University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Friday & Saturday, October 21-22 2005

The interplay between high and low cultural forms and the flux and flow of still often porous gender positions have been among the most energetically researched and richly theorized features of early modern culture in recent years. This conference will bring together established historians and literary scholars to explore the intersections of gender and popular culture over a hundred-year period that was pivotal in the emergence of modern understandings of these two conceptual categories. The pioneering research assembled at this conference and in the edited volume to follow will focus renewed attention on the profound transformations that defined the cultural lexicon and life experience of non-elite women and men in the post-renaissance period.

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  :: Featured Speakers ::
Paula Backscheider
Auburn University, author of Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England
Jane Spencer
University of Exeter, author of The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen
Bernard Capp
University of Warwick, author of When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England
Frances Dolan
UC Davis, author of Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700
Anthony Fletcher
University of London, author of Gender, Sex, & Subordination in England 1500-1800
Paula McDowell
Rutgers University, author of The Women of Grub Street
Mary Beth Norton
Cornell University, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Ruth Perry
MIT, author of The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist
John Richetti
University of Pennsylvania, author of Popular Fiction Before Richardson
Robert Shoemaker
University of Sheffield, author of Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres?
William Warner
UC Santa Barbara, author of Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Eighteenth Century Britain
Rachel Weil
Cornell University, author of Political Passions: Gender, The Family and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714
Paula Backscheider
Auburn University, author of Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement