The organizers of the 2025 British Women Writers Conference have released their full Call for Papers:
BWWC 2025 will focus on the theme “Transformations” as it relates to texts produced by women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals within global and transatlantic contexts during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The organizers wish to consider how these texts represent, reflect, and embody transformation, as well as how they have proved and continue to prove transformative. How might the study of these texts generate transformation within the classroom, academic programs and disciplines, educational institutions, and academia at large? How might this work contribute to social, political, and ecological transformation at a time when efforts to address humanitarian and environmental crises are routinely and systematically met with resistance? What transformations must occur to ensure that the conditions of academic work are just, humane, ethical, and equitable?
See the full CFP, including submission guidelines and topic suggestions, here.
The organizers of BWWC 2024 at Boulder, Colorado, are proud to share the preliminary conference program. Please click here to access it and send queries and corrections to bwwc2024@colorado.edu.
The deadline for individual and panel abstracts for the 2024 British Women Writers Conference at Boulder, CO, has been extended to February 15, 2024. Please send us your proposals!
The organizers of the 2024 British Women Writers Conference have released the full Call for Papers:
The organizers of the 2024 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals related to the theme of “Reproduction(s)” in global, transatlantic, and British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. Beyond the more obvious correlation between this theme and the centrality of reproductive rights to women’s lives, a vital resonance exists between this topic and the commitment of the British Women Writers Association to recover “women/womxn from the margins to the center of literary history.” The act of recovery (and all forms of reproduction, for that matter) contains the potential for re-emergence and mutation—for moments of slippage and opportunities for change. Participants are encouraged to be especially aware of the potential for disruption embedded within the concept/practice/enactment of reproduction(s).
This year’s organizers have deliberately chosen the plural form of “reproduction” because the word is simultaneously a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Also, reproduction is both biological and technological, as seen in the reverberating effects the industrial revolution had on blurring the supposed boundaries between women’s labor, leisure, and traditional familial structures. The ways in which aesthetics and print culture reproduce these cultural tensions reveal the continual transformations and mutations of women’s roles in society.
Intimately tied to these issues are forms of familial reproduction, ranging from eighteenth-century laws regarding inheritance to the suffrage movement of the twenty-first century. While many women were embracing new roles, their self-enacted freedoms often outpaced their legal rights. This topic is especially relevant when considering that women of color who suffered because of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism had even fewer legal rights than white women of the middle and upper classes.
Of great interest are subversive methods of reproducing knowledge, for example, unsanctioned communication networks and the re-appropriation of cultural reproductions. It would be especially beneficial to have contributions that embrace alternative approaches to “reproducing” the traditional archive. In the spirit of reproduction(s), the organizers look forward to reading proposals that play with and challenge the limits of this theme.
See the full CFP, including submission guidelines and topic suggestions, here.
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
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.
18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Association
Travel Award Application
Due January 17, 2020
BWWC 2020
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX
As part of its mission to encourage conference participation by early-career scholars and contingent faculty, the British Women Writers Association offers 4 travel grants to help assuage the costs of travel for BWWC participants. These awards are offered for the following categories:
Independent Scholar/Contingent Faculty
Graduate Student Travel Awards for work in the following periods:
early to mid 18th-century
late 18th-century to early 19th-century
mid 19th-century to early 20th-century
Graduate students, independent scholars, and contingent faculty are invited to apply for a BWWA travel grant for BWWC 2020. The deadline for travel grant submissions is January 17th.
To qualify for a BWWA travel grant, applicants must:
Be currently enrolled as a full-time graduate student;
Be currently employed in a non-tenured, part-time, or adjunct position; or
Have completed their doctorate within the last ten years and be unaffiliated with any university.
Please submit the following information as a single file attachment to Courtney Hoffman at courtney.hoffman@lmc.gatech.edu by January 17, 2020:
A brief cover letter specifying:
Award being applied for: Graduate Student Travel Award or Independent Scholar/ Contingent Faculty Travel Award and the period that best fits the project
Information regarding your previous affiliation with the BWWA
Anticipated travel distance
Any other pertinent details of your employment
A copy of your conference proposal
Submission Directions:
All of the application documents should be part of one single attachment file.
The attachment should be an MS Word doc or Adobe pdf.
The file name should start with the applicant’s last name (e.g., smith_bwwcapp.doc).
The subject line of the email should indicate:
Award being applied for: Graduate Student Travel Award or Independent Scholar/ Contingent Faculty Travel Award
British Women Writers Association 
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