Women in the Archives

On March 5-7, 2009 the WWP hosted Women in the Archives, a two-day conference on the role of archival materials in shaping the study of early modern women's writing. The conference was co-sponsored by the WWP and the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, with generous financial support from the Brown University President's Office, the Brown University Library, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the English Department's Zucker Fund, and the Brown University Graduate School. The conference web site and schedule are available for historical reference. A summary of the event is provided here with links to abstracts or, where available, full papers. An exhibit on "women in the archives" including a fuller summary of the conference will be published at the WWP web site in summer 2009.

This conference was the second event in what is now an ongoing series.

All materials presented below are drafts and should not be quoted without first consulting the author.

Keynote lecture: "Paraplex:  Or, the Functions of Angels in the Archives"

Margaret Ezell, Texas A&M University

Panel discussion 1: Materialities of the Archive

Jacqueline Wernimont (moderator), Sheila Cavanagh, Earle Havens, Sandra Petrulionis, Elizabeth Vincelette

Keynote lecture: "Silent Bodies: Archives, Race, Women and the Cultural Historian"

Margo Hendricks, University of California, Santa Cruz

Paper session 1

Zephorene Stickney and Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College: "A Grand Tour in 1862: Digitizing Documents and Parsing an Itinerary"

Noelle A. Baker, independent scholar, and Sandra H. Petrulionis, Penn State Altoona: "'I defy tomorrow': Mary Moody Emerson, Women’s Writing, and Revolutions in the Archive"

Paper session 2

Elizabeth Patton, Johns Hopkins University: "Three Texts By or About Women from English Catholic Recusant Families:  Anne (Dacre) Howard, Countess of Arundel (1557-1630); Dorothy Arundell (1559/60-1613); and Ann Bellamy (fl. ca. 1580-1595)."

Juliette Paul, University of Missouri-Columbia: "Histories of Manuscripts: Jane Barker's Poems in the Archive"

Earle Havens, Johns Hopkins University: "Smugglers, Patronesses and Scribes: Archival Remnants of Disorder and Activism among Elizabethan Catholic Women"

Panel discussion 2: Editing the Archive

Margaret Ezell (moderator), Noelle Baker, Kate Eichhorn, Elizabeth Hageman, Elizabeth Patton, Juliette Paul

Paper session 3

Elizabeth Vincelette, Old Dominion University: Independent Women:  Recovery, Genre, and Identity in the Archive"

Kate Eichhorn, The New School: "Reading the Recipe Box: Archives, Memory and Embodied Knowledge"

Sandra Dedo, Notre Dame University: "Re-Zoning the Historical Memory: Susan Howe's Poetics of Marginalization and Marginalia"

Paper session 4

Sheila Cavanagh, Emory University: "Building a Collaborative Archive: 14 Years of the Emory Women Writers Resource Project"

Julia Flanders and John Melson, Brown University: "Close, Near, and Distant Reading"

Gina Luria Walker, The New School: "Mary Hays: Archives and Contexts"

Panel discussion 3: Pedagogy in the Archive

Gail Cohee (moderator), Elizabeth Hageman, Kathryn Tomasek, Gina Luria Walker