University of Lincoln, 23rd July 2019 – website here
Organisers: Dr Alice Crossley, Dr Amy Culley, and Dr Rebecca Styler
Plenary Speaker: Prof. Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
‘Ageing in Public: Women Authors in the Nineteenth Century’
This conference responds to the burgeoning critical interest of humanities scholars in age, ageing, and stages of life from childhood to old age in the nineteenth century.
The figure of the child and the imaginative investment in the idea of childhood are the focus of seminal studies of ageing in this period.
However, recent critical engagements have suggested the value of exploring ageing identities and cultural articulations of age across the life course, in dialogue with one another, and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
In light of this development, this conference seeks to address the experiences, conceptions, and representations of the ageing process in the literature and culture of the nineteenth century.

W.P. Frith’s ‘Many Happy Returns’ (1856) ‘Harrogate Museums and Arts, Harrogate Borough Council’