Please note this two-day symposium will take place online on 24-25th June 2021 in British Summer Time (BST) (UCT+1) via Zoom.
For a complete programme, including speakers’ abstracts, please download our PDF version.
24th June
10:00 – 10:15 Registration and Welcome
10:15 – 11:45 Panel 1: Creating Agency
Chair: Jake Arthur (University of Oxford)
Katherine Mennis (University of Oxford): ‘Translators Learn of Her’: Latin Translation and Women’s Agency
Jessica Sternbach (Temple University): Virginal Spaces: Feminine Music and Space in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting
Caitlin Dahl (University of Pittsburgh): Playful Articulation: Voicing Female Desire in Les Mémoires de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière
11:45 – 12:00 Break
12:00 – 13:30 Panel 2: Crafting Agency
Chair: Ellice Wu (Nanyang Technological University)
Emily Fu (University of Toronto): Making and Thinking Small: Encounters with Pronk Poppenhuisen
Mallory Haselberger (University of Maryland): Learning to Draw: Giovanna Garzoni’s Libro de’caratteri and Transnational Calligraphy
Lorenz A. Hindrichsen (Independent Scholar): Glocal Intersectionality in Lady Drury’s Closet
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 Panel 3: Embodying Agency
Chair: Valentina Finger (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
Hayley O’Kell (University of Leeds): ‘They say the ladies eat these clays, to tone down their colour’: Perilous Beauty Regimes in Early Modern Spain
Selin Ozulkulu (Williams College): Beautiful Protection: Henna in Anatolian Henna Nights
Blanca Llanes Parra (University of Valencia): Gender-Based Violence and Women’s Agency in Early Modern Madrid
16:00 – 16:15 Break
16:15 – 17:45 Panel 4: Challenging Representations
Chair: Tristan Marshall (Shakespeare’s Globe)
Seth Wilson (University of Georgia): Restoration Actresses and the Invention of the English Woman
Claire Becker (University of Rochester): Mother Juana de la Cruz Through the Eyes of Father Antonio Daza
Rathika Muthukumaran (University of Oxford): The ‘Penthesilean of China’ and the ‘Arrias and Portias of Rome’ in India: Mediating Women’s Agency and Asian ethnography on the Late-Stuart Stage
17:45 – 18:00 Break
18:00 – 19:00 Keynote: Agency and Activism: Then and Now
Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
25th June
10:00 – 10:15 Registration and Welcome
10:15 – 11:45 Panel 5: Practising Agency
Chair: Nancy Haijing Jiang (Northwestern University)
Chloe Fairbanks (University of Oxford): ‘For no man’s pleasure, I’: Exercising Female Agency in the Early Modern English Tavern
Laura Roberts (University of Oxford): ‘She was not only your Mother but your Captain’: English Nuns, Religious Violence, and Self-Identification in the Dutch Revolt, 1566-1630
Urvi Shah (Jadavpur University) and Debraj Ghatak (Independent Scholar): Religious Agency, Cult Worship and Traditions of Womanhood in Mangalkabya
11:45 – 12:00 Break
12:00 – 13:30 Panel 6: Mobile Agents
Chair: Serena Laiena (University of Cambridge)
Chris Higgins (Birkbeck): ‘Wide Wandring Weemen’: the nature and variety of female mobility in the early modern era
Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen (Independent Scholar): Agents, Acquisitions, and Agency: Queen Christina of Sweden’s Development of Antiquarian Collections in Stockholm and Rome
Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University): The Politics of Sanctity: Luisa de Carvajal in Anglo-Spanish contexts
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 Panel 7: Networks of Agency
Chair: Chimène Bateman (University of Oxford)
Anne R. Larsen (Hope College): Salons, Agency, and the Self-Representation of Three French Seventeenth-Century Women of Science
Olin Moctezuma-Burns (University of Cambridge): Mary Somerset’s seed lists and the paperwork of transnational cooperation
Ben James (King’s College London): Letters of a Portuguese Abbess: Madre Soror Maria da Cruz
16:00 – 16:15 Break
16:15 – 17:45 Panel 8: Confronting Power
Chair: Sam Dobbie (University of Glasgow)
Ruchika Sharma (University of Delhi): Bequeathing Unto Thee: Intimacy and Materiality in Mixed-Race Households in early Colonial Bengal
Erica Levenson (Crane School of Music, State University of New York, Potsdam): From the French Courtroom to the English Opera: The Trial of Marie-Catherine Cadière on the Early Eighteenth-Century London Stage
Jagyoseni Mandal (University of Oxford): ‘Why are women kept in the protest?‘: Revisiting the Bishnoi Movement (1730), The First Environmentalist Movement in India in light of today’s Protests
17:45 – 18:00 Break
18:00 – 19:15 Women and Agency: Transnational Perspectives
Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Dr Nadia Cattoni (University of Lausanne)
Professor Bernadette Andrea (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Professor Suraiya Faroqhi (Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul)
Professor Ros Smith (Australian National University, Canberra)
19:15 – 19:20 Closing Remarks
Symposium Organisers: Kate Allan (University of Oxford) and Nupur Patel (University of Oxford)
Women and Agency: Transnational Perspectives, c.1450-1790 