A two-day conference at the National Portrait Gallery, 25-26 April 2008
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Organised by the National Portrait Gallery in partnership with King’s College London, this interdisciplinary conference will place the intellectual woman in her broader historical and cultural context. In the mid-eighteenth century, the literary and artistic woman was celebrated for the first time as a figure of patriotic pride and the index of national supremacy. Yet despite this period of ascendancy, the learned woman’s position was precarious and scandals threatened to eclipse the fame of individual women, such as Hester Thrale, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. This conference will develop the themes of the exhibition Brilliant Women: 18th- Century Bluestockings (13th March to 14th June 2008) and will explore the achievements, representations and reputation of intellectual women in the eighteenth century.
Papers will consider issues of female agency, patronage and promotion; the relationship between internal and external brilliance; the influence of the collective celebration of learned women and the effect of the changing political climate on bluestocking careers. British and American scholars from a range of disciplines, including English Literature, Art History and Cultural History, will raise these questions and consider the visual and cultural impact of these ‚brilliant women‘. For a full list of speakers and provisional paper titles, click here. Please note that this list is provisional and will be updated in due course.
Tickets for the conference also include a wine reception and a viewing of Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings on the evening of 25 April. This will be followed by a conference dinner, held in the River Room of the Strand Campus, King’s College London. A limited number of tickets for this dinner are available for booking before 25 February. Tickets for both events are available here on the conference booking page. We are pleased to be able to offer a limited number of free student places for this conference. See conference Webpage for details.
List of Speakers and Provisional Paper; Titles
Clare Barlow, PhD Candidate,
King’s College London & National Portrait Gallery, ‚Mrs Montagu not Mrs Modish: Virtue, Politeness and Female Learning‘
Clarissa Campbell Orr, Head of History,
Anglia Ruskin University: ‚Charlotte: Bluestocking Queen‘
Emma Clery, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature,
University of Southampton: „To dazzle let the Vain design“: Alexander Pope’s portrait gallery; or, the impossibility of brilliant women.
Kate Davies, Lecturer in American Literature, University of Newcastle: „Radical Portraits: Catharine Macaulay and Robert Edge Pine“
Harriet Guest, Professor in the Department of English and Related Studies and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York: ‚Hints towards a Change of Ministry‘: Gambling women in 1796′
Devoney Looser, Associate Professor of English,
University of Missouri: ‚The Blues gone Grey: Portraits of Bluestocking Women in Old Age.‘
Anne Mellor, Distinguished Professor of English, Women’s Studies, Literature and Art, UCLA: ‚Romantic Bluestockings: from Muses to Matrons‘.
Felicity Nussbaum, Professor of English Literature, Critical Theory, Gender Studies, Autobiography and Satire, UCLA: ‚Hester Thrale: „What Trace of the Wit?“
Marcia Pointon, Emerita Professor of the History of Art,
University of Manchester: ‚Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough’s Brilliants‘.
Susan Staves, Professor Emerita of English, Brandeis
University: ‚The Learned Female Soprano‘.
Shearer West, Professor of Art History, University of Birmingham: ‚Montagu, Siddons, Lady Macbeth‘
Alison Yarrington, Richmond Professor of Fine Art,
University of Glasgow: ‚Anne Seymour Damer (1748-1828), a sculptor of ‚republican perfection‘.
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