06 Nov 2018
By Pia Jakobsson
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November 2018 – ‘She said’: women’s authority, #MeToo and Margaret Cavendish

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Joanne Wright for the SSEMW Blog In 1989, students and staff at Columbia University hung a 170-foot wide banner off the top of Butler Library featuring the names of women writers, from Sappho and Christine de Pizan to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Virginia Woolf. As Laura Brown, who designed and made the banner, pointed out, “Great women do not get their names inscribed on buildings.”[1]  To this end, the Columbia University Banner Project provided a symbolic counterweight to the list of iconic Western men that permanently adorn the building in stone. Later, in 1994, when designing another banner…
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16 May 2018
By Pia Jakobsson
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May 2018 – Uncomfortable Alliances, Embarrassing Relations: Resisting and Reclaiming Intersectionality

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Christina Luckyj for the SSEMW Blog Coalitions, especially intersectional ones, can make for strange bedfellows. Many of us who advocate for early modern women writers might well avert our eyes if those women appeared on our street corners to hawk their religious pamphlets - just as they in turn might cast a censorious glance in our direction as we scurried past. “For various reasons, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about all this work on early modern religious texts,” tweeted Helen Smith on April 5 2018, citing her “lifelong atheism” as one reason for her discomfort. “The #nuntastic hashtag, great though it…
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03 Nov 2016
By Pia Jakobsson
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November 2016 – Bernardino Ochino and the Women Who Made His Career Possible

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Julie D. Campbell for the SSEMW Blog In January 2106, I attended a webinar entitled “Networking Early Modern Women,” intended to help scholars add early modern English women’s names to the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project, a DH endeavor produced by a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University. The Bacon project, co-founded by Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, “aims to be the broadest, most accessible source of who knew whom in early modern Britain.” Warren says that Six Degrees shows two degrees of relationship—“Think friends and friends of friends.”[1] It occurred to me that if one mapped…
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