Moving Dangerously: Women and Travel, 1850-1950
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS, PERCY BUILDING, NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
ORGANISER: DR EMMA SHORT
Friday, 13 April 2012
A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference exploring the changing relationship
of women and travel across key moments in modernity, such the First World War and its
effects on women’s independence, the developments in British Imperial activity, and the
boom in rail, air and sea travel. The conference aims to stimulate academic discussion on a
range of topics relating to women and travel in the period ranging from 1850-1950. These
topics include representations of women and travel in fiction and film, non-fictional
portrayals and documentations, as well as archival work on first-hand accounts of women
travellers. As such, we welcome papers from those working in the fields of Literature,
History, Geography, Film and Media, Modern Languages, Gender/Women’s Studies, and
Politics.
Contact
Email: moving@ncl.ac.uk
Programme
9.15-10.15
Registration (Percy Foyer)
10.15-10.30
Welcome Address (Percy G13)
10.30-11.30
KEYNOTE ADDRESS (Percy G13)
Avril Maddrell (University of the West of England)
Title: ‘Women on the Move: Moving and Being Moved’
Chair: Stacy Gillis
11.30-12.00
Tea & Coffee (Percy Foyer)
12.00-13.30
SESSION ONE
Panel 1A – Middle Eastern Journeys (Percy G5)
Chair: Mary Henes
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Nadia Atia (Queen Mary), ‘A Wartime Tourist Trail: Mesopotamia in the British Imagination,
1914-18’
Mari Firkatian (Hartford), ‘Got a Ticket to Ride? A Family of Women Travellers from the
Balkans to the West and Back Again’
Isabel Simões-Ferreira (Lisbon Polytechnic), ‘From Auxiliary to Emancipatory Travel-Writing:
Discourses of Confinement and Freedom in the Travelogues of Emily Eden and Louise Jebb
Wilkins’
Panel 1B – African Adventures (Percy G10)
Chair: Jocelynne Scutt
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Elizabeth Noble (University College London), ‘Aesthetics in British Women’s Travel Accounts
of South Africa in the 1880s’
Janelle Rodriques (Newcastle), ‘“Only Me”: The Death of the Author in Mary Kingsley’s Travels
in West Africa’
Ellen Turner (Lund), ‘E.M. Hull’s Camping in the Sahara: Desert Romance Meets Desert Reality’
Panel 1C – Extreme Movements (Percy G13)
Chair: Abbie Garrington
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Wibke Backhaus (Freiburg), ‘A Comrade and Mother: Women Mountaineers and the
Possibilities of Belonging in 1930s Alpinist Discourse’
Jessica Dunkin (Carleton), ‘The Canoe and the Woman: Paddling Against the Current of Social
Convention in Canada and the United States, 1880-1950’
Karen Stockham (Exeter), ‘“No Mere Feminist Gesture”: Travel and Women’s Mountaineering,
1850-1930’
13.30-14.30
Lunch (Percy Foyer)
14.30-16.00
SESSION TWO
Panel 2A – Class, Femininity and Travel (Percy G5)
Chair: Sara Steinert-Borella
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Jennifer Pearce (Hull), ‘Cowards and Conquerors: Danger and Discrepancy in the Governess
Travel Narrative’
Hannah Sikstrom (Oxford), ‘“The Serpent and the Dove”: The Adventures of an Unprotected
Victorian Female in Norway and Sicily’
Jo Stanley (Lancaster), ‘Ayahs who Travelled: Indian Nannies Voyaging to Britain in the
Nineteenth Century’
Panel 2B – Empire and Travel (Percy G10)
Chair: TBC
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Monica Di Barbora (Independent), ‘Travelling for the Fascist Empire: Images of Italian Women
in East Africa in the 1930s’
Claudia Faria (Madeira), ‘Madeira Island: Nineteenth-Century Feminine Perspectives from the
Travelogues of Emmeline Wortley, Anna Brassey, and Julia Roundel’
Anna Snaith (King’s College London), ‘“A Night in the Indian Ocean”: Australian Women
Writers and Travelling Modernisms’
Panel 2C – Emancipatory Movements (Percy G13)
Chair: Anna Sloan
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Emma Baumhofer (LSE/Columbia University), ‘On the Road: Passing Women in America,
1890-1910’
Emily Ridge (Durham), ‘Uncommon Baggage: The New Woman Traveller and the Emancipatory
Bag’
Lisa Robertson (Northampton), ‘Seduction and the Seaside: Ambulatory Romance and Capital in
Julia Frankau’s Baccarat’
16.00-16.30
Tea & Coffee
16.30-17.30
SESSION THREE
Panel 3A – Transatlantic Travels (Percy G5)
Chair: Leanne Groeneveld
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Babs Boter (Utrecht/Free University Amsterdam), ‘Moving Across: Transatlantic Travellers
Transgressing the Limits of (White) Femininity’
Jeana Evans (LSE/Columbia), ‘After Bicycle-Face but Before Babe Didrikson: American Women
Olympians Abroad, 1920-28’
Panel 3B – Travel in the Press (Percy G10)
Chair: Nina Baker
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Clare Mendes (Leicester), ‘Dialogues of Female Travel in Women’s Magazines of the 1890s’
Christine Neejer (Michigan State), ‘“To Mount My Steed and Set Off with a Map”: Women’s
Bicycling and Travel in the 1890s’
Panel 3C – Movement through Film (Percy G13)
Chair: Jocelynne Scutt
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Andrew Hogan (Birkbeck), ‘Red Women on the Move: Soviet Representations of Women
Travelling, 1925-38’
Anna C. Sloan (Warwick), ‘Virgins in Italy: Tourism, Imperialism, and the American Woman in
1950s Hollywood Melodrama’
18.00-21.00
Wine Reception and Buffet Dinner (Hatton Gallery)

Saturday, 14 April 2012
9.00-10.30
SESSION FOUR
Panel 4A – Modernist Movement I (Percy G5)
Chair: Ellen Turner
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Katherine Cooper (Newcastle), ‘Matrilineal Travel Narratives in Storm Jameson’s Farewell Night,
Welcome Day and The Journal of Mary Harvey Russell’
Rebecca Kirstein Harwood (Minho, Portugal), ‘After the Truth: The Politics of Authenticity in
Storm Jameson’s Europe to Let’
Mhairi Pooler (Aberdeen), ‘“Seeing is Not Enough”: Dorothy Richardson’s Oberland’
Panel 4B – Crossing the Boundaries of Eastern Europe (Percy G10)
Chair: Stacy Gillis
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Orsolya Kereszty (Eötvös Loránd), ‘“Ex Occidente Lux”: The Representation of the ‘Other’ in
the Writings of the Hungarian Feminist Press, 1867-1914’
Grazyna Kubica-Heller (Jagiellonian University, Krakow), ‘“My Siberian Year”: Maria Czaplicka
and her Travelogue about her Yenisei Expedition, 1914-15’
Jane McDermid (Southampton), ‘British Women Travellers in Russia from the Downfall of Tsar
Nicholas II to Stalin’s “Revolution from Above”, 1917-1937’
Panel 4C – Automotive Travel (Percy G13)
Chair: Sasha Disko
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Nina Baker (Strathclyde), ‘Women Car Designers and Designing Cars for Women: The Arrol
Galloway and the Volvo YCC’
Stephen N. Brown (Rhode Island College), ‘“Lipstick Jane who drives through rain”: Motoring
and Modernity in Middle-Class American Women’s Poetry, 1914-23’
Jean Williams (De Montfort), ‘Speed: Towards a Collective Biography of Brooklands’ Women,
1907-39’
10.30-11.00
Tea & Coffee
11.00-12.30
SESSION FIVE
Panel 5A – Autobiography and the Travelogue (Percy G5)
Chair: Nicola Darwood
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Barbara Cooke (East Anglia), ‘The Adventures of Miss Ross: Interventions into, and the Tenacity
of, Romantic Travel Writing in South West Persia’
Katarina Gephardt (Kennesaw State), ‘Gender, Genre, and Geography in Ménie Dowie’s A Girl
in the Karpathians’
Geraldine Perriam (Glasgow), ‘“A Book About Myself when Travelling”: On the Road with
Interwar Writers’
Panel 5B – Anthropology and/as Travel (Percy G10)
Chair: Lisa Robertson
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Mary Henes (King’s College London), ‘Autobiography, Journalism and Controversy: Freya
Stark’s Baghdad Sketches’
Emily Sloan (Cambridge), ‘Religion, Feminism, and Identity: Suffragist Carrie Catt’s 1911-12
World Tour’
Lucy Watson (Southampton), ‘Time, Memory and the Politics of Colonial Nostalgia in the
Writings of Sylvia Leith-Ross’
Panel 5C – Politics and War (Percy G13)
Chair: Katherine Cooper
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Marlene Baldwin Davis (William and Mary), ‘A War Correspondent in the Making: Fragments of
the Chinese Civil War as Recorded by Stella Benson’
Maureen Mulligan (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), ‘Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark: Political
Involvement and Personal Conflict’
Jocelynne A. Scutt (Buckingham), ‘Stirring Up Trouble: Travelling Women as Political Agitators’
12.30-13.30
Lunch
13.30-14.30
KEYNOTE ADDRESS (Percy G13)
Alexandra Peat (Franklin College, Switzerland)
Title: ‘The Limitless Horizon: Travelling in the Home’
Chair: Emma Short
14.30-16.00
SESSION SIX
Panel 6A – Moving Through London (Percy G5)
Chair: Barbara Cooke
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Danielle Dodson (Kentucky), ‘Trouble in the Tube: Women, the Underground, and Experiences
of Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle London’
Claire Gwatkin (Amsterdam), ‘Transgressing the Gendered Urban Space of Victorian London:
Mary Hannah Krout’s A Looker on in London’
Panel 6B – National Identity and Travel (Percy G10)
Chair: Karen Stockham
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Sasha Disko (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin), ‘With Lipstick and Shotgun: Gender and
Chauvinism in German Interwar Motorized Adventure Literature’
Leanne Groeneveld (Regina), ‘“He Showed Himself in Response to Your Longing”: Women
Spectators at the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1853-1905’
Sara Steinert-Borella (Franklin College), ‘Humanitarian Ideals between the Wars:
(Re)Constructing Switzerland through Travel Writing’
Panel 6C – Modernist Movement II (Percy G13)
Chair: Stephen Brown
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Nicola Darwood (Bedfordshire), ‘“Moving Dangerously”: Fatal Flights in Elizabeth Bowen’s To
the North’
Francesca Ferrari (Milan), ‘Writing Expatriation: An Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Dislocated
“Vienne”’
Siriol McAvoy (Cardiff), ‘Errancy and Epiphany: Virginia Woolf’s Uses of Medieval Discourses
of Travel in The Voyage Out’
16.00-16.10
Closing Address (Percy G13)
16.10
Close of Conference