Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent Conference

Please see the conference programme below for our full lineup of speakers.

Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator and polemicist, celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’. The year 2025 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Barbauld’s death and the publication of a new four-volume scholarly edition of her Collected Works by Oxford University Press. We celebrate these landmarks with a two-day conference in-person at the King's Manor, University of York, and online.

‘Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent’ will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for Barbauld’s poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent. William McCarthy in his landmark biography named Barbauld a ‘Voice of the Enlightenment’; hers was an influential mode of enlightenment, mediated by Dissent.

• View our York Travel and Accommodation information document.

We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. She commanded, in Isobel Grundy’s words, a ‘various set of voices’, and she was acutely attuned to the rhetorical force of the human voice, working in forms and genres designed for vocalisation, from songs and hymns to speeches and sermons. Such voicings were informed by dissenting practices, but Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to these traditions, and in turn inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.

Our speakers will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for Barbauld’s poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent.

• See our Anna Letitia poster (PDF , 5,288kb)

Conference programme

View our Barbauld Voicing Dissent conference programme.

Book your place

Many thanks to our sponsors: MHRA; Dr Williams Trust; British Association for Victorian Studies; British Association for Romantic Studies; York Georgian Society; University of York Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies; University of York Department of English and Related Literature.