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Rewriting Gender
in an Age of Transition
(1880-1940)
An online conference
hosted at the University of St Andrews
16th – 18th September 2022
Thank you…
We would like to thank all the speakers and delegates for their contributions to the conference.
The turn of the 19th to 20th century marked an eruption of innovations in our cultural conception of gender. Rising consumerism altered men’s relationships with presentation while sexologists considered gender as a complex taxonomy. The New Woman sought greater levels of empowerment and heightened androgyny. Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition encompassed questions of presentation, perception and the textual body in gender variant literature and culture from 1880-1940. The programme for the three day conference is below. For the full conference packet, including bios, abstracts and other details, please click on the “Conference Packet” tab. For a downloadable version of the programme click on the following link.
All times shown are UK (British Summer Time).
16th September – Training Workshops
9:00 – Book Club #1 – Xavier Maynes, Imre: A Memorandum Moderated by Katerina García-Walsh
10:00 – New Developments in Gender Studies
Dr Jade Fletcher, Lecturer in Philosophy, Deputy Director of St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies (StAIGS)
Sebastian Stuart, PhD Candidate in Philosophy and Art History, Research Coordinator for StAIGS
11:00 – Inclusivity in the Field
Umais Tahir & Phillippa Scrafton, Stonewall Consultants
12:00 – Break
13:00 – Publishing in the Humanities
Dr Ana Paola Gutierrez Garza, Lecturer in Anthropology, Head of StAIGS
14:00 – Transforming Research into Public Engagement
Dr Kirsty Ross, Head of Public Engagement with Research (PER) Team
15:00 – Break
16:00 – Book Club #2 – Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack Moderated by Paul Thompson
17:00 – End of Day One
17th September
10:00 – Online Access Opens
10:15 – Welcome – Professor Gill Plain, University of St Andrews
10:30 – Keynote – Dr Jane Goldman, University of Glasgow.
“Knickers into nackers”: Gender in transition in the art and life of Nina Hamnett.
11:30 – Break
12:00 – Panel 1 – Women and Girls in Interwar Popular Culture
– Caroline McWilliams, University of St Andrews. “Margot is human, isn’t she, after all?”: The Modern Girl in Inter-war Élite Women’s Magazines.
– Mi Zhou, University of St Andrews. Kodak Girl in China: Photography and the Modern Woman in 1920s and 1930s China.
– Annalisa Federici, Roma Tre University. Sensuous Modernity: the Linguistic Construction of Femininity in the Fashion Content of Interwar Vogue.
13:30 – Break
13:45 – Panel 2 – Women Authors and Transgressive Texts
– Suparna Roy, Independent Researcher. Urgency of Female Writing and Authorship: Re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in the Age of Transition.
– Aiswarya Jayamohan, University of Edinburgh. Queer coolness in Willa Cather’s “Tommy the Unsentimental” (1896).
– Victoria Bik, Georgetown University. New Women Disguised as Domestic Angels: Sarah Grand and Her Heroines in The Heavenly Twins.
15:15 – Break
15:45 – Panel 3 – Queer Modernist Masculinities
– Michela Esposito, University of St Andrews. “Might he not try to be a man now?”: Confusing Masculinity in British Literature 1938-1940.
– Jesse Gauthier, Queen’s University. The Politics of Masculinity in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.
17:15 – Announcements
17:30 – End of Day Two
18th September
12:00 – Online Access Opens
12:30 – Panel 4 – Queer Utopias of the fin-de-siècle
– Douglas Pretsell, La Trobe University. Police-liaison in fin de siècle Berlin.
– Joe McLaughlin, University of Toronto. Revolutionary Receptivity: Walter Pater’s Ethicopolitical Effeminacy.
13:30 – Panel 5 – Gothic Genders of the fin-de-siècle
– Brontë Schiltz, Manchester Metropolitan University. “Mysterious influences”: de-medicalising queerness in the Gothic fin de siècle.
– Tanya Cheadle, University of Glasgow. “I was no longer the silly sceptical boy, believing only what he could see and handle”: masculinity, modernity and esotericism in the occult novels of John William Brodie-Innes.
14:30 – Break
15:00 – Panel 6 – Non-human and Non-cis Bodies
– Dean Leetal, Kibbutzim College of Tel Aviv. The Jewish Transgender Golem: Rereading Rosenberg’s Nifl’os Maharal.
– Cecilia Rose, University of Exeter. Gendering Victorian Mermaids: Mermaids and Sirens as Figures of Indeterminate Gender in Victorian Literature and Art.
– Jonah Garde, University of Bern & University of Victoria. Animal Connections: Endocrine Subjectivities, Racial Fantasies and Trans* Horizons.
16:30 – Break
16:45 – Panel 7 – Women Poets on the Margins of Century and Society
– Domenico Di Rosa, University of St Andrews. Reclaiming Women’s Voices in the Poetry of Violet Jacob and Marion Angus.
– Holly Laird, University of Tulsa. Redefining the Turn of the Century: Through Gender and the Voices of Michael Field.
17:45 – Break
18:15 – Keynote – Dr Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha.
“Neither man nor woman”: Sexology, George Moore’s “Albert Nobbs,” and the Always Partial Turn-of-the-Century Genealogy of Trans Identities.
19:15 – Closing Remarks – Professor Emma Sutton, University of St Andrews
19:30 – End of Conference
If you have any questions about the programme, please get in touch with the organisers – Paul Thompson and Katerina García-Walsh, University of St Andrews.
