Online Symposium on Women and Early Photography 1 June

For this online symposium focusing on photographs of and by women in the late-19th- and early-20th-century, we invite abstracts for papers dealing with an often-neglected aspect of photography history - women and early photography around the world.

This project is inspired by our exploration of photographs taken by the Aberdeen-based photography studio of George Washington Wilson (1823-1893), who was named the Photographer Royal for Scotland in 1860. His collection is housed at the University of Aberdeen library, and consists of over 37,000 glass plate negatives, produced by the firm that he, and then his sons, headed from the 1850s to 1908. It includes landscapes, cityscapes, and portrait photographs from across Britain and its former colonies and beyond. The GWW Collection includes diverse representations of women, in terms of their location, class, occupation, and ethnicity. An online exhibition of a selection of these photographs can be seen via this link: Envisioning Women's Places: Photographs from the George Washington Wilson Collection · University Collections (abdn.ac.uk)

We invite proposals for 15-20-minute presentations and for shorter 5-minute ones. We will request that presentations be submitted as video recordings by 15 May 2022, when they will be made available online so that participants in the symposium can explore them in advance of the online symposium on 1 June 2022.

We will be delighted to welcome Professor Elizabeth Edwards, author of Photographs and the Practice of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) as keynote speaker at this event.

Please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a short bio-bibliography (100 words) by 30 April 2022 to Dr Áine Larkin (Maynooth University) aine.larkin@mu.ie and Professor Heidi Brevik-Zender (University of California, Riverside) hbzender@ucr.edu