Barbara Taylor from the University of East London and Norma Clarke of Kingston University in London, two of the preeminent scholars of Enlightenment-era feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, will deliver lectures Thursday and Friday (April 12 and 13) at the University of Notre Dame. Both talks are free and open to the public.
Concluding the “Mary Wollstonecraft and her Legacies” speaker series sponsored by the University’s Gender Studies Program, Taylor will give a lecture titled “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Solitary Self” at 7p.m. Thursday in 112-114 McKenna Hall, andClarke will discuss “Scandalous Histories: Mrs. Pilkington, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Kingsborough Family Connection” at 3p.m. Friday in 120 DeBartolo Hall.
A professor of modern history at the University of East London, Taylor is the author of “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination” and__"Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century" and co-editor of “Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 1650-1850.” She is co-director of the university’s Raphael Samuel History Centre, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and served on the advisory council of the Institute of Historical Research.
Clarke, a professor of English literature at Kingston University, has worked with the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the university’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. She is the author of “The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters,” “Dr. Johnson’s Women,” and “Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love: The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans and Jane Welsh Carlyle.”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early advocate for equality of the sexes who ridiculed the prevailing notions of women as dependent and unintelligent. Many of her ideas are main doctrines of contemporary women’s movements.
The events are co-sponsored by Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies, College of Arts and Letters Beyond the Classroom Program and Eighteenth Century Studies Seminar.
Contact: Eileen Hunt Botting, director of the Gender Studies Program,574-631-0495, ehunt@nd.edu
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on April 11, 2007.