10th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference

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   due 9/30/01
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University of
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Gillian Beer is the president of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, as well as a scholar and professor there.  Beer is an internationally acclaimed scholar of literature who has received many honors, such as being named a judge on the Booker Prize Committee.  Beer is especially known for her innovations in the interdisciplinary study of science and literature.  The paper that she will give at the conference will discuss late 19th-century women poets and their engagement with evolutionary theory.  Key works by Gillian Beer:  Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth- Century Fiction (1983),  George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996). 

She has also edited the Oxford edition of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1996), George Meredith’s Modern Love (1995), and the Oxford edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1992).

Tilottama Rajan is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, where she is also a professor.  Rajan is one of the most significant critics of British Romanticism, highly regarded for her work with literary theory and philosophy in connection with Romanticism.  At the 2002 British Women Writers Conference, Rajan will be presenting a paper on feminism and reproduction in the Jacobin novel, focusing on Eliza Fenwick’s novel Secresy and drawing on the work of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and German Romantic philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.  Rajan has published widely on Romantic literature, including such key works as Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (1980) and The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (1990).  She has also edited Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga for Broadview Press (1998) and has recently co-edited Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-Forming Literature, 1789-1837 (1998).

Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace is a professor at Boston College, highly regarded for her work as a feminist scholar and for her use of material and popular culture in her studies of 18th-century British literature.  She has published widely, authoring two key recent works of feminist criticism: Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (1991) and Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (1997).  She has also edited the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory (1997), and has co-edited Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (1989).