Category: WSG Seminars

WSG SEMINAR SERIES 2026-27: SCHEDULE

To see the abstracts for each of these papers, please click here.

Saturday 17 October 2026

In Person at the Foundling Museum, 1.30pm for 2pm start (BST or GMT +1)

Abigail M. Carr

‘This poor woman’: the importance of compassion and perception for Wet Nurses of the London Foundling Hospital

Amory S. Zhao

The Automated and the Autonomous: Frances Burney’s Scribulerations

Angela Escott

‘I swung and walked a great deal upon deck’; women at sea

Peter Radford

A rediscovered, but untitled, anonymous, and old (but undated) engraving of women playing cricket – the search for its ‘meaning’

Thursday 12 November

ZOOM 6.45pm for 7pm (GMT)

Sara Read

A Physician’s Wife? Revisiting the Biography of the German Princess Using Digital Genealogy

Valerie Schutte

A Comparison of the Coronation Rings of Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I

Ailsa Maxwell 

Women’s Home(work): Creating Sweets and Sausages in Georgian Britain

Saturday 16 January 2027

In Person at the Foundling Museum. 1.45pm for 2pm (GMT)

Luisa Signorelli

Misogyny and Shakespeare’s Eighteenth-Century Women Critics

Dr Jean G-Owen

Poachers in Petticoats: ‘Unwomanly Practices in Rural Britain’

Teresa Jung-Sin Hsie.
The Afterlives of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eliza Haywood, and the Long Eighteenth Century in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Thursday 11 February 2027

ZOOM. 6.45pm for 7pm (GMT)

Francesca Saggini

A pen to correct the imbalance. Metaphors and communicative asymmetries in Frances Burney’s ‘A Mastectomy Letter’

Tabitha Kenlon

A Disabling Education: Gender, Knowledge, and Disability in Fanny Burney’s Camilla

Flávia Varella

Familiar Conversations and Historical Learning in Elizabeth Penrose and Elizabeth Helme

Saturday 20 March 2027

In Person at the Foundling Museum. 1.45pm for 2pm (GMT)

Mary Nevin

At the Hearth of Taste, Propriety, and Decorum: Female Consumers and the Eighteenth-Century Chimneypiece

Laura Granda-Mateu

Ladies of Liverpool and their lost collections: natural history knowledge-making in the North West, c. 1768–1837

Eszter Kovácz

Anne Conway and Ancient Wisdom

Thursday 29 April 2027

ZOOM. 6.45pm for 7pm (BST or GMT+1)

Elisabetta Marino

Not Just ‘the Mother of…’: Frances Trollope and the Beginning of Her Literary Career

Laura Giuliano.

Writing Art Across Borders: British Women Travellers, Artistic Identity, and Cultural Comparison in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Adriana Marinelli (Parthenope University of Naples)

Reclaiming Parthenope: Women Travellers and the Neapolitan Myth of the Siren

Upcoming events in February

Our final in-person seminar is taking place on Saturday 7 February at the Foundling Museum.

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.

Please see our seminars page for further details.

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.

Upcoming events in January 2026

WSG Online Seminar, 15 January 2026.

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.

Upcoming Zoom seminar, Thursday 6th November, 2025. 

We have an upcoming Zoom seminar on Thursday 6th November, 2025.  ZOOM 18:45 FOR 19.00 – 20.00 (GMT).

The papers to be presented are:

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.

All members are invited to attend. The Zoom link will be sent via the members list.

Upcoming in-person seminar at Foundling Museum, Saturday 4th October, 2025. 

We have an upcoming seminar taking place on Saturday 4th October, 2025.  In-Person: Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N 1AZ, Saturday 13.00 for 13:30 – 16:30, British Summer Time (GMT + 1)

The papers to be presented include:

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.

All members are invited to attend.