WSG 2025 – 2026 Calendar of Events

Day/Date/Time EventDetails
Saturday 4 October 2025
13:30 – 16:30 (BST) GMT+ 1
In-person seminar 
Foundling Museum,40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
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.
28 October 2025
19:00 – 20:00 (GMT)
WSG Reading Group: Her StoriesFrances Brooks’ ‘History of Montague’
Thursday 6 November 2025
19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Online seminar via ZoomValerie 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
13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT)
In-person seminar 
Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
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
19:00 – 20:30 GMT
Online seminar via ZoomStephen 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
13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT)
In-person seminar 
Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
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.
Sunday 8 March 2026International Women’s DayDetails to be confirmed. WSG in collaboration with the Foundling Museum.
Thursday 12 March 2026
19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)                
Online seminar via ZoomSarah 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 19 March 2026Online seminar via ZoomElisabetta Marino: Mary Shelley and biography, between history and romance.
Ramit Samaddar: Sophia Goldborne in colonial Calcutta: 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: Victoria de Chastenay: a scholar, an archive, a digital edition.
Saturday 18 April 2026 (GMT)WorkshopAn opportunity to present and discuss your research interests.
Saturday 16 May 2026Summer VisitHam House visit. A NT property, former home of Catherine & Elizabeth Murray.

2025 – 2026 Call for papers from the Women’s Studies Group: 1558-1837 (London) 

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is a small, informal, multidisciplinary group formed to promote women’s studies in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century. Established in the 1980s, the group has enabled those interested in women’s and gender studies to keep in touch, hear about one another’s research, meetings and publications, and meet regularly to discuss relevant topics. We organize regular meetings and an annual workshop (see membership application form) where members can meet and discuss women’s studies topics. This season we shall also be hosting two book launches for publications by our members. We can offer advice and opportunities to engage in activities that increase opportunities for publication or enhance professional profiles in other ways. The WSG is open to men, women, and non-binary people, students, faculty, and independent scholars, all of whom are invited to join the group and give papers.

The group now has two kinds of meetings for seminars.

In-person seminar meetings. These will 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 – 4.30 pm. So please arrive a little early if you can.

ZOOM seminar meetings. These will take place on Thursday evenings and will be hosted by a member of the WSG committee. They will run from 19:00 – 20:30 GMT , with the waiting room opening at 18.45 GMT.

Topics can be related to any aspect of women’s studies: not only women writers, but any activity of a woman or women in the period of our concern, or anything that affects or is affected by women in this period, such as the law, religion, etc. Male writers writing about women or male historical figures relevant to the condition of women in this period are also a potential topic. Papers tackling aspects of women’s studies within or alongside the wider histories of gender and sexuality are particularly welcome; so are topics from the early part of our period. We would also welcome how-to presentations for discussion: examples of suitable topics would include, but are not limited to, grant applications, setting up research networks, becoming a curator, co-authorship, using specialised data, and writing about images. Papers should be 20-25 minutes.

Dates of seminar meetings: 
Saturday 4 October 2025In-person, Foundling Museum London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30, British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Thursday 6 November 2025ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Saturday 6 December 2025In-person, Foundling Museum, London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT)
Thursday 15 January 2026ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Thursday 12 March 2026  ZOOM 19:00 – 20:30 (GMT)
Saturday 7 February  2026  In-person, Foundling Museum, London 13:00 for 13:30 – 16:30 (GMT) 

Find out more about us on https://womensstudiesgroup.org

Please reply to 2wsgevents@gmail.com with expressions of interest and draft titles, listing all the seminar sessions when you are available to present your paper by 31 April 2025.  

Final titles and abstracts will be expected to follow by the end of May 2025. 

WSG Seminar Reminder: Thursday, April 10, 2025 via Zoom

WSG Seminar Reminder

Thursday 10 April 2025 – ZOOM

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

Chair: Karen Griscom

Host: Louise Duckling

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.

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

The seminar will take place on Zoom. 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.

For further information, please see our seminars page.  To join the WSG, please see our membership page.

WSG Seminar Reminder: Saturday March 15, 2025 at the Foundling Museum

Saturday March 15, 2025 at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N; 1.00 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.

To read the speakers’ abstracts, please find them on the seminars page on the WSG website.

This is an in-person meeting. The seminars are free and open to the public although non-members will be asked to make a donation of £2 for refreshments.

Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum before or after the seminar. We will be allowed into the room at 1.00, Greenwich Mean Time, to give us time to sort out paperwork and technology, but sessions will run from 1.30 – 4.30. Please arrive between 1.00 and 1.30. There is a break for tea, coffee and biscuits halfway through the session.

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.

If you have any queries please contact the Chair, Carolyn D. Williams, or Co-Chair, Gillian Williamson, by email at wsgworkshop@gmail.com

We look forward to welcoming you.

Reminder: Special Seminar with Merry Wiesner-Hanks February 13, 2025 via Zoom

Zoom starting at 7.00 pm, finishing at 8.00 pm GMT. Waiting room will open at 6.45pm.

Please join us for our special seminar with distinguished Professor Emerita Merry Wiesner-Hanks who will discuss her book Women and the Reformations. She will speak for 30 minutes, leaving 30 minutes for questions.

If you have not already registered for the event, please contact Valerie Schutte.