Women’s Scientific Literatures:
The Poetry and Poetics of Early Modern Natural Philosophy
26–27th June 2025, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Deadline for submissions: Monday 3rd March 2025
Contact email: WomensScientificLiteratures@gmail.com
The international AHRC/DFG research consortium, Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Anglia Ruskin University; University of Bayreuth; University of Marburg; University of York), invite proposals for their second conference.
Plenary speakers
- Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin)
- Helena Taylor (University of Exeter)
Confirmed speakers
- Liza Blake (University of Toronto)
- Sajed Chowdhury (Utrecht University)
- Johanna Luggin (Innsbruck University)
- Whitney Sperrazza (Texas A&M University)
- Elizabeth Swann (Durham University
Topics of interest might include:
- Women’s use of poetic genres and forms as vehicles for scientific knowledge (devotional, occasional, dedicatory; the elegy, the ode, the epigram etc.).
- Natural philosophical vocabularies including, but not limited to, cosmology and astronomy; the body, soul and medicine; botany and alchemy in women’s poetic texts.
- Women’s participation in (and exclusion from) spaces and communities of learning, including scientific and philosophical circles and academies, salons, literary coteries, correspondence networks, and patronage networks.
- How scientific ideas filter into other frameworks of women’s poetic writing, such as the theological, political and domestic.
- Relations in women’s scientific-poetic writing between early modern vernaculars and neoLatin.
- Instances of transcultural and transnational encounter and exchange in women’s natural philosophic writing.
- The role of manuscript and printed texts in preserving women’s natural philosophical works.
- Comparative studies of male and female literary engagement with natural philosophy.
- Recovery of lesser-known, marginal, or unpublished work by women writers.
- The historiographical exclusion of women’s poetry from histories of science and philosophy.
- New methodologies for reading women’s poetic writing.
Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers or contributions for roundtables (in English), along with a short biographical note (c. 50 words), to WomensScientificLiteratures@gmail.com by Monday 3rd March 2025. We welcome submissions from graduate students and ECRs. Please get in touch with any questions.
Full CFP available here.
