Learning to see the power of women

• Professor Suzan Broomhall (Australia)
• Professor Mary Spongberg (Australia)
• Dr Elena Woodacre (UK)
• Dr Armel Duboit-Nayt (France)
• Dr Séverine Genieys-Kirk (UK)

• Belgian playwrights and actresses Barbara Sylvain and Lula Bery talked about their play on Marie Suart and Elizabeth I, It’s so nice (2011)
• Alexandria Patience talked about her co-authored play on seventeenth-century playwright Aphra Behn, APHRA (1997) and gender equity in theatre
• Clarissa Palmer talked about her co-authored play Olympe de Gouges, porteuse d’espoir/ A Beacon of hope (L’Harmattan, 2012).

MARCH (2015, 40 minutes) documents March of Women, a large-scale public art event in Bridgeton, Glasgow held on the eve of International Women’s Day 2015. Through a series of interviews with a wide variety of the participating women, the film considers the gap in documenting women’s history, and points to the resounding importance of having a female generation to both honour and draw inspiration from. A screening of the film was included in the programme of the Recovering Women’s Past conference in September 2016. It was introduced by Professor Anna Birch, Artistic Director of March of Women, and followed by a debate moderated by Professor Gina Luria Walker (New School, New York).

Associating with Andy Warhol and the Beat Generation, Alice Neel (1900-1984) tended to exist on the peripheries of society. Telling the story of the turbulent events that shaped Neel’s life, The Subject and Me was the first solo exhibition of her work in Scotland. It was the latest in a series of exhibitions at Talbot Rice Gallery promoting the work of leading women artists, previously including Jane and Louise Wilson, Hanne Darboven, Jenny Holzer and Rosemarie Trockel. A guided tour of the exhibition with Principal Curator, Pat Fisher, was included in the programme of the Recovering Women’s Past conference in September 2016.

The first in a series of workshops examining the lives and literature of female writers from the early modern period (16th to 18th centuries). Held in French, this event centred on the work of seventeenth-century playwright and novelist, Mme de Villedieu, with a focus on her play, Le Favori (1665) (H. Goldwyn and A. Evain (eds.), Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime, XVIIes, 2008).

The second in a series of workshops examining the lives and literature of female writers from the early modern period (16th to 18th centuries). Held in French, this event centred on the novels of Madame de La Fayette, with a particular focus on La Princesse de Montpensier.

A public screening of Bertrand Tavernier​​​​​​'s 2010 film La Princesse de Montpensier [The Princess of Montpensier] shown in collaboration with The French Institute as part of the two-day event, Cultural Encounters Between North, South, West And East. Inspired by a novel by an iconic seventeenth-century French woman writer, the film was introduced by Dr Séverine Genieys-Kirk based on her research ‘Women of the past, Reception of women writers: Madame de La Fayette as a case study’.