Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent

Posted on 6 May 2025

The Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies will host our summer conference, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent.

The conference will take place at King’s Manor, University of York, and online on 27-28 June 2025.

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, and online.

Our keynote speakers William McCarthy, Elizabeth Kraft, Scott Krawczyk and Emma Clery will discuss editing Barbauld’s work, will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for her poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent.

We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. 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. Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to dissenting traditions, and inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.

Registration and attendance are free for University of York students, and students are very much encouraged to attend! For full registration details, see the conference web page.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the MHRA, Dr Williams Trust, British Association of Romantic Studies, British Association of Victorian Studies, and York Georgian Society.