TERN2023 Epistolary Times / Time in Letters 6-7 October 2023 (online symposium) The clock is ticking. Schedules, delays, deadlines, queues worry our lives. Letters are often considered in terms of space and geographical distance. In 2023, TERN proposes to revisit…
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19th April 2023: LGBTQ+ History Month Rescheduled Seminar – Refiguring ‘The Maternal’: The Body of Christ and Regimes of Sexual Difference in the Eighteenth-Century West
Don’t miss our rescheduled LGBTQ+ History Month special seminar! Thomas Fleming from UCL will be presenting his paper titled ‘Refiguring ‘The Maternal’: The Body of Christ and Regimes of Sexual Difference in the Eighteenth-Century West’. Wednesday, 19th April 2023, 4pm…
Maternal Bodies Symposium (Birmingham, 15 June 2023)
Maternal Bodies is an interdisciplinary one-day symposium taking place at the University of Birmingham on 15 June 2023. We are interested in… Embodiment: as women, mothers, birthing parents, non-birthing/adoptive/step-parents, etc Medical and social control of reproductive bodies Institutions, corporations, or…
Finding Betty Joel: Uncovering the hidden histories of interwar design, making and style – PhD opportunity
Applications are invited for a fully-funded collaborative four-year PhD to commence in October 2023 at the University of Portsmouth. The PhD will be based in the School of Art, Design and Performance and will be supervised by Professor Deborah Sugg…
Black women’s organising in the 1980s – Shukri Ahmed
In 1982, the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) hosted its last national conference before it folded that very year. Its trajectory and demise are often considered indicative of the rise and end of the Black Women’s…
5th April 2023: Academic Fellows Celebration – Early Career Research Fellows Roundtable
Join us for a very special session featuring our Women’s History Network Early Career Research Fellows! Our ECR Fellows will be sharing their work on a diverse and fascinating range of topics from the history of women’s masturbation to the…
Everyday Gays, Ordinary Queers, and the National Lesbian and Gay Survey – Victoria Golding
Pride 1987, 10.10am: ‘Helped E. to throw pills down the cat with cystitis. Washed breakfast dishes. Brought Gay Vegetarian placard up from cellar. Fed goldfish.’ (Correspondent No.157)[1] This National Lesbian and Gay Survey contributor’s account of her involvement in the…
Girls in the workhouse: a question of morality, c.1880-1920 – Claire Phillips
In the late nineteenth century, anxiety was growing throughout society about the suitability of the workhouse for children. Children could enter the workhouse for many reasons: as part of destitute families, as orphans, or as a result of economic difficulties…
Medicine, morals, and masturbating women: John Marten and the changing face of female self-pleasure – Elizabeth Schlappa
From the early eighteenth century to the urban myths of today, masturbation has been credited with causing all manner of bodily miseries. Serious moral and medical alarm about self-pleasure was first popularised by an anonymous pamphlet entitled Onania, or, The…