Our 2018–2021 Year in Reviews can be found here.
Although 2022 was a year of upheaval, the WPHP team continued to find solace in collaboration, friendship, and a mutual love for women’s book history.
In usual WPHP fashion, we increased our RA numbers and simultaneously said our bittersweet goodbyes. Please join us in congratulating Angela Wachowich, who has since begun her PhD in English at the University of Chicago. Although Angela has only been with us for a year, she established our Spotlight Series on Women & Philosophy, cleaned our long list of Title records, and encountered, hilariously, this obscured title on fish.
We also congratulate Amanda Law and Hanieh Gaderi who have both started their MA in English at the University of British Columbia and in Gender and Sexuality at SFU, respectively. We are grateful that Amanda continues to run our social media pages, particularly our Twitter account, and that Hannah has begun our forthcoming podcast transcriptions, an exciting and demanding endeavour.
Congratulations, too, to Julianna Wagar, who has not only begun her MA in English at SFU, but has also accepted a Digital Fellowship with the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. Julianna continues to untangle our web of Person records and has also composed a spotlight on royal printer Agnes Campbell. She presented her work on femmes de lettres Elizabeth Spence and Anne Grant at the annual Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Ottawa, alongside Sara Penn, who presented her quantitative data on chapbook publisher and bookseller Ann Lemoine. Julianna also presented at SFU’s and the University of Guelph’s joint symposium on “Networking Jacobites.”
Prof. Betty A. Schellenberg and RA Julianna Wagar.
We lastly applaud Caelen Campbell and Victoria DeHart, who have since graduated with an MA in Teaching for English (MATE) and BA in Archaeology, respectively. Caelen has been an enormous help to us insofar as editing our Spotlights and podcast blog posts, while Victoria’s penchant for archaeological women’s writing has inspired Spotlights on Sarah Belzoni and Elizabeth Heyrick.
Our newest RA takes the form of Tammy T., a fourth-year BA student specializing in the Bluestockings and the Aikin family. Her Spotlight on Anna Barbauld, co-authored with Kate Moffatt and Michelle Levy helps us think more closely about the elusivity of our Genre categories.
RAs, old and new, gathered at Michelle’s house to watch Netflix’s Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson and Cosmo Jarvis. Although the evening culminated in our fits of laughter and Michelle’s criticisms of the many historical inaccuracies, we relished in the delicious food and playful banter with our team mascot, Tessa Levy, and previous PM, Kandice Sharren, who visited us from her fellowship in Ireland.
Left to right: Tammy T., Belle Eist, Tessa Levy, and Kate Moffatt.
Kandice Sharren, model, with Tessa Levy, mascot.
Our year was not all fun and games, however. Thanks to the expertise of our resident early modernist, Kate Ozment, we have decided to amalgamate metadata for the period 1700–1836. To read more on our data tables and updated methodology, click here.
Apart from our two Spotlights Series, the first on Women & Philosophy and the second, Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades, we have also continued to host many wonderful guests on Season 2 of our podcast, The WPHP Monthly Mercury. Timothy Whelan discussed the literary mapping of Dissenter Mary Hays, women philosophers, Lisa Shapiro philosophy as a genre, and E.J. Clery the larger-than-life “powerhouse” Mary Wollestonecraft. Hilarity ensued during a crossover episode of monk-ish mayhem with The Canterbury Fails, a podcast discussing the ‘fails’ of Old and Middle English poetry, hosted by SFU’s very own David Coley and Matt Hussey.
From back left to upper right: Matt Hussey, Kandice Sharren, David Coley, and Kate Moffatt enjoy monkish batter and murkish drinks.
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