As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the WPHP this year, we’re also looking back at some highlights of the previous year. 2024 was a year of bittersweet change and exciting new prospects for the team.
Kandice Sharren and Michelle Levy at Chawton House in 2015.
In a departure from last year’s influx of RAs, our team dwindled to just three members, with many graduating by the end of the summer. To this end, we would like to congratulate Serena Spacek and Julianna Wagar on their graduations, with their BA and MA in English, respectively.
Left: Serena Spacek; right: Rebekha Stuive, friend of the WPHP, with Julianna Wagar.
We’re going to miss Serena’s stellar work on our social media (@womensprinthistoryproject on Instagram!) and titles, alongside Julianna’s expertise with our Persons records, and we wish them the best on their new adventures. Serena has taken on a position with Douglas College as an administrative assistant and Julianna has left the province to pursue her PhD in English at the University of Alberta. We also wish RA Julia Gorospe the best with her co-op program at SFU.
Speaking of new adventures, we also said goodbye and congratulations to RA emerita Sara Penn, who started her PhD in English at New York University. Not only has Sara authored all the previous Year in Reviews since 2019, but she has spearheaded countless WPHP tasks since she joined the team in 2018. Some highlights include updating all of our documentation, creating transcripts for The WPHP Monthly Mercury, writing the bio for our Team Mascot, Dr. Tessa Levy, and completing our Ann Lemoine data as fully as possible alongside her own research. If Sara has anything to say about it, though, it’s not truly a goodbye (evidenced by her editing this Year in Review).
Left: Sara Penn and Julianna Wagar; right: Sara at NYU!
In March, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and Project Director Michelle Levy visited Dr. Lindsey Seatter’s Romantic Poetry class at Kwantlen Polytechnic University to introduce and discuss the database. With the guidance of our team, Dr. Seatter’s students had the opportunity to verify a few Anna Laetitia Barbauld titles (for example, 16443, 16450, 16486, 16427).
Left: Amanda with students from Lindsay Seatter's Spring 2024 English 3328 class; right: Julianna (top) and Michelle (bottom) with students from English 3328.
In July, Salena Wiener presented her paper titled “The Sexual Politics of Making a Text: Claire Clairemont’s Fair Copy Labour for Byron” at the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) 2024 which took place in Glasgow. We also congratulate Salena for earning a 2024 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship for her work on the gendered labour politics of women's fair copy work in the British Romantic period.
Salena presenting at BARS 2024.
Joining Salena at BARS was our Lead Editor Kandice Sharren, who presented “Beyond the Silver Fork: Henry Colburn’s (and Mary Russel Mitford’s) American Tales.”
Kandice presenting at BARS 2024
Michelle delivered her plenary presentation at BARS entitled “Women Writers and the Making of Printed Books.” This presentation followed her other talk, “Reading Women’s (Print and Manuscript) Books from Cover to Cover,” at the University of Passau’s Books In and Out of Time: Genres and Formats of Media History, 1700-1900 conference. In 2024, our indefatigable director published “‘A volume of manuscript poems &&’: Phillis Wheatley’s lost book and a found proposal” in the January issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (copy edited by our very own Sara Penn!), and edited the Dorothy Wordsworth digital editions “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District” (alongside Nicholas Mason and Paul Westover) and “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District: Poems from the Commonplace Book.”
The July sun also witnessed the WPHP braving the Pitt Meadows heat to pick berries. Let’s just say we were berry pleased to relax in the shade and enjoy our waffles!
Left to right: Salena Wiener, Serena Spacek, Michelle Levy, Julianna Wagar, Sara Penn, Kate Moffatt.
Kandice and our Project Manager, Kate Moffatt, gifted us four WPHP Monthly Mercury episodes this year. In February, we learned about unraveling firm addresses and the repercussions of early WPHP data decisions. Season Five premiered in October with an episode delving into authority records, which was followed by our traditional yearly Halloween episode, featuring Contributing Scholar Kate Ozment. We closed the year off with an extra special episode interviewing Megan Peiser and Emily Spunaugle about their work on the Marguerite Hicks Collection.
In November, Kandice returned to Vancouver to visit and our now small (but still mighty!!) team stopped by SFU’s Book Arts Studio to see Kate, who taught us how to use a letterpress. While our bench presses might not be the heaviest, you definitely won’t want to challenge us at the letterpress!
Left to right: Amanda Law, Belle Eist, Kate Moffatt, and Salena Wiener
To celebrate another busy and successful year for the WPHP, our team (including Kandice, who just can’t seem to stay away from us!), met for a hearty and festive brunch in December.
Left to right: Belle Eist, Michelle Levy, Amanda Law, Salena Wiener, Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and WPHP Monthly Mercury audio engineer Alex Kennard.
We can’t wait to share with you what this next (tenth!!) year has in store for us. To keep up with the WPHP, you can find us on BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook. You can listen to our podcast episodes on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout, and you can find our previous Year in Reviews at the top of our Team page.