Conference | Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Corpus Online
Thomas Rowlandson, Breaking Up of the Blue Stocking Club, 1815, hand-colored etching
(San Marino: Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens)
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Next month at The Huntington:
Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 8–9 December 2023
Organized by Elizabeth Eger and Nicole Pohl
This conference, organized in collaboration with the Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online (EMCO) project, explores themes related to The Huntington’s Elizabeth Montagu Papers. Topics include the letter as object, historical document, linguistic artifact, as well as a carrier of objects and messages about friendship, health, the mind and body, and politics. The Huntington’s collection of Elizabeth Montagu’s extensive correspondence has provided a rich source—as well as a practical challenge—for scholars working in a variety of fields, from social and economic history to histories of medicine, aesthetics, authorial selfhood, and literary genres.
Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1718–1800) combined many roles: pioneering Shakespeare critic, businesswoman, manager of coalmines and agricultural estates, philanthropist, and patron of artists and writers. She pivoted between several important social, political, religious, and intellectual networks. Her letters connect people, places and concepts with graphic immediacy.
In 2017, the registered charity Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO) was founded to fund the digitization of her 8000 extant manuscript letters, most of which are curated by The Huntington Library. This conference will explore themes connected to the archive, the letter as object, historical document, linguistic artifact, as well as a carrier of objects and messages about friendship, health, the mind and body, and politics.
This conference is organized by Elizabeth Eger (King’s College, London) and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes, Oxford). Funding is provided by The Homer Crotty Lecture Endowment and the Edward A. Mayers Fellowship Endowment.
f r i d a y , 8 d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 3
8.45 Registration and Coffee
9.15 Welcome by Susan Juster (The Huntington Library) and Conveners
9.30 Session 1 | A History of the Montagu Collection at The Huntington
• Vanessa Wilkie (The Huntington Library)
• Karla Nielsen (The Huntington Library)
10.00 Break
10.30 Session 2 | EMCO: The Physical Archive and Its Virtual Other
Moderator: Joanna Barker (Durham and EMCO Senior Editor)
• Alexander Roberts (Swansea University)
• Daniel Archambault (Swansea University)
• Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes and EMCO Editor in Chief)
Noon Lunch
1.00 Session 3 | Gender and Knowledge
Moderator: Emily Anderson (University of Southern California)
• Rachael Scarborough King (UC Santa Barbara), Improving Letters: Self- and Literary Improvement in Women’s Epistolary Genres
• Nataliia Voloshkova, (Kazimierz Wielki University), Bluestockings and Science: Acquiring, Sharing, and Employing Knowledge, read by Nicole Pohl
2.30 Break
3.00 Session 4 | Absence and Presence
Moderator: Susan Carlile (Cal State Long Beach)
• Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London and EMCO Consultant Editor), Embodying Mind: Portraits of Elizabeth Montagu
• Felicity Nussbaum (UCLA), The Beloved Absent: The Correspondence between Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale Piozzi
s a t u r d a y , 9 d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 3
8.30 Registration and Coffee
9.00 Session 5 | Embodying Language: The Letter and Creative and Critical Modes of Writing
Moderator: Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes)
• Betty A. Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), Unclothed Bodies: The Problem of Enclosures in the Montagu Collection
• Mike Cousins (Historian), Keeping Track of Mrs. Montagu: Challenges in Dating Her Correspondence with Lord Lyttelton, and a Comparison with Unpublished Letter Collections of Some Other Contemporary Women Writers
10.30 Tours of the Library and Gallery
Noon Lunch
1.00 Session 6 | Bodies in Letters, Letters as Bodies
Moderator: Dena Goodman (University of Michigan)
• Lisa Forman Cody (Claremont McKenna College), Pregnant Pauses: Reproduction in—and as—Letter Writing
• Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham), ʽWe Must Chat about Invalids’: The Lived Body in British Women’s Letters, 1730–1800
2.30 Break
3.00 Session 7 | In Sickness and in Health: Bluestocking Friendship
Moderator: Karla Nielsen (The Huntington Library)
• Anna Senkiw (Oxford Brookes), ʽSeveral Weeks Indisposition, a Little Dastardly Fever Lurking about Me, Has Hinderd My Coming to the Adelphi’: Friendship with the Garricks, in Sickness and in Health
• Helen Deutsch (UCLA), Symptomatic Correspondences, Female Complaints: Authorship, Friendship and Illness in the Montagu Letters
4.30 Concluding Remarks
Panel Discussion | Caricature Collectors in Conversation
Modified version of Charles Williams, after George Moutard Woodward, The Conclusion of the First Volume of the Caricature Magazine, published by Thomas Tegg, 1807, hand-colored etching.
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Sponsored by The Lewis Walpole Library:
Panel Discussion | Caricature Collectors in Conversation
Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, Thursday, 16 November 2023, 3pm
Please join us for a panel of distinguished private collectors and print curators for lively conversation about their interests, expertise, and adventures in building their collections of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British caricature and satiric prints. They will share stories of discovery and the pursuit of coveted acquisitions, and we will invite their thoughts on the role of appreciation, connoisseurship, and learning that grows along with the collection and the value that they find in engagement with fellow collectors and curators, and in research at library and museum print rooms. The program is free and open to the public.
Enfilade 
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