I'm an assistant professor of English at Santa Clara University. I teach and study digital humanities, British literature of the long 18th century, writing, women writers, book history, Romanticism, and more.
The BWWA Executive Board invites nominations for the positions of Chair and Vice Chair. These positions are elected by the BWWA members and serve for 2-4 years. Descriptions of the positions’ main responsibilities are:
The Chair (term of 2 years)
Serves as executive officer, setting meeting agendas, appointing board members, and creating ad hoc committees if necessary;
Assists BWWC organizers in the conference organizing process, including recruiting
future host institutions and coordinating host organization proposal approval;
Organizes Association and Advisory board meetings, trains Vice Chair,
Advises Board as Past Chair, and serves as an Association Board member after their tenure as Chair expires.
The Vice Chair (term of 2 years; followed by 2-year term as Chair)
Advises the Chair and acts as Chair in Chair’s absence.
Oversees Travel Award committee and chairs Nominations and Elections Committee
Serves as Chair after completion of two-year term as Vice Chair.
Those interested in learning more in the positions may contact Roxanne Eberle at eberle@uga.edu or Donelle Ruwe at Donelle.Ruwe@nau.edu for more information.
Please submit a letter of interest and CV by Friday, October 14, 2022 to BWWA.contact@gmail.com if you wish to run for either of these positions.
The British Women Writers Association (BWWA) seeks self-nominations and nominations by others for a Web and Media Manager (WAMM). The WAMM is responsible for website design, administration, and maintenance. Intended for both an internal and an external audience, the website provides information about membership, governance, past and future conferences, and awards. The WAMM, along with the Communications Director, also publishes updates and announcements on social media and relevant listservs and responds to emails sent to the Association.
The WAMM is an appointed position and serves on the Executive Board. All nominations will be considered by the members of the Executive and Association Boards, who will appoint the new WAMM from the pool of nominations. To nominate yourself, submit a short letter of interest and your CV to kleuner@scu.edu. If you are nominated by another, the BWWA will contact you and solicit a CV and letter of interest. Nominations are due by Friday, October 14, 2022. If you have questions about the role, direct them to Kirstyn Leuner kleuner@scu.edu.
The organizers of the 2023 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals (UPDATE: submission deadline extended to January 31, 2023) interpreting the theme of ‘Liberties’ in global and transatlantic British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. We ask participants to consider ‘liberties’ not only as a political abstraction but also as part of material and experiential subjectivity. Interpreted broadly, liberties include (but are not limited to) legal rights and freedoms, liberty of the person and bodily autonomy, liberties of creative and artistic expression, liberty of profession and vocation, freedom of movement both physical and social, and self-determination in the private and public spheres. How far did these liberties extend to women at different historical moments? Were liberties granted by the state and other institutions or taken despite them? How were they imagined and realized differently by women across categories of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, age, ability? We invite presenters to contextualize ‘liberties’ in terms of both its capacities and practices as well as its limits and exclusions.
British history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poses conflicting and contradictory narratives of liberty. The abolition of the slave trade did not end indentured labor in the colonies. The expansion of the franchise through legislation did not extend the vote to women and the poor. Free trade and market liberalism increased Britain’s wealth but also aggravated socioeconomic inequalities. The rhetorics of emancipation at home contrasted with the realities of imperial rule abroad. How can we make sense of these partial and conditional liberties using literary history? Whose liberty is centered in literary, historical, and political narratives? How is liberty represented in women’s writing — as aspiration, transgression, fantasy, lack? We welcome scholarship that puts the construct of liberty under critical scrutiny and interrogates its relationship to ongoing and incomplete struggles for liberation. We also welcome presentations and panel proposals on pedagogy. How can we draw connections in our teaching between literary history and the liberationist movements of the present? Short talks on pedagogical methodology, classroom practices, use of digital and other media tools, or collective and community-facing projects are highly encouraged.
Women and nationhood, women’s civic participation, women and human rights, anti-slavery and abolition, empire and anti-colonialism, suffrage and women’s liberation
Social liberties
Women’s education, women’s work and the professions, women travelers and migration, women’s associations and societies, liberty and domesticity
Liberties of the body
Reproductive liberties, sex and sexuality, desire and consent, queer bodies, women’s physical cultures, women and disability
Liberties of expression
Gender and performance, women’s self-fashioning, women’s art and aesthetics, women and publicity, women and print culture, women’s intellectual histories
RC Pedagogies and K-SAA see the work of discovering, gathering, developing, and elaborating anti-racist pedagogies as essential to the work of scholars and teachers, not to mention to the viability and relevance of the Romantic period more generally. Since systemic racism has long affected not only what texts are considered canonical, but also how, where, and to whom Romantic-era materials are taught, RC Pedagogies and K-SAA hope to provide support for scholars in expanding access to Romantic-era pedagogy, including resources for teaching in underserved communities and carceral facilities. Such an undertaking must be a collaborative, sustained, and rigorous research project to include bibliographies of available material, articles discussing best classroom practices, contextual materials, and syllabi, compiled into a readily usable/accessible set of pages to be maintained over time.
A joint team of K-SAA and RC scholars seek to appoint a team of 4 Pedagogies Fellows tasked with adding to a permanent yet expanding set of anti-racist pedagogy web links and resources begun by last year’s amazing Fellows (Mahasweta Baxipatra, Conny Cassity, Hilary Fezzy, Lenora Hanson, Indu Ohri, and Erin Saladin). The Colloquium to be held over Zoom during several meetings over four weeks during July-August 2022. Fellows would receive a $500 honorarium, and specific dates for the colloquium will be crowd-sourced by the fellows and convener. Over the course of that month, Fellows would, together and independently, locate helpful contextual sources, syllabi, articles, and techniques for anti-racist pedagogy in the Romantic period, as well as organize and annotate these items into accessible webcontent for teachers of high school, undergraduate, graduate students, and other learners.
Throughout the colloquium, Fellows will be encouraged (but not required) to share their work through online social fora like Twitter and HASTAC. At the month’s end, the group will identify future work for the participants of this colloquium and colloquia to come, which may include blogging for the K-SAA Blog, a series of short essays for RC, a conference panel, a special issue, or another form of work. (This colloquium is the second in a series of continuing work.)
Fellows will have the opportunity to build a cohort and a virtual space for discussion of anti-racist pedagogy and its intellectual work. They will also receive mentoring via senior scholar-teachers in the field via guests and speakers as well as other members of the K-SAA/RC Pedagogies team. Fellows can thus expect to become part of a widening professional network of Romantic scholars, digital humanists, and teachers, especially in their unique relationship to Romantic Circles and K-SAA as organizations with journals and other scholarly events. Additionally, Fellows will gain exposure to journal, organization, and advisory board projects.
Applicants of any rank are invited to submit a one-page letter of intent to keatshelleyassociation@gmail.comby June 15th, which discusses specific interests and experience in anti-racist pedagogy, including discussion/description of courses taught or proposed as well as scholarly research/interests and public humanities work.
The organizers of the 2022 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of “Borders” in global British women’s writing across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This year’s BWWC calls for papers that contextualize that history bearing in mind changes in the field itself, as it turns towards the global and the transatlantic. “Borders” may be broadly interpreted to include scholarship concerning borders within and among scholarly disciplines, borders within form and genre, political and geographical borders, socio-economic boundaries and borders, and borders among individuals or identities, especially between and within historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities.
Baylor University, Waco, Texas, welcomes scholars to the website for the Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Association conference, May 19-21, 2022! The BWWC 2022 theme of “Borders” and the supporting logo encourage reflection about widening the borders of the discipline. Who is included among the writers studied? What geographic boundaries could expand to include overlooked, colonized, or misrepresented lands? How might contemporary scholars disrupt historical boundaries between literatures, people, cultures, and disciplines to uncover and make evident intersectionality?
To start the conversation and to encourage dialogue about these questions, this website offers an interactive discussion forum where association and conference participants can engage with one another in the months and days ahead of the conference. Join the discussion here.
About the Logo
The conference logo is designed with two purposes: to foreground diverse voices of women writers from the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show, through its circular structure, a commitment to equity and welcoming. The circular “border” line around the outside of the inner circle gives the logo movement, creating the sense of borders widening. Writers represented in the logo are (from the center top, clockwise): Mary Seacole, Toru Dutt, Isabella Bird, Krupabai Satthianadan, Phillis Wheatley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The background image is a map drawn by Shanawdithit, a member of the Beothuk people from what is now called Newfoundland. Shanawdithit (1801-1829) documented the culture of the Beothuk nation.
Registration is now live for the June 1-4 2021 BWWC!
Please fill out this form to register for the conference and receive the needed Zoom link. Remember to click “submit” on the second screen of the form.
Following your submission of the form, you will receive an email confirmation with a single Zoom link that will allow you to access each day’s events. You will also be prompted to submit your BWWA dues at https://britishwomenwriters.org/association/membership/.
The conference organizers and the BWWA are excited to welcome you all to our virtual conference in June!
If you’re on the fence, check on the impressive list of speakers and our schedule.
UPDATE May 2021: These positions have been filled.
As the British Women Writers Association (BWWA) approaches its 30th anniversary in June 2022, we would like to invite interested scholars of the long 18th and 19th centuries to help us expand participation in the Association’s governance. Specifically, we invite applications to serve on our new Association Board.
The Association Board is the governing body of the BWWA and will contain nine members, in addition to the members of the Executive Committee and past Chairs. They are encouraged to attend the annual board meeting during the annual British Women Writers Conference (BWWC); they recruit potential conference hosts and promote the BWWC in professional venues; and they help solicit papers and/or organize panels for the annual conference. Association Board members will be appointed for 2021-22, and afterward will be elected to serve terms of a minimum of two years, and may stand for re-election.
If you are interested in serving on the Association Board, please send a letter of interest and your CV by December 20 to BWWA Co-President Roxanne Eberle: eberle@uga.edu.
Eligibility:
Scholarly expertise in the British women writers of the long 18th and 19th centuries
Constance Marie Fulmer (11 November 1938 – 17 March 2020)
by Donelle Ruwe
Constance Fulmer (2nd from right) with Margaret Barfield (2nd from left) and graduate students Angharad Eyre (left) and Angela Runciman (right) at the 2015 BWWC
Constance Fulmer, a mainstay of the British Women Writer’s Conference (BWWC) and an enduring role model, passed away after a brief bout with cancer. She died peacefully in her home in Malibu, California, on March 17, 2020. Constance and her partner Margaret Barfield were life-long members of the Association. Constance attended the second annual conference in 1993 and thereafter came to almost every conference for the next 27 years.
Constance often presented on the two loves of her scholarly life: Edith Simcox and George Eliot. Her scholarly dedication culminated in two major publications: George Eliot’sMoral Aesthetic: Compelling Contradictions (2019) and A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith S. Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (co-edited by Constance Fulmer and Margaret Barfield, 1998). The latter is a magisterial work of literary recuperation of Edith Simcox (1844-1901), a suffragist, Socialist, activist, and author. In addition to publishing books and multiple periodical essays, Simcox and her friend Mary Hamilton founded the successful shirtmaking co-operative, Hamilton and Company, to employ women and offer them decent working conditions. Simcox met George Eliot in 1872 when she was preparing her review of Eliot’s Middlemarch. Simcox adored and admired Eliot, who was 25-years older than she, and although her “love-passion” was not reciprocated, Simcox made it her life’s mission “to love rather than be loved” and to shape her life and work as a tribute to Eliot.
It is no wonder that Constance was drawn to the works of George Eliot. Constance daily lived the ethics that Eliot espoused. As Constance wrote, the foundation of Eliot’s moral identity is charity, the act of “solidarity or reaching out to others.” I recall a particular moment at the 2012 BWWC at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As I walked into the conference hotel, I saw Constance carrying out containers of food from the hotel restaurant. She handed out sandwiches and warm meals to a group of homeless people sitting in the curbside shade of the hotel entrance. It was a simple act of generosity, but not one that I had considered doing myself until that moment.
At the 2017 BWWC, (L-R) Lauren Pinkerton, Doreen Thierauf, Paula Feldman, Margaret Barfield, Donelle Ruwe, and Constance Fulmer
Constance Fulmer saw people and their needs, and she acted on their behalf. This is one of the many qualities that made her such a gifted mentor to students. Constance embodied the spirit of the BWWC, which is to chip away at the professional divide between graduate students and experienced faculty, to provide mentorship for early career scholars of all levels, and to create a more inclusive scholarly community. At conferences, she was beloved for her approachability and genuine desire to talk with graduate students about their work and their lives. As a tribute to her legacy, the BWWA Executive Board voted unanimously to retitle the Association’s mentorship award “The BWWA Constance Fulmer Award in Mentorship.” In her final year, she was unable to attend the BWWC hosted by Texas Christian University, but she was there in spirit and already fostering her legacy of mentorship and generosity. She sent in her stead a group of young women from Pepperdine, and it was their first scholarly conference. It was no surprise to hear how fondly they spoke of their mentor and to see how well they represented her.
Constance had an extraordinary academic life, especially for a woman born in the 1930s. She received a BA in English with a minor in Psychology from Lipscomb University, a Master’s in Education from Harding University, and a Master’s in Mathematics from the University of Alabama. She received a third Master’s degree in English and eventually a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. She taught at Lipscomb University for twenty years until accepting, in 1980, the position of Director of Continuing Medical Education at Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1990 she joined the faculty of Pepperdine University. At Pepperdine she accepted a variety of administrative roles: the Blanche E. Seaver Chair in English Literature, the Divisional Dean of the Humanities and Teacher Education Division, and the Associate Dean of Seaver College from 2007 to 2016. Beyond Pepperdine, Dr. Fulmer was a board member of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States.
You are invited to submit a proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and culture c. 1770-1840, will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.
The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.
Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society
British Women Writers Association 
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