Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent conference
University of York, 27-28 June 2025.
REGISTRATION OPEN!
Registration is now open for our conference, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent, to be held at King’s Manor, University of York, and online on 27-28 June 2025. You are all warmly invited to attend. Please register at our conference webpage: tinyurl.com/barbauld25
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 celebrate these landmarks with a two-day conference in-person at the King’s Manor, University of York, and online, organised by the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies in collaboration with the Department of English and Related Literature.
Our keynote speakers William McCarthy, Elizabeth Kraft, Scott Krawczuk and Emma Clery will discuss editing Barbauld’s work, will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for her poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent.
We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. 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.
Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to dissenting traditions, and inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.
We warmly welcome both in-person and online registrations. Register at the conference webpage here, and check the webpage for our full two-day conference programme.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the MHRA, Dr Williams Trust, British Association of Romantic Studies, British Association of Victorian Studies, and York Georgian Society.
If you have questions please contact barbauld2025@gmail.com