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An interdisciplinary CECS Day Conference

Gender and Empire, 1763-1815

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Saturday 1st December 2007

The King's Manor
Exhibition Square
YORK YO1 7EP

With papers from:

Kate Davies,  Cora Kaplan,  Jenny Mander, Martin Myrone, Karen O'Brien, Jim Watt

CECS Postgraduate organisers: Jordan Vibert and Sarah Sheena

Some of the most innovative recent work in eighteenth-century studies has turned toward an exploration of the changing meanings of empire, in particular the subtly shifting horizons of global empire following the Seven Years War. Gender was a key vector as imperial power shifted and resettled in this period. Army officers and women, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s favoured comparison, “fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures and ridicule”, served as early domestic indexes for the surface effects of empire – its “blind obedience”, “tyranny” and “sensualism”. This day conference brings together key scholars working in the fields of gender and imperial history, the histories of art and literature, for a discussion of new research emerging in this area.

PAPERS

Dr Kate Davies (University of Newcastle): 'The Poem that Ate America: Helen Maria Williams' "Ode on the Peace"'

Professor Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary): 'A Figure in the Text: Burke, Wordsworth, Opie and the Black Woman'

Dr Jenny Mander (University of Cambridge): 'Women and the Colonies: where did the Amazons go?'

Martin Myrone (Tate Britain): 'Macaroni Multiplicity: Gender and Empire in the 1770s'

Professor Karen O'Brien (University of Warwick): 'The Female Emigrant: Stories and Poems of Britain's Settler Colonies, 1763-1815'

Dr Jim Watt (University of York): '"The blessings of freedom": America and "the East" in the fiction of Robert Bage'