27th-28th June 2025
Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, and online
Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator and polemicist, celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’. The year 2025 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Barbauld’s death and the publication of a new four-volume scholarly edition of her Collected Works by Oxford University Press. We announce a two-day hybrid and interdisciplinary conference which will celebrate these landmarks. This will be the first conference dedicated to Barbauld in over a decade, and will promote and build on important recent developments in Barbauld scholarship.
‘Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent’ will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for Barbauld’s poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent. William McCarthy in his landmark biography named Barbauld a ‘Voice of the Enlightenment’; hers was an influential mode of enlightenment, mediated by Dissent.
Barbauld was celebrated during her lifetime as a poet of genius, an innovative teacher and writer for children, and a powerful polemicist, but her reputation was distorted and eclipsed in the nineteenth century and her achievements have only gradually been recovered. Increasingly, scholars have noted the importance of Barbauld’s dissenting identity for her creative and political achievements. She was a member of a Dissenting Protestant community excluded from social and political circles of power, but protested what she termed ‘the mark of separation set upon us’ and used her outsider status – both as a dissenter and a woman – to protest contemporary injustices, and to support the causes of social and political reform, including the abolition of the slave trade. For Barbauld, dissent was not only the source of her civic identity but also of her profound religious faith. New research is now revealing the significance of devotional forms, customs and practices for her creative and political work.
We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. She commanded, in Isobel Grundy’s words, a ‘various set of voices’, and she was acutely attuned to the rhetorical force of the human voice, working in forms and genres designed for vocalisation, from songs and hymns to speeches and sermons. Such voicings were informed by dissenting practices, but Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to these traditions, and in turn inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.
Our confirmed keynote speakers are: Professor Emma Clery; Professor Elizabeth Kraft; Professor Scott Krawczyk; Professor William McCarthy.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and pre-formed panels of three, to be delivered in-person or online. We especially encourage submissions from early-career researchers and independent scholars. To propose a paper or panel, please send an abstract of around 250 words per presentation to barbauld2025@gmail.com before midnight on Friday 1 November 2024.
Possible themes for papers include, but are not limited to:
· Barbauld’s dissenting life and community
· Barbauld’s poetics of religious and political dissent
· Barbauld’s abolitionist and anti-war writings
· Barbauld’s engagements with devotional forms and practices
· The oral and aural contexts of Barbauld’s dissent
· Barbauld’s engagement with her dissenting contemporaries, male and female
· Nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies of Barbauld’s anti-war writing and ecofeminist thought
· Connections between Romantic-era and contemporary literatures of political and religious dissent
· The limits of Barbauld’s dissent
A small number of bursaries will be available to support attendance by students and early career researchers. Please indicate in your submission if you wish to be considered for a bursary, briefly outlining your case for support.
Organisers: Professor Mary Fairclough and Dr Joanna Wharton