This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the wide variety of women’s engagement with literary and theatrical cultures in the long-nineteenth century as authors, performers and audience members.

This conference develops the transdisciplinary perspectives of fan studies and audience engagement research back into the pre-twentieth century era. Scholars are invited from the fields of literary studies, social history, cultural studies, readership studies, book history, fan studies, and history of leisure and recreation to foster dialogues on the subject of nineteenth-century female creativity.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Alexis Easley, University of St Thomas

Dr Emily Midorikawa and Dr Emma Sweeney will participate in a panel discussion about women’s literary friendships, drawing on their research for their recent book A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum Press, 2016)

We invite proposals of 300 words for 20 minute presentations or A3 posters relating to the conference theme.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Responses to women’s literature – reviews, articles in periodicals and newspapers, letters written to female authors, advice on reading offered to women

Women’s ephemera – scrapbooks, commonplace books, marginalia, correspondence, diaries

Female authors in conversation – intertextual references to other works, correspondence between authors and/or publishers

Gender and performance – theatrical and musical fandoms, public readings of poetry and prose, women’s public speaking

The promotion and marketing for cultural events and publications featuring women, and/or aimed at a female audience

Women and the literature of professionalization – scientific articles, monographs, medical treatises, autobiographies/biographies of prominent female professionals

Gender and performativity – writing under gendered pseudonyms, the ‘feminisation’ of genres such as the gothic and the romance

Please send your abstract and a 100 word biographical note to organiser Evan Hayles Gledhill at authorshipcelebrityfandom@gmail.com by 5 December 2017.