CFP: Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe

 CFP: Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe: Spaces and Exchanges - Exeter 06/2025

The Cultures of Philosophy project at the University of Exeter in the UK invites proposals for our first conference, ‘Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe: Spaces and Exchanges’ to be held at Reed Hall, the University of Exeter, 2-4 June 2025.

Women Writing Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Europe: Spaces and Exchanges

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Helena Taylor / Felicity Henderson / Catherine Evans / Carlotta Moro / Floris Verhaart, University of Exeter (University of Exeter), EX4 4PY Exeter (United Kingdom)

02.06.2025 - 04.06.2025

Deadline: 29.11.2024

Confirmed speakers:

- Cassie Gorman (Anglia Ruskin)

- Ruth Hagengruber (University of Paderborn)

- Sarah Hutton (University of York)

- Eric Jorink (Leiden University)

- Meredith Ray (University of Delaware)

- Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (KCL)

The history of philosophy is experiencing a major paradigm shift, with the work of early modern women philosophers in the spotlight (for e.g. Detlefsen and Shapiro 2023): this conference builds on that momentum to produce a more inclusive account of “science” in the long seventeenth century. The conference aims to recover women’s contributions to early modern natural philosophy, looking beyond the treatise and dialogue to other genres both in manuscript and print; and to examine women’s roles in transnational communities of scientific exchange.

In particular, the conference will foreground women’s textual engagement with natural philosophy and investigate transnational institutions, communities, and collaborations. How are philosophical concepts conveyed by diverse literary forms that cannot be categorised as scholarship? How did European women draw on global perspectives and philosophical cultures outside Europe? How can we trace women’s engagement with philosophical networks and institutions? How might including different genres, figures, and communities shift our understanding of natural philosophy in this period?

Taking a comparative, relational, and transnational approach, the conference seeks to investigate women's collaborations, exchanges, and roles in networks both within or at the margins of academies, institutions, and other official sites of scientific knowledge exchange; and their involvement in informal salons, manuscript circles, and other spaces of encounter. The CultPhil project examines the European context, but we welcome papers that engage with non-European cultures and philosophical traditions, with attention to different languages, international networks, and contexts. We encourage proposals from scholars in disciplines including (but not limited to): history of science, environmental humanities, literary history, intellectual history, book history, and the history of philosophy.

Proposals could include, but are not limited to:

- Female-authored philosophical writings that engage with natural philosophy within a range of genres, such as hagiography and other devotional genres, poetry, marginalia, miscellany, historical fiction, salon verse, annotation etc.

- Women’s participation in (and exclusion from) academies, salons, manuscript circles, institutions, and other spaces of learning

- Women and transnational and national manuscript and epistolary networks, exchanges, dynamics of collectivity and collaboration, circulatory systems, book history and their relations to natural philosophy

- Recovery of forgotten thinkers; methods for approaching the history of (natural) philosophy

- Intersections between natural philosophy and other disciplines: theology, natural history, medicine, political thought, rights of women

- Women’s ecological thought

- Ecofeminist and animal history readings of early modern texts

- Variations in women’s intellectual conditions (both constraints and opportunities) across borders and cultural regions

- Encounters, influence, entanglements with the global context

We invite proposals (200-250 words) for 20-minute papers or 10-minute lightning talks, delivered in English (please include a short biographical note of c. 50 words); we welcome proposals from PhD students and early career scholars.

Conference attendance will be free, but participants are expected to arrange and cover the costs of their own travel and accommodation. There will be a limited number of bursaries to support speakers without access to institutional funding. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please note this with your proposal.

Deadline: November 29th 2024. Please send proposals to cultphil@exeter.ac.uk.

We envisage publishing a collected volume based on the conference proceedings.

Conference organisers (University of Exeter):

- Helena Taylor

- Felicity Henderson

- Catherine Evans

- Carlotta Moro

- Floris Verhaart

The conference is supported by the European Research Council-selected Starting Grant, ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number EP/Y006372/1].