BWWC 2022

Just a reminder that tomorrow, April 30th, is the last day to register for the conference!

https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/registration/

As you are planning your trip to Waco, we hope you will consider visiting Baylor's Armstrong Browning Library. We are excited to share that the ABL is now home to Professor Deborah A. Logan's Harriet Martineau collection. The collection contains over 100 volumes, including original writing by Martineau as well as scholarly editions and scholarship on her works. Professor Logan writes, "The Armstrong Browning Library is such a good resource for Victorianists, and I'm proud to have my small collection be part of it...and hope the Martineau materials will be of use to other Victorian/Martineau scholars."

Recent Gift Enhances Harriet Martineau Resources at Armstrong Browning Library Professor Deborah A. Logan, professor emerita of victorian literature at Western Kentucky University, recently gifted Baylor's Armstrong Browning Library and Museum with her personal Harriet Martineau collection. This donation includes over 100 volumes that will fuel future research for visitin...

Remember to register before this Thursday, March 31st to receive our Early Bird rate!

BWWC Registration • $200 for full-time faculty (after March 31, cost is $250)• $100 for part-time faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars (after March 31, cost is $130)

Today's author highlight concludes our series on the authors in our logo! Read on to learn more about Phyllis Wheatley with a bio written by Baylor graduate student Sarah Kaderbek.

Now recognized as a foundress of both African American and transatlantic literature, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was born in West Africa but was enslaved at the age of seven or eight and purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley. Despite her enslavement, Wheatley quickly learned English and, with the help of her mistress, obtained a classical education. At the age of 14, Wheatley published her first poem in the Newport Mercury and, in just six years, had composed enough poems to put together a full-length book collection: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley chose to be published in London rather than Boston, and while in London, she gained an international reputation for “très-bons vers anglaise” (according to Voltaire’s estimation), was enthusiastically offered Benjamin Franklin’s “services,” and finally achieved her manumission from John Wheatley “at the desire of [her] friends in England” (Shields). Wheatley returned to America with Susanna; though she was freed upon their return, she continued to live with the Wheatleys (even after Susanna’s death) until she married John Peters, a free man, in 1776. Unfortunately, following the turmoil of the Revolution, Wheatley’s fortunes rapidly declined, and although she attempted to publish a second volume of poems, she died in 1784 before the project was accepted by a publisher.

From early scholarship of the twentieth century to the current conversation, critical views of Wheatley have shifted from “earlier treatments of her as a humble, limited, even racially self-hating figure” to recognitions “that she was a prodigiously informed, sophisticated, and talented poet and cultural critic” (Carretta). A remarkable boarder-crosser, “she has moved from the margin of the 18th-century transatlantic world to its center” (Carretta)

Today's author highlight was written by Baylor PhD student Kristyn Drew Woytkewicz. Read on to learn about Krupabai Satthianadhan!

Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862-1894) is widely considered the first Indian woman author of a novel in English. Born to Christian converts in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, she studied at Madras Medical College until her poor health from prior tuberculosis exposure forced her to leave her studies. She married the Christian convert and missionary Samuel Satthianadhan in 1881. Tragically, she died at the age of 31 from tuberculosis. Satthianadhan's first novel, Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, was published in 1894. Her second novel, the autobiographical Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life, was published posthumously in 1895.

In her life and works, Satthianadhan engaged questions of Christianity, gender, colonialism and reform. Focusing on her use of English, Auddy has argued that Satthianadhan’s texts display an “Indianization” of the language, working towards “formulating suitable discourses for the depiction of the realities of Indian life and culture” (94). Post-colonial and feminist scholarship remain interested in the cultural contradictions of Satthianadhan’s work.

We are excited to announce that registration for the conference is officially open!

Registration – Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Conference Registration Registration for the thirtieth annual British Women Writers Conference is now open! Please use this link to register for the conference. The deadline for conference registration is 11:59 PM CST on Saturday, April 30. If you need to cancel your registration, please email bwwc2022@baylor....

Today's author highlight was written by Baylor graduate student Alli Scheidegger. Read on to learn more about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu!

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (baptized 1689, died 1762) is remembered for her witty prose and fresh cultural commentary—and for laughingly rejecting the affections of Alexander Pope. The daughter of a duke, she eloped with longtime suitor Edward Wortley Montagu to escape marriage to another suitor. When her husband was appointed ambassador to Turkey, Montagu traveled with him and wrote to friends back home describing her experiences of Hanover, Vienna, Adrianople, and finally Constantinople. She collected and later edited these letters into the Turkish Embassy Letters, which she shared with friends but did not publish during her lifetime. In addition to sharing experiences of unfamiliar cultures, Montagu also shared medical innovations she’d witnessed in her travels, such as smallpox inoculation. Herself a smallpox survivor, she worked to spread awareness of this unfamiliar treatment back in England and pointed concerned parents to her own daughter, who had been inoculated at the start of a smallpox outbreak.

Contemporary scholarship on Montagu wrestles with questions of cultural appropriation and gender roles in Montagu’s Letters. As Danielle Tuttle observes, Montagu eagerly adopted Turkish dress, but then refused to disrobe in the hamam (Turkish public bath). This refusal can be read as a critique of the constraints of polite English culture from which Montagu cannot fully escape, or as a desire to observe rather than participate with the other naked women. In either case, Montagu’s interpretation of this nakedness within the hamam unexpectedly reads nakedness as liberating rather than objectifying, in contrast with the familiar constraints of English dress.

Abstracts are due this Monday, January 31st! For more information about the conference and this year's focus on "Borders," please visit our website at: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/. To submit an abstract, please use the form found here: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/submissions/. For questions, please email [email protected]

Submissions – Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Conference Submissions The online form for abstract submissions is live! This submissions form will remain open until 11:59 PM CST on Friday, January 14, 2022. If you encounter any problems in submitting your abstract, please feel free to contact the conference organizers at [email protected]. In addition to...

The organizing committee of the 2022 British Women Writers Conference recognizes that the recent Omicron surge has made the start of many people’s semesters challenging. For that reason, we are extending the abstract deadline to January 31st. Thank you to all who have already submitted their abstracts. We are looking forward to an exciting and energizing event May 19–21! For more information about the conference and this year's focus on "Borders," please visit our website at: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/. To submit an abstract, please use the form found here: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/submissions/. For questions, please email [email protected]

Submissions – Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Conference Submissions The online form for abstract submissions is live! This submissions form will remain open until 11:59 PM CST on Friday, January 14, 2022. If you encounter any problems in submitting your abstract, please feel free to contact the conference organizers at [email protected]. In addition to...

Today's author highlight is written by BWWC 2022 planning committee member Elizabeth Parker. Read on to learn about Isabella Bird!

Isabella Lucy Bird, married name Bishop (1831-1904), was a famed traveler, author, and naturalist. She was one of the first women admitted to the Royal Geographical Society, and her publications include books chronicling her travels to regions as distant from her home country as Hawaii, China, Australia and New Zealand, and Tibet, to name a few. She visited every continent except Antarctica on her travels. According to biographers, Bird’s first overseas journey was undertaken in 1854 in an effort to improve her chronically ill health. She spent seven months in Canada and the United States on this trip, writing about her travels in “The Englishwoman in America” (published in 1856). Between 1856 and 1901, Bishop’s travels, many of them made without a companion, were undertaken for a variety of reasons: while her early journeys seemed to be largely for health, with exploration as an attendant benefit, and some were made for naturalistic observations or geographical reasons, her later trips emerged from her commitment to medical missions. Biographers note that this shift in focus to medical missions occurred after her husband, Dr. John Bishop, died in 1886. Characteristically, Bird did not go unprepared. She studied medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital in London before being consecrated for mission work by famed preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1888.

Bishop’s legacy is not uncomplicated. Although Bird is recognized as a pioneering figure for women’s involvement in exploration, naturalism, and travel-writing, and was known for her piety and compassion, both of which emerged from her serious faith commitments, she is also scrutinized for an innately Anglo-centric posture toward the people she encountered on her travels. Scholars like Laurence Williams and Steve Clark, however, note that her travelogues, particularly Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), can be read as “simultaneously radical and conservative, sympathetic and denunciatory, staunchly imperial and anticipatory of postcolonial critique” (abstract). Bird, Williams and Clark argue, “is better understood less as a representative of British imperialism, than as an avatar of cosmopolitan awareness and utopian horizons already emergent in the later nineteenth century” (3).

Happy New Year from the BWWC planning committee! We wanted to remind everyone that abstracts are due January 14, 2022. Here is the CFP:

The organizers of the 2022 British Women Writers Conference held this year at Baylor University invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of “Borders” in 18th- and 19th-century British women’s writing. In response to the 2021 BWWC “Reorientations,” panels and papers on topics related to race and ethnicity are especially welcome.

The 18th and 19th centuries were exciting and disorienting periods in British history as the borders of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, geography, economics, and aesthetics were drawn and redrawn on the cultural map. This flux manifested itself in physical and ideological “border crossings” between the rural and urban, the religious and the secular, the domestic and the professional, the private and the public, the metropole and the periphery, and so on. The theme of “Borders” invites contributors to articulate and speculate on crossing, redrawing, transgressing, retreating from, and reinforcing such dividing lines.

Borders may be broadly interpreted to include scholarship concerning borders within and between scholarly disciplines, borders within form and genre, political and geographical borders, socio-economic boundaries and borders, and borders between individuals or identities, particularly those of diverse racial or ethnic identities.

For a full description of the CFP and other conference information, please visit the website at: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/

Abstracts are due January 14, 2022, and may be submitted through the website at https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/submissions/

For questions, please email [email protected]

We hope to see you in May!

Submissions – Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Conference Submissions The online form for abstract submissions is live! This submissions form will remain open until 11:59 PM CST on Friday, January 14, 2022. If you encounter any problems in submitting your abstract, please feel free to contact the conference organizers at [email protected]. In addition to...

This week's author highlight was written by Baylor graduate student Sarah Tharp. Read on to learn more about Toru Dutt!

Toru Dutt was a Bengali writer and translator who worked in and with French, English, and Sanskrit. Born 4 March 1856 in India, she died 30 August 1877 at the age of 21. She and her family spent several years in Europe, where she continued her studies. She wrote poetry, two novels, Bianca, or the Spanish Maiden and Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, and translated many poems in her other collected works. Though only A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was published in her lifetime, her father found her writings and collaborations with her sister Aru (1854-1874) and had them published posthumously. Her writings were globally recognized within a few years of her death, as Edmund Gosse noted in his “Introductory Memoir” to her posthumously published collection, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. As a Bengali Christian woman who had traveled and studied in Europe and who was also educated in Sanskrit, Dutt’s writings transcend borders.