Women
Celebrating Collaborations with the Heritage Sector
As #TORCHGoesDigital enters its eighth week, the TORCH Heritage Programme and National Trust Partnership are highlighting our projects that focus on women's histories, women's stories and women's lives, all of which have involved active collaboration with the heritage sector.
This week, we recommend reading 'Miracle Kitchens and Bachelor Pads: The Competing Narratives of Modern Spaces'. This paper by Rebecca Devers, Assistant Professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, was published in the collective volume InHabit: People, Places and Possessions, edited by Antony Buxton, Linda Hulin, and Jane Anderson in 2017. The volume was the product of the TORCH research network inHabit: Text, Object and Domestic Space.
If the good weather makes you crave more outdoor topics, have a look at a special issue of the journal Women’s History, publishing papers delivered as part of the Women Gardeners c.1500-2000 conference, which was held at the History Faculty in 2018 in partnership with the National Trust. Many of the participants from this study day were due to speak at the Women and Gardens conference in Oxford over the weekend of 29th-31st May 2020. This conference, which was co-organised by The Gardens Trust and the Department for Continuing Education's has sadly been cancelled due to Coronavirus.
With better days in mind, this is a great opportunity to promote the Women’s Library at Compton Verney, a project inspired by the library of Georgiana Verney, mistress of Compton Verney, and a champion of women’s reading, education, and suffrage.
Working with the Historic Coventry Trust and the Medieval Coventry Trust, the Heritage Partnerships Team supported three doctoral researchers, Dr Sarah Griffin, Dr Rachel Delman, and Eleanor Townshend, in developing an exhibition and a series of walking tours exploring Royal Women of Influence in Medieval Coventry.
Through a series of workshops, we supported Historic Royal Palaces in setting up the AHRC-funded research network Victoria’s Self-Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation and Empire, and introduced Dr Priya Atwal to the project's principal investigators, just in time for the 200th birth anniversary of Queen Victoria on 24 May 2019. Dr Atwal reflected on this collaboration in her blog post Fashioning Victoria.
Women's roles and contributions in history have featured heavily in projects associated with Oxford's National Trust Partnership as well. In 2019, the Partnership convened a two-day conference 'Women and Power', bringing together academics and heritage professionals to reflect on previous practice and look forward to the future of representing women’s histories. 2019 also saw the exhibition 'We Are Bess' at the National Trust's Hardwick Hall, a collaboration with Oxford's Dr Emma Turnbull which aimed to show how Bess of Hardwick's story resonates with many women today. More stories of women throughout history are featured in Trusted Source, our growing collection of short and easily understood articles about history, culture, and the natural environment, developed in partnership with the National Trust. This week we look at articles on women who were writers, social reformers, royalty, and more.
