Category: WSG News

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2024-25

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2024-25.

*RESCHEDULED* Our first seminar of the year will now take place on Zoom, starting at the earlier time of 5.45 for 6 pm and finishing 7.30 pm British Summer Time on Monday 14 October 2024. This first seminar features the following presentations:

Marion Wynne-Davies: Isabella Whitney and London.

Avantika Pokhriyal: The Sign of the Woman: Reading Spatial Negotiations in Betsy Thoughtless.

Emily C. Cotton: Elite Women’s Agency in Marriage Negotiations, 1742-1788.

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The group has two kinds of meeting for seminars.

In-person seminar meetings. These take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, UK, on Saturday afternoons. We will be allowed into the room at 1.00 pm, to give us time to sort out paperwork and technology, but sessions will run from 1.30 pm – 4.30 pm. Please arrive between 1.00 pm – 1.30 pm. The Foundling is a wheelchair accessible venue, and directions for getting to the Museum can be found here, including for those who are partially sighted. Seminars are free to WSG members. Non-members are welcome and are kindly requested to pay the Museum entrance fee and make a donation of £2 for refreshments. Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum before or after.

ZOOM seminar meetings. These take place on Thursday evenings and will be hosted by a member of the WSG committee. They run from 7.00 pm – 8.30 pm, with the waiting room opening at 6.45 pm. Please be aware, you must be a member of the WSG to gain access to the Zoom sessions. The links are distributed through our WSG mailing list 24-hours before the event.

Download the full programme in PDF format: 

Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 seminars schedule 2024-25Download

Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837, Seminar Schedule 2024-2025

Monday 14 October 2024

ZOOM STARTING AT THE EARLIER TIME OF 5.45 FOR 6 PM, FINISHING 7.30 PM, BRITISH SUMMER TIME

Marion Wynne-Davies: Isabella Whitney and London.

Avantika Pokhriyal: The Sign of the Woman: Reading Spatial Negotiations in Betsy Thoughtless.

Emily C. Cotton: Elite Women’s Agency in Marriage Negotiations, 1742-1788.

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Saturday 19 October 2024

FOUNDLING MUSEUM, LONDON, 1 FOR 1.30 PM, FINISHING 4.30 PM. BRITISH SUMMER TIME

Lindsey Bauer: The Women of Lucca and Costanza Bonarelli: Why Modern Scholars Cannot Place a Full-Stop after ‘Victim’.

Holly Day: Recontextualising the Nine Living Muses of Great Britain.

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Saturday 9 November 2024

FOUNDLING MUSEUM, LONDON, 1 FOR 1.30 PM, FINISHING 4.30 PM. GREENWICH MEAN TIME.

Margarette Lincoln: Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty (Yale: Sept. 2024).

Luiza Tavares da Motta: Alchemy and Galvanism in legal theory: a look at nineteenth-century legitimation of common law through Frankenstein.

Megumi Ohsumi: Aphra Behn’s American Feathers.

Charlotte Vallis: An Empress’ Coronation: public display of gender identity for Elizabeth Petrovna, 1741-1761 and Catherine the Great, 1762-1796.

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Thursday January 16, 2025

ZOOM STARTING 6.45 FOR 7 PM, FINISHING 8.30 PM. GREENWICH MEAN TIME

Jasmin Bieber: Unprecedented Paths Beyond Europe: British Women’s Travel Writing 1680-1780.

Chandni (Anjali) Rampersad: Female Genius In Memoriam: Women Writers’ Afterlife in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-1806).

Rosalyn Sklar: Healing women: Early modern women as healers in their own texts, practices and representations.

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Thursday February 6, 2025

ZOOM STARTING 6.45 FOR 7 PM, FINISHING AT 8.30 PM, GREENWICH MEAN TIME

Dra. Pilar Botías Domínguez: ‘‘Masquerading! a lewd custom to debauch our youth’’: compliance and defiance in Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677).

Amy Solomons and Elizabeth Ingham: Reconstructing Dispersed Collections: The Library of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Charlotte MacKenzie: Women and knowledge making communities in Georgian Cornwall.

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Saturday March 15, 2025

FOUNDLING MUSEUM, LONDON, 1 FOR 1.30 PM, FINISHING 4.30 PM GREENWICH MEAN TIME

Susannah Lyon-Whaley: Small Enough to Hold: Stuart Consorts and Knowing Nature Through Cabinets, Miniatures, and Books.

Susan Bennett: ‘Fancy, Design and Taste’: Promoting female artistic talent in the 18th.century.

Valentina P Aparicio: Boundaries and Intimacy in Transatlantic Friendships: Maria Graham and Empress Maria Leopoldina.

Breeze Barrington: An introduction to the topic of her forthcoming book The Graces: The Untold Lives of the Women Who Transformed the Stuart Court.

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Thursday 10 April 2025

ZOOM STARTING 6.45 FOR 7 PM, FINISHING AT 8.30 PM, BRITISH SUMMER TIME

Claudia Cristell Maria Berttolini: Saint Gertrude as a female role model in 18th century Puebla de los Ángeles.

Jacqui Grainger: Mary Somerville, the United Service Museum and women of science.

Francesca Saggini: Jane Austen and the Golden Age of Crime Fiction.

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page, or contact the organiser Carolyn D. Williams, cdwilliamslyle@aol.com. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Summer Book Launch Event

Please join us for a special online Zoom event on Thursday 27 July, when we will be celebrating four new books by WSG members. Each author will be giving a short, informal talk about their work, followed by a Q&A session.

This event is free and open to everyone. Why not come along for some summer reading inspiration?

Reserve your place now on Eventbrite: Summer Book Launch Event – Online Tickets, Thu 27 Jul 2023 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

COME AND MEET OUR GUEST AUTHORS:

Charmian Kenner is a researcher and writer on women’s history, with a special interest in Latin America. She will discuss her free eBook Revolutionary Partners: Sarah Andrews and British campaigners for Latin American independence.

Revolutionary Partners asks: How did a young woman from Yorkshire meet a Venezuelan revolutionary in the year 1800? This is the story of Sarah Andrews and Francisco de Miranda, whose London home served as a British headquarters for the struggle to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule. Their sons Leander and Francisco took up the cause, joining many Britons who crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside Simón Bolívar or witness the dawn of a new society. All were partners in the revolution, but their contribution is little-known in Britain today, and Sarah Andrews has remained in the shadows.

Peter Radford is an Olympic medallist and world record holder, and Professor at the University of Glasgow and Brunel University. He will discuss his new monograph They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain.

Sports have never been the sole preserve of men; women athletes have always been there. As this book shows, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, women of all ages ran, fought, rode, played football, cricket, tennis, and other sports. They competed in tough, head-to-head events that required extraordinary endurance and skill. They Run with Surprising Swiftness recognizes these remarkable athletes and their achievements and aims to restore them to their rightful place in the long history of women in sport.

Sara Read is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research is in the cultural representations of women, bodies and health in the early modern era.

Her second novel The Midwife’s Truth is a sequel to The Gossips’ Choice and continues the story of midwife Lucie Smith. The birth stories, which form the backdrop to the novels, are inspired by the case notes of a Bristol midwife published in 1737. The books mix humour, compassion, and sorrow, and have been scrupulously researched.

Kim Sherwood is an award-winning author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her latest novel, A Wild and True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

The novel opens during the Great Storm of 1703, as smuggler Tom West confronts his lover Grace for betraying him to the Revenue. Leaving Grace’s cottage in flames, he takes her orphaned daughter on board ship disguised as a boy to join his crew. But Molly, or Orlando as she must call herself, will grow up to outshine all the men of his company and seek revenge – and a legacy – all of her own.

WSG Mentoring Scheme: One week left to submit your applications in!

Scheme now open! Deadline 15th January 2021

Academia is becoming an increasingly competitive environment and some may feel at a loss when it comes to developing new research projects, producing publications, building networks and curating knowledge exchange events/resources. All of these activities are an important part of scholarly work and can help build a lucrative research portfolio (no matter the field). Yet, graduates may struggle to find specific support in these areas, especially if they do not belong to an institution.  

The WSG recognise that among its members is a diverse community with a wealth of expertise and experience, as well as those who would benefit from collegial support. With this in mind, we are implementing a mentoring scheme. The scheme hopes to pair mentees and mentors from similar fields to work together on one or more goals. A goal could be a mentee seeking advice on developing a fellowship application or a funding application, or perhaps developing a new research project, writing an article or book proposal or developing a knowledge exchange activity. We also strongly encourage mentees to work with their mentor to develop a WSG bursary application.

For further details, please see our mentoring scheme page.

WSG Mentoring Scheme: Get your applications in!

Scheme now open! Deadline 15th January 2021

Academia is becoming an increasingly competitive environment and some may feel at a loss when it comes to developing new research projects, producing publications, building networks and curating knowledge exchange events/resources. All of these activities are an important part of scholarly work and can help build a lucrative research portfolio (no matter the field). Yet, graduates may struggle to find specific support in these areas, especially if they do not belong to an institution.  

The WSG recognise that among its members is a diverse community with a wealth of expertise and experience, as well as those who would benefit from collegial support. With this in mind, we are implementing a mentoring scheme. The scheme hopes to pair mentees and mentors from similar fields to work together on one or more goals. A goal could be a mentee seeking advice on developing a fellowship application or a funding application, or perhaps developing a new research project, writing an article or book proposal or developing a knowledge exchange activity. We also strongly encourage mentees to work with their mentor to develop a WSG bursary application.

For further details, please see our mentoring scheme page.

WSG Mentoring Scheme: Get your applications in!

Scheme now open! Deadline 15th January 2021

Academia is becoming an increasingly competitive environment and some may feel at a loss when it comes to developing new research projects, producing publications, building networks and curating knowledge exchange events/resources. All of these activities are an important part of scholarly work and can help build a lucrative research portfolio (no matter the field). Yet, graduates may struggle to find specific support in these areas, especially if they do not belong to an institution.  

The WSG recognise that among its members is a diverse community with a wealth of expertise and experience, as well as those who would benefit from collegial support. With this in mind, we are implementing a mentoring scheme. The scheme hopes to pair mentees and mentors from similar fields to work together on one or more goals. A goal could be a mentee seeking advice on developing a fellowship application or a funding application, or perhaps developing a new research project, writing an article or book proposal or developing a knowledge exchange activity. We also strongly encourage mentees to work with their mentor to develop a WSG bursary application.

For further details, please see our mentoring scheme page.