Elaine presented the paper, which offered an overview of our approach to editing Behn’s texts and the principles we’ve developed as a result. It was great to be back conferencing.
You can view the slides of our talk here, and the accompanying script here.
New Conference Date: 14-16 July 2022, Loughborough University UK
Like so many events and occasions, the planned end-of-project conference ‘Early Modern Words’ had to be postponed back in April 2020. However, given the national and international developments in the pandemic, the project team now hope the event can go ahead next year with the new dates of 14-16 July 2022.
Our objectives for the conference, taking place at Loughborough University, remain the same: to foster interdisciplinary exchanges between those working on early modern texts, society and culture in literature, linguistics, history and other fields; to provide a potential spark for future collaborations and research projects; and to shamelessly promote Aphra Behn’s life and works alongside recent, innovative and cutting-edge research in early modern studies.
We look forward to welcoming our four plenary speakers who represent the range of disciplinary expertise in early modern studies:
Professor Terttu Nevalainen, University of Helsinki
Professor Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester
Professor Ruth Ahnert, QMUL
Professor Tim Harris, Brown University
We are also pleased that so many of our original speakers have confirmed their intention to participate in the rescheduled event.
Given that more than two years will have passed between the original conference date and the rescheduled event, we are also issuing a further Call for Papers to allow others working on relevant areas to join the conversation and share their research.
Photograph by Claire Bowditch (personal collection)
Members of the Behn project have organised and will be taking part in a virtual conference on Restoration women at the Huntington Library, which is scheduled for the 15th and 16th April 2021.
The two-day event, “This Reading of Books Is a Pernicious Thing”: Restoration Women Writers and Their Readers, will bring together scholars working on the lives and writings of Restoration women – including Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Finsh and Mary Pix – and explore questions relating to editing, digital approaches, race and readership, among others. The event is funded by The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. The full conference schedule is below.
Elaine has also written a short blogpost reflecting on her research at the Huntington, and its history in promoting women’s writing, for the library.
Photograph by Claire Bowditch (personal collection)
If you are interested in attending the conference – via Zoom – then you can reserve a place for free here:
There may not be the opportunity to visit the beautiful gardens of the Huntington, but the conference should prove to be a stimulating and engaging event, wherever in the world you happen to be!
Conference Schedule
THURSDAY, APRIL 15
All times arePDT.
9 a.m. – Welcome: Steve Hindle, The Huntington Introduction: Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University (Convener)
9:15 a.m. – Session 1: Publication and its Perils
David Norbrook, Emeritus Fellow, Merton College, Oxford “Lucy Hutchinson and the Perils of Publication”
Claire Bowditch, University of Queensland “‘a Purse that seldom fails’?: Aphra Behn’s Finances and Readers’ Legacies”
Jennifer Keith, University of North Carolina at Greensboro “Anne Finch’s Early Readers in Manuscript and Print”
10:45 a.m. – Break
11 a.m. – Session 2: Machines, Networks, and Book Catalogues
Marie-Louise Coolahan, National University of Ireland Galway “Late Seventeenth-Century Book Owners and Women’s Writing”
Julia Flanders, Northeastern University “Reading Models, Modelling Reading: Digital Texts and Human Readers”
12:15 p.m. – Closing Discussion: Elaine Hobby
FRIDAY, APRIL 16
9:15 a.m. – Session 3: Plays on Stage
Elizabeth H. Hageman, Professor Emerita, University of New Hampshire “Katherine Philips’s Plays on Stage, in Manuscript, and in Print”
Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University “Staging Reading in Aphra Behn”
Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky “‘Dazeling white’: Erasing Blackness in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks”
10:45 a.m. – Break
11 a.m. – Session 4: Reading Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Past, Present and Future
Lisa Sarasohn, Professor Emerita, Oregon State University “‘But to cut off tedious and unnecessary disputes, I return to the expressing of my own opinion…’ (Philosophical Letters, 1664, 81.) Margaret Cavendish’s Gripers and Groupies”
Shawn W. Moore, Florida Southwestern State College “Reading Margaret Cavendish in the Twenty-First Century”
12:15 p.m. – Break
12:30 p.m. – Closing Discussion: All participants, chaired by Elaine Hobby
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