Feminist histories: care, loneliness and embodiment

On Tuesday 4 February, BRIHC and the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre will host a panel of distinguished historians to discuss feminist/women's history approaches to care, loneliness and embodiment in the past.

• This will be a hybrid event
• Zoom link

Dr Anna Jamieson (University of Birmingham) holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship on the topic of 'Materialities Of Care: Women, Material Culture And The English Private Madhouse, 1760-1840'. Professor Sarah Knott (Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History, University of Oxford) works on the long history of care and on 'care' as a historian's category. Dr Naomi Pullin (University of Warwick) is currently working on the monograph project 'A Social History of Solitude in Early Modern Britain', with a central focus on the ways in which solitude carried different gendered expectations. They will be in conversation with Professor Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham), who is completing a project on the body and has recently co-authored a piece on spatial and affective dimensions of care in eighteenth-century households. 

Speakers will discuss together their distinctive approach to the topic. How do the themes of 'care' or 'loneliness' offer the historian affordances to open up new accounts of the past? Is the conduct or outcome of their research 'feminist'? How significant is gender in their studies? In what ways can an approach that historicises the body and emotions enhance this work?