Writing Women: A Colloquium

Tuesday 31 January 2023, 1.45pm - 7pm
Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College

Join us for an afternoon of talks and debate about what it can mean to be a woman writing about women.

The speakers will share their experience of creating compelling narratives and explore the challenges of communicating their work to different groups of readers. Gender may be our starting point, but we will be considering other lenses through which we can understand more fully the practices and purposes of life-writing. The afternoon will be structured to allow maximum time for inclusive discussion and will provide a rich, engaging experience for those who read, write or think about life-writing.

This will be followed by the OCLW Linton Lecture, delivered by Dr Anna Beer on her new book Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature.

Tickets for either the colloquium or the Linton Lecture (or both) can be booked on this page.

Schedule:

1.45pm: Welcome — Dr Kate Kennedy 

2pm: Perspectives I — Chair: Dr Victoria Phillips

Dr Michelle Deininger - Confronting Apocalypse: Writing, Teaching, and Ecofeminism 

From teaching plague during the pandemic to writing about environmental crisis in the wake of global fires, floods, and droughts, this talk will reflect on the process of writing, researching, and teaching apocalypse from an ecofeminist perspective.

Dr Leah Broad - Writing musical women

I will be talking about the knitting together of multiple lives and the challenges inherent in writing lives where very little knowledge about the subject can be assumed at all.

Discussion

--- 3pm: Break (Tea and Coffee) ---

3.30pm: Perspectives II — Chair: Dr Victoria Phillips

Dr Siân Brooke - There are no women on the Internet

Technology and the Internet have amplified how we think about gender and identity. In this talk, I will summarise how online communication authors women from a default masculine perspective. Considering anonymity, memes, and Internet terminology we will explore how we write women.

Dr Kate Kirkpatrick - Writing Simone de Beauvoir

I will begin by framing some general questions debated in the philosophy of biography before considering a specific case. I will outline some suspicions and discoveries that led me to write a new biography of Simone de Beauvoir; address significant distortions in her Anglo-American reception; suggest the ways she wrote back against them; and explore the feminist politics that still affect the ways we write her—and other women—today. 

Discussion

4.30pm: Q&A with audience — Chair: Dr Anna Beer

5pm: Closing words — Dr Kate Kennedy

5.30pm: The Linton Lecture: Eve Bites Back

Speaker: Dr Anna Beer

The Linton Lecture will be followed by a drinks reception for event speakers, OCLW Linton Friends, OCLW Visiting Scholars and invited guests. 

Participants

Dr Anna Beer, Kellogg College, Oxford

Anna is a cross-disciplinary scholar and biographer, working at the intersection of literature, history and the arts. The author of lives of John Milton, William Shakespeare, and a groundbreaking group biography focusing on female composers (Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music), her most recent book is Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature (2022), which will be the subject of her Linton Lecture.

Dr Leah Broad, Christ Church, University of Oxford

Leah’s first book Quartet (Faber & Faber), a group biography of four women composers, appears in March. Alongside her academic writing, Leah is also active as a journalist and broadcaster, writing for publications including The Guardian and BBC Music Magazine, and appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3 discussing women in music.

Dr Siân Brooke, Oxford Internet Institute

Siân (she/her), a Leverhulme Fellow in Computational Social Science Research currently based at the LSE, and with a background in political philosophy, sociology, and data science, focuses on how technologies perpetuate gendered inequality and what interventions are effective against online discrimination. Siân’s passion for diversity in computing extends beyond her academic work, to activism, and engagement with outreach programmes focused on greater diversity in programming.

Dr Michelle Deininger, Cardiff University

Michelle Deininger (she/her) is a lecturer in the Division of Lifelong Learning at Cardiff University, managing and developing humanities courses for adult learners. Michelle completed a PhD in women’s writing from Wales at Cardiff University, having begun her educational journey as a mature student at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. She writes on a wide range of areas, from working class identity to environmental crisis in young adult fiction.

Dr Kate Kirkpatrick, Regent's Park College, Oxford

Kate Kirkpatrick is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford. She is the author of several books and articles on French existentialist philosophy, including the internationally acclaimed biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019), which was a best book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and the Telegraph, and which is currently being translated into over a dozen languages. 

Dr Victoria Phillips, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Victoria Phillips is a writer, historian, teacher, and student. Her research and writing centres on questions of U.S. women, internationalism, and agency. Roles include co-directing the Cold War Archival Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington DC, which offers cutting edge archival training to MA and PhD students, and houses the CARE International Research Project.

This event will take place in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium (LWA) (accessibility information). Wolfson College advises caution by wearing masks and not attending if you are feeling unwell.

Event Image: Margaret Llewelyn Davies and colleague at their desks