Call for Papers ‘Portraits & Poses’

Call for Papers

Portraits & Poses: Representations of Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe.

Annual Conference of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

This conference seeks to address the various modes and strategies through which female intellectuals (authors, scientists, educators, and others) sought to negotiate and legitimize their authority in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (1600-1800).

The 17^th and 18^th centuries have often been described as a decisive period in terms of professionalization as well as disciplinary formation and/or consolidation in the arts and sciences. In the course of this period, learned women increasingly articulated an awareness of their public image and were actively involved in modelling these representations. There is a growing body of scholarship on such individual women’s (self)representation as intellectuals, that invites us to draw out its implications for early-modern cultural history more broadly.

Multiple questions arise when examining representations of female intellectual authority during the Early Modern period and the Enlightenment: which visual and/or textual strategies (e.g. portraits, paratexts and ego-documents) did women (and their critics) use to construct their persona in the emerging intellectual, scientific and literary fields; to what extent were these homogeneous, complementary or rather conflictual? And how did representations of personal and collective authority interact? For instance, when and why did women resort to their (private/public) contact with other (female) authorities or rather shy away from gendered association and/or collaboration? And to what extent were these legitimizing strategies determined by historical context, geographical boundaries and social position?

We welcome submissions in the form of complete sessions (3 papers + response) or individual papers (20 minutes) preferably in English on the following topics:

• Text and Image: Textual and visual representations of women as intellectual authorities
• Networks of Authority: uses of gendered associations (through paratexts, dedications, ego-documents) as strategies to gain authority;
• Disciplines: inclusion/exclusion strategies of and by women in emerging disciplines
• Markets and publication strategies: commercial strategies; branding female authority in the “public market”; discourse on fame/reputation and gender;
• Labels: conceptualizing/classifying female intellectuals and authors in early historiography and accounts of the cultural field.

Potential speakers are invited to submit a title and abstract of 300 words by May 15 2018. These, accompanied by a short CV, can be sent to PortraitsandPoses@18e-eeuw.nl.

Notification of acceptance will be given by July 1st 2018. Selected papers will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume after the conference; authors will be asked to submit revised versions of their conference paper by July 1st, 2019.

Organising committee

Dr. Beatrijs Vanacker
Dr. Lieke van Deinsen
Prof. Dr. Alicia C. Montoya
Prof. Dr. Anke Gilleir