St Mary’s to Hold Women’s Freedom, Rights and Power Conference

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th April, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham is holding a multidisciplinary conference exploring the intersection between gender, revolt and power across the Americas in the twentieth century.

The two-day conference, ‘Freedom, Rights, and Power: Recasting Women’s Struggles across the Americas since 1900’, has been organised by St Mary’s School of Theology, Philosophy and History in conjunction with the Society for the History of Women in the Americas.

The conference will look to create links between historical, regional and current movements for change, capitalising on a new momentum that has emerged in relation to discourses of gender and power. Conference topics include African American Women Leaders and Activists, Second Wave Feminism, Suffrage, and African American and Caribbean Literatures.

Speakers alongside St Mary’s History Lecturer Dr Sinead McEneaney include scholars from the Universities of East Anglia, Brunel, Leeds and Trent in the UK, as well as US-based experts from the Universities of North Carolina, Wayne State and Illinois, Springfield.

Completing a diverse line-up, the conference will also welcome academics from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the University of Costa Rica.

Conference organiser Dr Sinead McEneaney said, “Women have been central in stretching the definitions of legal rights, challenging old concepts of power, and establishing new parameters of freedom across the Americas throughout the twentieth century.

“Our conference seeks to create links between historical, regional and current movements for change, and to capitalize on a new momentum that has emerged in relation to discourses of gender and power. The wide range of papers will help us to think anew about the ways that women have challenged prevailing social, economic and political systems, and to consider how the past informs the future as we extend our concepts of freedom within the context of the whole continent.”

The conference will also see the launch of a new journal History of Women in the Americas. The conference will take place at St Mary’s Strawberry Hill campus.

For more information please visit the conference website. Alternatively, join the conference Facebook group or follow on Twitter. You can register online or email freedomrightspower2013@gmail.com.