free – Women's Studies Group 1558

WSG seminar series 2020-21

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2020-21. All meetings will start promptly at 1pm BST/GMT* (with arrivals from 12.30 onward to allow for necessary preparations and administration). We aim to finish by 3.30pm.

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. Becoming a member means you will be able to attend the Zoom and in-person seminars for the 2020-2021 season.

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September 19, 2020*
Stephen Spiess: Reading Strumpets: Thomas Heywood, Sexual Epistemology, and the Making of English Whoredom
Sonia Villegas Lopez: Female Libertinism in Gabriel de Brémond’s Transnational Oriental Fictions.
Anthony Walker-Cook: Descending into the Underworld with Mary Leapor and Sarah Fielding.

November 21, 2020
Rocio Martinez: To defend a princess’s rights to her father’s throne: Maria Theresia of Austria and the protestations against her renunciation of the inheritance of the Spanish Monarchy.
Avleen Grewal: Vathek: Gaze, Disorientations and Policing Identity.
Eva Lippold: Marriage and Magic Swords: Mariana Starke’s Factual Fairytale.

December 5, 2020
Daniel Beaumont: Melancholy and Despair among Early Modern English Women: A case study of Hannah Allen’s Satan’s Methods and Malice Baffled (1683).
Yvonne Noble: Elizabeth Elstob, Mary Delany, and Money.
Valerie Schutte: Popular Literature at the Accession of Queen Mary.

January 23, 2021
Megan Shaw: Looking towards a cultural history of Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649).
Gillian Beattie-Smith: Catherine Helen Spence: a consideration of her feminist and transnational agency.
Kate Stephenson: Lawyers, Débardeuses and Pages; Women Masquerading as Men.

February 20, 2021
Sarah Ailwood: ‘In justice to myself’: Legal and Textual Subjectivities in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Memoirs.
Daisy Winter: “I who am but dust”: mortal fear in Elizabeth Delaval’s ‘Memoirs and Meditations’.
Valentina Aparicio: Maria Graham’s Journal of a residence in Chile (1824): a transnational community of women.

March 20, 2021 Cheryll Duncan: ‘Much want of judgment’: new evidence concerning the singer Jane Barbier.
Maria Clara Pivate Biajoli: Understanding Current Readers’ Reception of Jane Austen through Fan Fiction. Miriam al Jamil: The Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s Birth Days: Weary and Waiting at the Florentine Court.

April 17, 2021*

Julie Vig: Women and martiality in the Sikh literature of early modern Punjab.
Francesca Saggini: ‘From St Martin’s Street to “Camilla Cottage.” Frances Burney’s Houses between Fact and Fantasy.’

Anna Jamieson: “Comforts in her Calamity”: Dorothea Fellowes’s Shopping and Spending in the late Eighteenth-Century Private Madhouse.

*Please note that the September and April meetings are BST, and the rest are GMT.

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

WSG seminar series 2019-20

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2019-20. All seminars will take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, starting promptly at 1pm and finishing at 4pm. Doors open at 12.30. All seminars are free and open to the public, though refreshments will cost £2 to those who aren’t WSG members. 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. Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum afterwards.

Saturday 21 September, 2019. Chairs Gillian Williamson and Carolyn D. Williams
Charmian Kenner: Sarah Andrews: furthering the cause of Latin American independence in early 19^th century London
Sonia Villegas López: Female libertinism in Gabriel de Brémond’s transnational oriental fictions
Rebecca Simpson: Scandal and the Maternal Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Confessions of Mary Toft [WSG Bursary awardee, 2018]
Alison Daniell: Of False Hair, Bolstered Hips and Witchcraft: The Regulation of Women’s Bodies and an Act of Parliament that Never Was

Saturday 23 November, 2019. Chairs Miriam al Jamil and Felicity Roberts
Masuda Qureshi: Celestial Revolutions: Hester Pulter and the circular skies.
Natasha Simonova: ‘Semiramis does not stand still’: Amabel Polwarth and Amateur Authorship
John Beddoes: Anna, Emmeline and Maria Edgeworth, Three Sisters of the Enlightenment: “I do not wish to be the cause of one of your tight laced faces.”
Francesca Saggini: Below and Beyond. On Re-reading Burney’s Biographies

Saturday 18 January, 2020. Chairs Angela Escott and Miriam al Jamil
Charlotte Young: Women’s involvement in Canterbury sequestrations, 1643-1650 [WSG Bursary winner, 2019]
Carol Stewart: Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves and the Politics of Opposition
Anne Stott: Princess Charlotte of Wales: gender and the “reversionary interest”
Katherine Woodhouse: “Madam Smith says, what shou’d the Captain do with such a wife as me who can only sit with a book in her hand”
Anna Jamieson: Madness Exhibited: The Margaret Nicholson Scandal

Saturday 21 March, 2020. Chairs Carolyn D. Williams and Angela Escott
Lindy Moore: The Scottish Schoolmistress in the Eighteenth Century
Alexis Wolf: Women and Mentoring in the Late Eighteenth Century: Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King and Mary Shelley
Rachel Eckersley: Female benefactors to dissenting academies in England
Catriona Wilson: “Some attention to those female members”: Feminised monarchy in the first exhibition of Kensington Palace’s State Apartments, 1899

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

WSG seminar and book launch December 2018

Come and help the Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 celebrate the launch of their 30th anniversary book, Exploring the Lives of Women! On 8 December at the Clore room in the Foundling Museum, London, WSG will be holding a one-off edition of one of their winter seminars, featuring a special set of 3 papers, ‘Women’s and Gender Studies in 2018 and Beyond’, followed by the book launch. Booking for this seminar is now open on eventbrite. Reserve your place to join us for three stimulating papers, a glass of bubbly or a soft drink and an opportunity to peruse the new book.* Hardback copies will be available for purchase on the day at the special pre-order price of £15.99 and editors and contributors will be there to sign or dedicate your copy. It would make an ideal Christmas present…

Speakers are:

Louise Duckling on ‘Exploring the Lives of Women, 1558-1837: A Journey in Images’
Bernadette Andrea on ‘‘English Daughters’ in Eighteenth-Century Morocco: Abjection and Assimilation in the Narratives of Thomas Pellow and Elizabeth Marsh’
Felicity Roberts on ‘The Academic Precariat: Writing Women’s History Now’

The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, 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 and open to the public, start promptly at 1pm and finish at 4, doors open at 12.30pm, and those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum before or after. This seminar is a parent and baby-friendly event.

*Once you have booked, no printed ticket is necessary to attend this event. Just turn up and give your name. If you are experiencing trouble booking, please email the WSG organisers on wsgpostbox@gmail.com.

*If you are intending to purchase a book, please also indicate to the organisers by emailing wsgpostbox@gmail.com. Please bring cash.

To order a copy online, see our publisher Pen & Sword’s page.

Artist and Artisan talk for the Johnson Society

WSG member Miriam al Jamil is giving a talk at 2.30pm on 10 February for the Johnson Society, on ‘Artist and Artisan in the European Magazine (1782-1826)’. Miriam is a doctoral researcher at Birkbeck College, studying eighteenth-century women and the Classical Canon of sculpture. In her research she looks at how women engaged with sculpture during this period when art academy training was not available to them, and turns an alternative lens on the Grand Tour.

Further information about the talk, and the Johnson Society, can be found here. But please note: all Johnson Society meetings are held at Wesley’s Chapel and Leysian Mission, which is right next door to John Wesley’s House museum. The equally interesting Dr Johnson’s House museum is a 25 minute walk away.

WSG seminar series 2017-18

The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 is pleased to announce the speakers for their seminar series 2017-18. All seminars will take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, starting promptly at 1pm and finishing at 4pm. Doors open at 12.30. All seminars are free and open to the public, though refreshments will cost £2 to those who aren’t WSG members. Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum afterwards.

Saturday 23 September, 2017. Chair: TBC
Charmian Mansell: Female servants in the early modern community: space, place and identity.
Christina Paine: Crises of celebrity: Angelica Catalani and her experience as a highly successful female immigrant singer in London, between 1806 and 1814.
Emma Clery: Jane Austen on money.

Saturday 25 November, 2017. Chair: TBC
Eva-Maria Lauenstein: ‘Within these tombes enclos’d’: delineating Renaissance love in Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius.
Mihoko Suzuki: Political writing beyond borders: Charlotte Stanley and Margaret Cavendish.
Valerie G. Derbyshire: Words and pictures: Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) and the works of the artists of her day.

Sunday 14 January, 2018. Chair: TBC
Maryann Feola: Aphra Behn and the shaping of an imagined Naples.
Karen Lipsedge: Reading women and the eighteenth-Ccntury home.
Sarah Burdett: From bloodthirsty Amazon to ‘Desp’rate Mother’: Sarah Yates’s re-invention of Queen Margaret of Anjou on the 1790s London stage.

Sunday March 11, 2018 (This is a ‘how-to’ session that also involves a measure of ‘work in progress’: the techniques under discussion are life writing, the use of legal documents, and audio research). Chair: TBC
Valerie Schutte: Princess, Duchess, Queen: Mary Tudor as represented in the long eighteenth century.
Cheryll Duncan: Music, women and the law: the challenges and rewards of legal documents.
Catriona Cooper: Listening to the Commons: the sounds of debate and the experience of women in Parliament c.1800.

For further information, see our seminars page, or contact the organiser Carolyn D. Williams. To join the WSG, see our membership page.