Please find below details of our first C19 Research Group session, which will take place on Thursday 12th October in room MB3202 (Minerva building, 3rd floor), with refreshments served from 5pm and the paper due to start at 5.15pm.
We hope to see lots of you there!
Dr. Cassie Ulph (Bishop Grosseteste University), ‘Anne Lister, the Halifax Lit and Phil, and Civic Improvement’
Anne Lister (1791-1840) is best – and rightly – known as a pivotal figure in the history of sexuality, whose detailed diaries of homosexual relationships, and same sex de facto marriage to her partner Ann Walker, disrupt assumptions about the sexual norms of the early nineteenth century. This paper will address another aspect of Lister’s resistance to gendered norms, in the form of her active and determined engagement in the civic life and politics of Halifax. Focusing on Lister’s membership of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society (est. 1830), I will consider the ways in which civic leaders hoped to shape the culture of their town through such institutions, and the opportunity this presented in turn for Lister to shape her own identity and dynastic legacy. I will also examine the extent and meaningfulness of Lister’s participation in the Society, in light of other intellectual and social networks of which she was part.
Cassie Ulph is a Lecturer in English at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, specialising in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. She received her PhD from the University of Leeds in 2012, with a thesis that recontextualised Frances Burney’s work in relation to her formative experience of London artistic and musical culture, and her father Charles’s social and professional networks. Cassie’s recent work has focussed on women and intellectual community more broadly, and in particular on Hester Piozzi and Anne Lister. Before joining BGU in 2016, Cassie was a research fellow on the Leverhulme-funded Networks of Improvement project at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, and taught literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. In 2016, Cassie was awarded the McGill-ASECS Burney Fellowship, and the 2016-17 ASECS fellowship at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cassie is a committee member, conference organiser and former treasurer of the Burney Society UK, and was a member of the organising committee of the 2017 British Association of Victorian Studies conference held at BGU.