Conference Announcement: „Feminist Enlightenment and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe“
Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland Wednesday 25th June 2025 to Saturday 28th June 2025
The upcoming conference will address the relationship between a feminist Enlightenment and the forms political action took within a European context. It will explore whether and how women’s political identities were formulated and even implemented by men, or by women themselves. Furthermore, it will also concentrate on the circulation of these ideas in the global eighteenth century and how Enlightenment discourse on gender and politics contributed to or opposed the colonial project and theories of race. We welcome papers that investigate how class, age, race, and religion intersected with the question of gender and politics. We invite scholars from the fields of eighteenth-century literature, history, legal studies, women’s studies, political theory, and philosophy.
“Feminist Literary History Today: A Symposium for Ina Schabert”
University of Zurich, 3. September 2021, 2-7pm
This symposium celebrates the achievements of Prof. Dr. Ina Schabert, one of the most distinguished scholars of feminist literary history in German-speaking academia and beyond. Her two-volume history of English literature from the perspective of gender studies has become a standard textbook. Four lectures by international experts that explore the significance and methods of feminist literary history today are followed by the launch of a new book series on the ‘Feminist Enlightenment in Europe’.
“Women, the Law and Women’s Rights”
International Conference at the University of Zurich, 1.-3. September 2021
This international conference is dedicated to the relationship between law and gender in the sciences and arts, but also in the social and state reality of the eighteenth century. It traces the development of debates and legal situations as well as the interactions between the history of ideas and historical reality, and their critical or affirmative reflections in literature and art. In doing so it raises the fundamental question of women’s legal capacity and their possible participation in the human rights, formulated for the first time in the Enlightenment, and discusses the answers provided in the realms of eighteenth-century philosophy, sciences, arts and legal practice.
“The Feminist Enlightenment across Europe”
International Conference at the University of Würzburg, 5.-7. July 2018
This conference explores the central role of women in the project of the European enlightenment. Far from posing merely as the object of moral, didactic or medical writings, learned women entered into a critical dialogue with Enlightenment thinkers and their positions. The conference aims at reconstructing the transnational networks of the feminist Enlightenment as well as at establishing the philosophical, religious, political and literary conditions which shaped it.