Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online’ conference

The Conference on the theme ‘Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online’ was held at the Huntington Library on Friday 8th December - Saturday 10th December 2023. Many thanks to all speakers and organisers.

CORRESPONDENCE & EMBODIMENT: THE BLUESTOCKING CORPUS ONLINE

Friday, December 8, 2023

A History of the Montagu Collection at The Huntington

Vanessa Wilkie (The Huntington) and Karla Nielsen (The Huntington)

EMCO (Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online): The Physical Archive and its Virtual Other

Joanna Barker (Durham and EMCO Senior Editor/Project Manager)

Alexander Roberts (Swansea University), Daniel Archambault (Newcastle University), and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes)

Gender and Knowledge

Moderator: Emily Anderson (University of Southern California)

Rachael Scarborough King (UC Santa Barbara) “Improving Letters: Self- and Literary Improvement in Women's Epistolary Genres”

Nataliia Voloshkova (Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz) [Paper read by Nicole Pohl] “Bluestockings and Science: Acquiring, Sharing, and Employing Knowledge”

Absence and Presence

Moderator: Susan Carlile (Cal State Long Beach)

Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London) “Embodying Mind: Portraits of Elizabeth Montagu”

Felicity Nussbaum (UCLA) “The Beloved Absent: The Correspondence Between Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale Piozzi”

Embodying Language: The Letter and Creative and Critical Modes of Writing

Moderator: Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes)

Betty A. Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University) “Unclothed Bodies: The Problem of Enclosures in the Montagu Collection”

Mike Cousins (Historian) “Keeping Track of Mrs. Montagu: Challenges in Dating her Correspondence with Lord Lyttelton, and a Comparison with Unpublished Letter Collections of Some Other Contemporary Women Writers”

Bodies in Letters, Letters as Bodies

Moderator: Dena Goodman (University of Michigan)

Lisa Forman Cody (Claremont McKenna College) “Pregnant Pauses”: Reproduction in—and as—Letter Writing"

Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham) “ʽWe must chat about invalids’: The Lived Body in British Women’s Letters, 1730-1800”

In Sickness and in Health: Bluestocking Friendship

Moderator: Karla Nielsen (The Huntington)

Anna Senkiw (Oxford Brookes) [Read by Joanna Barker] “ʽSeveral weeks indisposition, a little dastardly fever lurking about me, has hinderd my coming to the Adelphi’: Friendship with the Garricks, in Sickness and in Health”

Helen Deutsch (UCLA) “Symptomatic Correspondences, Female Complaints: Authorship, Friendship and Illness in the Montagu Letters

Please note that all dates and location information are provisional, initially taken from the library and archive catalogues. As our section editors continue to work through the material we will update our database and the changes will be reflected across the edition.

Browser support: The website works best using the Chrome, Edge, and Firefox browsers on the PC, and only Chrome and Firefox on the Mac.