenth century.

In spite of the many difficulties women have had in making their voices heard philosophically – women did not have access to the highest levels of education, they often had to confine themselves to safe subjects to avoid social censure, they frequently found it necessary to write anonymously or to destroy one’s work, and they were in any case not normally taken seriously – their work far was more influential in their own time than we often realise today, and it still has the potential to speak to us in our own time through its influence on contemporary debates and issues.

The purpose of this conference is both to raise awareness of the rich historical tradition of women’s philosophy as well as to help make the connection with current social, moral, political and philosophical debate by bringing neglected women writers, past and present, into dialogue with today’s discourses.

We invite submissions for papers on any related theme, including but not limited to those named above. We are also interested in papers focused on women writing from a non-Western tradition, or under conditions of social or political oppression today. Presentations may address any area of philosophy, or of social, moral and political thinking more widely conceived. Some suggested topics include women philosophers on education, social reform, or revolution.

Telling Her Story’ will bring together heritage professionals and academics to explore the diverse roles and experiences of women at historic sites. Whether in country houses or castles, women have played a pivotal role in shaping the built environment and in influencing the course of history. Yet, more often than not, their voices are marginalised or missing from the historical record and from interpretation at heritage sites. This conference seeks to uncover the many and varied experiences of women at historic properties in the care of English Heritage and other heritage organisations. It aims to move beyond stock biographies of famous and extraordinary women to discover the many diverse stories of women from all walks of life, to offer new perspectives on better-known individuals and to critique narratives and interpretations which continue to be constructed principally around the experiences of men.

What extraordinary things did ordinary women do? Which kinds of buildings or landscapes are women not commonly associated with and why? How can we place women’s stories connected to specific properties in the wider context of women’s history? What was distinctive about the experience of women – across different social classes – at these sites? How does the inclusion of women change the way in which we understand the histories of particular sites? By thinking about some of these questions, the conference will also explore the relationship between women’s history, heritage and the built environment and will highlight the potential of women’s history to enrich our understanding of the heritage environment.

Panels of Interest:

Margaret Cavendish and Medicine

Childhood, Marriage, and Feminism in Margaret Cavendish

Work after Death: Posthumaelty in Early Modern Literature

Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation II

British Women Writers Challenge Established Epistemic Frameworks

Roundtable: Women’s Poetics and Early Modern Literary Studies

Lead Convenors:

Dr. Stella Achilleos (University of Cyprus) and Professor James Fitzmaurice, (Northern Arizona University)

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About the Conference:

We are very pleased to announce that our keynote speaker at the Second Annual Early Modern Women Writers’ Colloquium in 2018 will be Professor David Norbrook, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, who will deliver a lecture titled ‘Providence and Displacement: Writing Lucy Hutchinson’s Life’.

Dedicated to women writers from the period 1500 to 1700 (approximate dates), the Early Modern Women Writers’ Colloquium forms a strand within the annual interdisciplinary “Othello’s Island” conference on Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance studies.

The strand was held informally at the fourth Othello’s Island conference in 2015, and became a formal feature in 2016 at the fifth Othello’s Island in 2016. This developing tradition continues at the sixth Othello’s Island Conference in 2018, where we will again welcome papers on women writers in all languages of the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on the writers Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn and their contemporaries.

The strand includes papers on women writers themselves, but also associated topics, such as the representation of women and women writers in work by male writers of the period, women publishers, and also the popular round table discussion, held outside under the olive trees, as a true academia, in the courtyard garden at CVAR.

If you would like to submit a paper to the Early Modern Women Writers strand of Othello’s Island, please follow the instructions below. If you have any questions, please do contact us.

Participants in the Early Modern Women Writers strand can, of course, attend all the other papers and events of the Othello’s Island Conference, and we encourage participants to do so.

The Early Modern Women Writers strand is held in association with the International Margaret Cavendish Society.

SAA is hosting its annual conference this month at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington D.C. To learn more about the event, click on the link to the SAA homepage.

You can follow along on Twitter using the #Shax2019 hashtag!