October
2008
WIFIS 2008 – Conference Report0
The seventh annual meeting of Women in French in Scotland (WIFIS) took place on 18 October 2008 at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow’s splendid nineteenth-century municipal library. The conference, organised by Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier (Strathclyde), and Elisabeth Campbell (University of the West of Scotland) welcomed a group of six historians from the Association Les Femmes et la Ville, Marseille, as part of the Glasgow/Marseilles Twin Towns Programme, as well as participants from Bordeaux, Montpellier, Haute-Alsace, Berlin, Avignon, Bielefeld, and throughout the UK. Conference papers presented in the five sessions took up a broad spectrum of work by and about women, including Louise Labé, Taos Amrouche, Catherine Breillat, eighteenth-century pedagogical novels by women, and the letters of Euphrasie Rodrigues, a young pianist active as a Saint-Simonian. Highlights of the Mitchell’s extensive archives and special collections were toured with Marion Beaton, department co-ordinator. The WIFIS plenary was given by the distinguished feminist historian Françoise Thébaud, professor of modern history at the University of Avignon and co-editor of CLIO, on ‘L’aventure intellectuelle de l’histoire des femmes et du genre en France’. The organisers are grateful to the University of Strathclyde and the University of the West of Scotland for financial support. The October 2009 meeting will take place at the University of Aberdeen, organised by Elizabeth MacKnight, e.macknight@abdn.ac.uk. For more information, please visit the WIFIS blog at http://wifis.edublogs.org. (Report by Elisabeth Campbell, Joy Charnley, and Caroline Verdier).
