Welcome to The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 website. Our blog includes information about upcoming events, call for papers, reviews and reflections. This pinned post will highlight our recent blog posts so it is easy to find information, such as event sign up. However, if you would like to find other previous posts from the blog, please use the search function or click on one of the categories found on the right-hand side of this page.
We are excited to announce the publication of a new collection of essays by WSG members, Women and Transnational Cultural Exchange, 1550–1850, edited by Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland and Louise Duckling. Congratulations to everyone involved!
This multidisciplinary collection has been five years in the making. It was inspired by the group’s own transnational exchanges during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the move to an online space allowed deeper engagement with an international community of scholars.
Using a wide range of highly readable case studies, the authors respond to the following questions: How have women enabled the transfer of culture and ideas from one geographical region to another? What role did they play in facilitating connections and forms of exchange with and about other cultures and communities across the world?
Centuries-long biases have misrepresented women’s international influence, often by focusing on a narrow cast of women – most notably queens – and eliminating lesser-known women from the discussion entirely. The book’s prologue uses queens as case studies to explore how some of these traditional narratives of women on the international stage are being reimagined.
Individual stories are then grouped into four sections according to the category of exchange: culture, knowledge, art, and music. Each section opens with a concise essay or “postcard,” featuring an impactful image and short reflection to introduce the section’s theme. These concise and illustrated postcards provide additional insights and imaginative ways of thinking about women’s exchanges. A closing epilogue reflects on the powerful influence of women and storytelling across cultures and time. The book is published by Bloomsbury Academic and is available via all good bookstores.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, UK) and Louise Duckling (independent scholar, UK)
Prologue. Power
Postcard 1: Queen Mary I and La Peregrina, Valerie Schutte (independent scholar, US)
1. Maria Theresa and Catherine II: Women rulers transmitting unexpected gender notions far beyond their realms, Ruth Dawson (University of Hawaii at Manoa, US)
Part 1. Culture
Postcard 2: The 188-page letter-memoir: Mary Anne Canning’s life writing as a defense of her motherhood, Rachel Bynoth (Bath Spa University, UK)
2. Imagining England: Recovering Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s Memoirs of the court of England (1707), Daisy Winter (Northumbria University, UK)
3. The racial politics of the Chilean family in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), Valentina Aparicio (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
4. “Today, two vent’rous females spread the sail”: The presence of female travelers in the works of Mariana Starke, Eva Lippold (University of Reading, UK)
Part 2. Knowledge
Postcard 3: “A new world of ideas”: Knowledge exchange in Helen Maria Williams’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (1814–29), Louise Duckling (independent scholar, UK)
5. Madeleine de Scudéry, Aphra Behn, and translation: Using the “Carte de Tendre” for cross-channel communication of women’s ideas, Amelia Mills (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
6. “Suns, wich to some other Worlds give Light”: Transnational philosophies of the universe in Margaret Cavendish’s poems and letters, Masuda Qureshi independent scholar, UK)
7. Science, art, and knowledge: Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft and the illustration of Cuban flora, Elisa Garrido Moreno (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)
Part 3. Art
Postcard 4: Collecting travel memories: Charlotte Bonaparte’s family album, Arlene Leis (independent scholar, UK)
8. Aletheia Talbot and the art of Italy: England’s first female collector, Breeze Barrington (independent scholar, UK)
9. Back through time and beyond Britain: Revealing polytheistic imagination and British imperial resolve in Eleanor Coade’s Artificial Stone products, 1769–1821, Miriam al Jamil (independent scholar, UK)
Part 4. Music
Postcard 5: Mrs Macglashan of Jamaica, Andrew Bull (independent scholar, UK)
10. “quite different from what it is abroad”: Elizabeth Wynne’s musical exchanges, Penelope Cave (independent scholar, UK)
11. The Murrays of Warrawang: Scots in Australia, Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, UK)
Epilogue
Postcard 6: Felicia Hemans, the Monument of Zalongo, and the “dance” of a moment in history, Trijit Acharyya (independent scholar, India)
WSG members are also invited to our next reading group session on 5 February 2026, 7-8pm (GMT). We will be discussing Sarah Scott’s ‘A Description of Millenium Hall’ (1762) and details will be sent via our members’ mailing list.
We have an upcoming Zoom seminar on Thursday 15th January, 2026. ZOOM 18:45 for 19.00-20.30 (GMT).
The papers to be presented are:
Stephen Spiess: Allegory and Violence: The Epistemology of the Whore in the Early Modern Visual Arts.
Gillian Beattie-Smith: Creating women’s literary identities: the Tour of Scotland.
Vicki Joule: Travelling and performing the self: Delarivier Manley and the ‘Stage’ coach.
Brianna Robertson-Kirkland: The other Mrs Corri: Camilla Corri’s musical legacy in Edinburgh.
All members are invited to attend. The Zoom link will be sent via the members list.
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WSG Support Network Event, 24 January 2026.
The WSG have set up a new Support Network which will feature a series of virtual skills-based workshops. The second workshop in the series will be led by Sara Read on 24 January 2026, 10.00-12.00 (GMT).
Sara will be providing Top Tips to Producing Quick and Succinct PowerPoint Presentations for Conferences.
Details on how to register for Sara’s event will be circulated via the members list.
If you’re not a current member of WSG, you can find details on how to sign up here. We hope you’ll consider joining us for a packed year of events.
Happy New Year to all our subscribers! As we look ahead to 2026, we are particularly excited about a new event in our calendar. We hope you can join us and take part in this initiative.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, on Saturday 7th March 2026, members of the Women’s Studies Group will be delivering a series of short talks in the museum galleries at the Foundling Museum, London.
WSG members are invited to propose a short presentation (around 15 minutes) in the museum for the visiting public to hear, loosely based on the topic ‘Women’s Lives in the eighteenth century: Struggle, Fame and Fortune’. These talks can take place in front of one of the museum’s paintings or objects or in a room of your choice. Short talks, play-readings, poetry, extracts from letters, etc., are all possibilities. Presentations can focus on women’s history topics such as mothers and children; women and the army; actors and writers; risk, sensation and exposure; the law and society’s attitudes to transgression.
Our members cover a wealth of subjects in their research which would be of interest to visitors, and we are keen to involve as many of our members as possible. If you are interested in participating, please contact the WSG at 2wsgevents@gmail.com
‘Demystifying the publication process’ was the first of our new online support network sessions led by academic author and professional proofreader and editor Louise Duckling. I was one of a group of twelve taken through the processes of monograph, edited volume and journal article publication from first proposal through manuscript submission, copyediting and proofreading to the finished product.
For me the overriding message from Louise that ran though all these stages is the need to be clear about what you are seeking to do: why your work matters, your audience and your realistic timetable. Academic publishing is a competitive world, a marketplace with slim profit margins and commissioning editors have to be able to justify a project. It has to have a readership, be fresh and have perennial interest. Journal articles have a limited word count so editors are looking for those that make one clear, new point and that above all fall within the journal’s scope. Many articles are rejected, the majority because they are not in scope. So do your research. Look at publishers’ lists, find gaps or alternatively series to which your work makes a contribution. Tailor your proposal to the individual publisher, fill in their forms and have an attention-grabbing, one-sentence summary of why your book matters.
For me, another takeaway from the session is that it pays to talk: talk to commissioning editors at conferences and find out what they have in the pipeline, what are the gaps they have in their lists; talk to your peers to learn their experience of different publishing houses and journals; and once your proposal is accepted keep talking to your editor to resolve issues quickly and painlessly.
Then there is the important factor of accuracy. When your proposal has been accepted make sure you submit a ‘clean’ manuscript and be attentive to copy-editing and proofreading. Most publishers have no budget for language editing : it is up to you and there may be imported errors that you need to pick up. Above all follow submission guidelines and rules over length (you can be under- but not over-length) and house style. Don’t ask for big changes at the proofreading stage – it will throw the set page format.
And a word or two about the peer review process both at proposal and submission. It can be daunting to receive criticism but try to see this as positive – helping to make your book or article better. Respond to comments in a calm, structured way but ultimately Louise encouraged us to own our own work. Editors can read between the lines of an apparently ‘bad’ review, so this does not necessarily mean game over.
The PDF of Louise’s PowerPoint presentation is available to all WSG members, to whom she has also generously offered 30-minute one-to-one sessions [for details, email: louise@louiseduckling.com], so armed with her advice I am sure we can look forward to seeing many books and articles from among you.
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The next online support network session will be on Saturday 24th January 2026 at 10am-12 noon (UK time). Sara Read, University of Loughborough, will take us through her ‘Top 10 Tips to producing quick and succinct PowerPoint presentations for conferences’ . To book one of the 20 available places, or for queries, please contact Sara on s.l.read@lboro.ac.uk.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 