Women, land and the making of the British Landscape, 1300-1900
A two-day interdisciplinary conference
29th-30th June 2015, University of Hull
Sponsored by the University of Hull and the Arts & Humanities Research Council
Provisional programme
th
Monday 29 June 2015
9:00
Registration, coffee & welcome
9:15
Session 1: The medieval landscape
Sheila Sweetinburgh (University of Kent) Religious women in the landscape: their roles in
medieval Canterbury and its hinterland
Miriam Muller (University of Birmingham) Women in the medieval landscape: space, work
and gender
Elizabeth Salter (University of Hull) Hull’s Medieval Lives c1400-1550
10:45 Coffee
11:00 Session 2: Early modern women
Jessica Malay (University of Huddersfield) Becoming Anne Clifford: encounters in text and
place
Amanda Capern (University of Hull) Landscape and female sensibility in early modern England
Jane Whittle (University of Exeter) Women and farming in early modern England, c. 15501700
Amanda Flather (University of Essex) Women, work and land: the spatial dynamics of gender
relations in early modern England 1550-1750
12:45 Lunch
13:45 Session 3: Women & landholding
Judith Spicksley (University of York) Spinsters with land in seventeenth-century England
Jennifer Holt (independent scholar) Tenantright, and the possession of land by women in
northern England
Joan Heggie (Teesside University) Exploring women’s involvement with property in the North
Riding of Yorkshire in the 18th and 19th centuries: a pilot study using the Register of Deeds
Janet Casson (independent scholar) Women and property reconsidered: new evidence on the
ownership of land by women during the nineteenth century
15:45 Sophie Gerrard, Drawn to the Land: Women Working the Scottish Landscape (an exhibition).
16:15 Afternoon tea
17:15 Session 4: Keynote
Anne Laurence (Open University) Women, land and these islands 1550-1750
18:15 Drinks reception, followed by conference dinner
Tuesday 30th June 2015
9:00
Session 5: Property, landscape, gender
Elizabeth Griffiths (University of Exeter) The life and legacy of Alice le Strange
Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University) From magnificent houses to disagreeable
country: Lady Sophia Newdigate’s tour of Southern England, 1748
Briony McDonagh (University of Hull) Beyond the (park) pale: gender and landscape in
Georgian England
Stephen Bending (University of Southampton) Negotiating men: Elizabeth Montagu and the
construction of pastoral
10:45 Coffee
11:15 Session 6: PhD round-table
Ann-Maria Walsh (University College Dublin) The Boyle women and their relationship with
‘this bleeding and well neere ruined Commonwealth’
Helena Kaznowska (University of Oxford) ‘She builds it with her hands, and beares it up by her
shoulders’: metaphor and the making of the early modern home
Charlotte Garside (University of Hull) Property Rights of Yorkshire Women in the Court of
Chancery, 1680-1700
Fern Pullan (Leeds Beckett University) ‘Marriage had bastilled me for life’: the propertied
woman as property in the novels of Richardson, Wollstonecraft and Collins
Erin Trahey (University of Cambridge) Elizabeth Virgo Scarlett: a Jamaican female absentee
proprietor, plantation management and the British Atlantic economy
13:15 Lunch
14:15 Session 7: Modern perspectives
Sarah Carter (University of Alberta) Imperial plots: British women, land and agriculture in
Prairie Canada 1870s-1914
Janet Smith (independent historian) Reshaping the landscape: Helen Taylor’s campaign for
land nationalisation in Great Britain and Ireland 1880-1907
Nicola Verdon (Sheffield Hallam University) ‘The work is grand and the life is just what I have
always longed for’: British women’s experiences of working on the land in the Great War
Catherine Flinn Goldie (Bodleian Library) British planning: the significance of Evelyn Sharp
16:00 Coffee & cake
16:30 Session 8: Keynote
Amy Erickson (University of Cambridge) Rethinking the significance of inheritance and
marriage in landholding
17:30 Concluding comments and end of conference
Registration and accommodation
The registration fee for the conference is £55 (including refreshments, lunches on both days and the
conference dinner on Monday 29th June).
Please book via the University of Hull’s online shop,
http://shop.hull.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=90&prodid=204
Accommodation details are available via the Women and Land blog,
https://womenandland.wordpress.com/accommodation/
Any queries, feel free to email the conference organisers on womenandland@outlook.com
Bursaries
Thanks to sponsorship from the University of Hull and the Arts & Humanities Research Council, a
limited number of bursaries (fee waivers plus a contribution towards travel/accommodation) are
available to postgraduate and early career researchers. To apply, please email
womenandland@outlook.com with your name, university affiliation, details of your PhD or postdoctoral research, and a short statement (of no more than 150 words) outlining why you’re keen to
attend the conference.