The Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2025–26.
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.
Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837, Seminar Schedule 2025–2026
Saturday 4 October 2025
In-person, Foundling Museum London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30, British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Julia Hamilton: Anna of Denmark and the origins of the Stuart sequence.
Pilar Botías Dominguez: Cathartic privacy: war, exile and melancholia in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters.
Gillian Williamson: Elizabeth Inchbald: a life in lodgings.
***
Thursday 6 November 2025
ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Valerie Schutte: Queen Mary I of England and portrait medals in print.
Conor Byrne: Representations of the executions of British Queens in early modern images.
Yihong Zhu: Women at night: readers, writers, pleasure-seekers, and night-walkers in eighteenth-century London.
***
Saturday 6 December 2025
In-person, Foundling Museum London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT)
Breeze Barrington: ‘Versifying Maid[s] of Honour’: Mary of Modena’s artistic legacy.
Diane Clements: ‘A very anxious and affectionate mother’: dealing with personal indebtedness in Georgian England.
Rhian Jones: ‘For what signifies an absent friend?’ Epistolary friendship between women and men in England, c. 1650-1750.
***
Thursday 15 January 2026
ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Stephen Spiess: Trans Allegoresis: Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’.
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.
***
Saturday 7 February 2026
In-person, Foundling Museum London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT)
Esther Villegas de la Torre: Seventeenth-century women scholars: an interdisciplinary, comparative approach.
Nora Rodriguez Loro: The rhetoric of royal panegyrics: Medbourne’s dedication of St Cecily (1666) to Catherine of Braganza.
Sarah Clarke: Catharine Pelzer’s years in Exeter in the 1840s: from child prodigy to adult musician. Clutching at straws.
***
Thursday 12 March 2026
ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Sarah Barthélemy: Spiritual retreats and women in early modern France.
Helena Queirós: Mediated bodies, devotional scripts: intermedial practices in early modern convents.
Laura Giuliano: Lady Anna Miller (1741-1781): a question of connoisseurship.
Teresa Rączka-Jeziorska: A Polish museum in an English garden. Romantic collection of multinational items of Princess Izabella Czartorska née Flemming.
***
Thursday March 19 2026
ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Elisabetta Marino: Mary Shelley and biography, between history and romance.
Ramit Samaddar: Sophia Goldborne in Colonial Bengal: Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta.
Charlotte Vallis: The role of French Ambassadors at the courts of Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine II.
Lisa VandenBerghe and Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin: Victorine de Chastenay: a scholar, an archive, a digital edition
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.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 