2010/11 Programme
September 25, 2010
Location: Room STB2
Vicki Joule (University of Plymouth): ‘Delarivier Manley: heroine of literary history’;
ABSTRACT: For recent scholars, Manley is regarded as a polemical writer. Her sexually transgressive and politically influential writings follow on from her predecessor Aphra Behn and mark her out as an important writer in terms of feminist literary history. Not only have we read her as a kind of heroine, but through her self-construction in literature, Manley actually casts her self in an heroic role. In this paper, I will be examining in more detail Manley’s early career as a playwright and in particular her first play, The Lost Lover (1696), where her long-standing involvement in literary history begins.
Vicki's research interests are in women's writing of the long eighteenth century, feminist literary history and theory. Recently, she has written on the lively and humorous novelist and playwright Mary Davys, published in the Women's Studies Group's special edition of Women's Writing in tribute to Mary Waldron. Currently, Vicki is working on a monograph on Delarivier Manley's literary career.
Sasha Garwood (University College London): 'So Wilfully Bent': Sex, Starvation and the Stuarts';
ABSTRACT: Sasha Garwood has studied at Oxford and UCL, where she's currently completing a PhD entitled 'The Skull Beneath the Skin: women and self-starvation in early modern English culture'. She is the author of 'Self-starvation on the Renaissance Stage' in the 2009 Shakespeare Jahrbuch and 'Fisting and feasting: food, sex, power and the non-normative female body in the erotic fiction of Pat Califia’ in the forthcoming anthology Spilling Over as well as various papers about sexuality, starvation and food culture in early modern England.
November 27, 2010
Location: Room ST273
Imke Heuer: ‘“I am guilty of having wrote the epilogue to ‘de Montfort’” - Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Playwriting, Patronage and Politics’;
ABSTRACT: Imke Heuer studied English and History at the Universities of Hamburg, Perugia, and York, where she completed a PhD in English and Related Literature. Her thesis, entitled ‘“The German’s Tale”: German History, English Drama and the Politics of Adaptation’, explores the ways in which historical novellas and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries engage with and appropriate the radicalism of the late 1790s, and looks at the interaction between genre, gender, politics and class. She has published/forthcoming articles on Byron’s plays, his engagement with women writers and dramatic appropriation of Gothic fiction, and on Harriet Lee, the Duchess of Devonshire, and historical fiction and tragedy. Currently she is preparing editions of two Gothic novels, Joshua Pickersgill's The Three Brothers and Grenville Fletcher's Rosalviva, or The Demon Dwarf, for Udolpho Press.
Pamela Pilbeam (Royal Holloway, University of London): 'Madame Tussaud, merchant of monarchy and murder'
ABSTRACT: Pamela Pilbeam is professor of French history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are France since 1789 and the history of waxworks. In 2003 she published Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (Hambledon). She is currently writing From Free Love to Algeria. The Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France to be published by Palgrave Macmillan and A Social History of Modern Europe from 1750 to the present, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell.
Anne Stott (Birkbeck, University of London): ‘Mothers of the Victorians: the Women of the Clapham Sect’;
ABSTRACT: The topic arises from Stott's work on the domestic lives of William Wilberforce and his friends and is intended as corrective to the male-dominated historiography of the Clapham Sect. By studying the lives of three women in particular, Barbara Spooner Wilberforce, Marianne Sykes Thornton, and Selina Mills Macaulay, it is hoped to follow up Davidoff and Hall's work on the inter-relationship of gender and religion in the late Georgian period. Stott's purpose is to show that within the ideology of separate spheres there were considerable differences of emphasis, created by ideology but also by personality.
January 29, 2011
Location: Room ST273
Tessa Storey (Royal Holloway, University of London): ‘Cosmetics, Poisons, Alchemy: Gender, Potions and Material Culture in Seventeenth-century Rome’;
ABSTRACT: Historians of early modern medicine have recently paid considerable attention to the making of medicines, cosmetics and chemical products in the domestic sphere, particularly in England and Spain. In particular they have documented the role played by elite women in the domestic production and in the circulation of the recipes themselves. This paper shifts the focus to both men and women, of middling rather than elite social extraction, who made up recipes in seventeenth-century Rome. Drawing on criminal archives, but with reference to my work on Italian Books of Secrets, it will explore the practices of two people engaged in both licit and illicit recipe making. It examines the ways in which the making of certain products –and hence the specific knowledge and equipment-was gendered; considers how this knowledge was transmitted; and explores the social networks which sustained the domestic production of legal and illegal substances.
Arlene Leis (University of York): ‘A Little Old China Mad: Lady Dorothea Banks and her dairy at Spring Grove’;
ABSTRACT: Lady Dorothea Banks, wife of the eminent man of science, Sir Joseph Banks, was an active collector of oriental, porcelain wares. Like many elite women, she followed the fashionable trend of transforming her dairy into an exquisite china cabinet. In the dairy, Lady Banks thoughtfully organized and displayed her collection of exotic porcelain on top of tables and across shelves and windowsills. The dairy provided her with a pastoral region where she used curatorial work to promote her landed status, and visualize herself as her husband’s productive counterpart.
This paper focuses on the rich and varied collection of oriental, porcelain wares amassed by Lady Banks at her villa in Spring Grove. Unfortunately, all what remains intact today of her collection is a handwritten essay addressing the subject of “Old China and Japan wares” containing some sketched illustrations and descriptions of the more remarkable pieces found in Lady Banks’ dairy. Studying this manuscript alongside other contemporary visual and textual accounts will not only recover the materiality, aesthetic and social meanings of some of the objects she accumulated, it also reveals how her collection worked to promote a much broader range of scientific and industrial activities including: agriculture, horticulture and the manufacturing of the arts, all of which were being promoted successfully at the Banks’ estate.
Arlene Leis is a second year PhD student at the University of York, working on a project entitled “Sarah Sophia Banks: Feminity, Sociability, and the Practice of Collecting in Late Georgian England”.
Joy Hudson (Birkbeck College, University of London): ‘“They all agreed nobody ever had so little a shape before, & that a Gust of Wind would blow you quite away’: Frances Burney’s really useful “Nobody”’.
ABSTRACT: Joy Hudson is a graduate student at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she is studying part-time for a PhD with the Dept. of English and Humanities. The subject of her thesis is spectatorship in the work of the eighteenth-century writer, Frances Burney. She is currently exploring the political background to Burney’s third novel, Camilla.
Annual Workshop
Myths of Flora: Representing, Repudiating, Recuperating the Goddess of Flowers
Keynote Speaker: Dr Ann B. (Rusty) Shteir
Saturday 25th June 2011, 10.00am - 5.00pm
Venue: Stewart House, University of London
Group Outing
Friday 1st April, 2011 at 1.00pm
We have arranged a group visit to see a rare full dress performance of Hannah Cowley's comedy A Bold Stroke for A Husband, at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. This will be followed by an optional historical tour of the theatre (commencing at 2.00pm).