This section of the website is available in PDF format:

Download CFP Here

The theme for this year's conference is "Speaking with Authority," which encourages submissions that reflect on the various forms of power that women writers wield in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches to the writers of this period, and we are especially interested in the ways women writers gain, accept, resist, and complicate authority and power. We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be Deborah Epstein Nord, Sally Mitchell, Teresa Mangum, Ann Ardis, Laura Rosenthal, and Ellen Rosenman. We encourage proposals for panels and individual papers that consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

Narrative as Political Tool

• Issues of empire and colonization
• The politics of representing social class
• Nationalism and female agency
• Sexuality and the body
• Race and subjectivity

Women Writing in Subgenres

• New Woman fiction
• The gothic novel
• Sensation fiction
• The domestic novel or the comedy of manners
• Poetry
• Drama
• Non-fiction in all its forms

Representations of and Responses to Women's Voices

• Women's letters and journals
• Representations in popular media
• Advice literature
• Fictional representations of the woman writer
• Issues of backlash

Reading/Writing/Creating Cultural Spaces

• Architecture (i.e. the British Museum, Crystal Palace)
• Circulating libraries
• The publishing industry
• Sports and entertainment
• Clubs or organizations
• The private and public spheres

Please submit brief abstracts for individual presentations and panel proposals (including the name of a moderator) by October 10, 2006. Please do not include any identifying information on your abstract. Proposals may be sent through email (include name, phone number, mailing address, institutional affiliation and brief biographical paragraph in the body of the email) to: bwwc07@uky.edu.

Abstracts may also be submitted via regular mail to:

British Women Writers Conference
University of Kentucky
Department of English
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY 40506

Please include a cover sheet with your name, address, phone number, email address, institutional affiliation and a brief biographical paragraph.

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is an online, peer-reviewed journal that publishes insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and 19th-century British literature, art and culture. Next summer, we plan to devote an issue to publishing the best papers from the 2007 British Women Writers Conference held at the University of Kentuckyl. For more information, please visit our website at www.ncgsjournal.com.