My recent cataloguing activities

Recent posts at the Wellcome Library blog on collections/items I've been processing lately:

Having a ‘typewritten conversation’: one letter, but a long and important one, from Sir Robert McCarrison to George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse of the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham

The Blood is the Life: the Harrison-Howell Blood Transfusion Collection

‘One of the great leaders among medical women in India’  on the papers of Dr Margaret Ida Balfour, (1866-1945), CBE, MD, CM FRCOG.

Further on Project getting out more

This week I managed to get to the IHR Life-Cycles seminar (which was rather distressingly thinly attended, I wonder why this was?), Ishita Pande, (Queen’s University, Ontario) talking on 'Sorting Boys and Men: Unlawful Intercourse, Boy Protection and the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Late Colonial India', with particular reference to the 1929 Act passed by the Legislative Assembly brought into being ten years earlier by the Government of India Act (and thus not simply a top-down imperialist measure). Whereas the earlier debates on and legislation to do with child marriage had been about the protection of girls and women (and the child-widow problem) this act incorporated the concept of boys as also in need of protection. While Pande indicated that the act was relatively ineffective (because of the importance of child-marriage within the broader joint family system) with fairly few cases brought under it, and these tending to deploy it for other agendas, she suggested that it reflected a shift from concerns specifically to do with the protection of women to the idea of children and childhood in general as a protected zone.

On Friday I managed, for the first time in rather a long while (since these usually take place on working afternoons), to get to the Critical Sexology seminar at Queen Mary University of London, on Sex and Pedagogy.  This included three fascinating presentations on the theme, ranging from the use of erotica to convey advice and safer sex messages, via pedagogical techniques for providing safe spaces for sex positive sex education to young people, to teaching sexually-charged material in the university classroom. (Live-tweeted). This was a thought-provoking afternoon which generated many thoughts and questions, and there was much lively and provocative discussion.

Some forthcoming conferences

Love, Desire and Melancholy: Inspired by the Writings of Constance Maynard

Centre for the History of the Emotions Symposium
Queen Mary, University of London

Date: 6th November 2012

The Centre for the History of the Emotions and Queen Mary, University of London Archives invite you to a symposium to explore love, desire, melancholy and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These themes are inspired by the personal experiences described in the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard (1849-1935), which were recently digitised.

Constance Maynard was a pioneer in higher education for women. She was also a prolific writer, whose personal writings cover over 40 years of her life and touch on topics such as her role in Westfield College, her devout Christian faith, her close friendships with other women and her attempts to understand her emotions.

Key Note Speakers

Professor Seth Koven, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, The Match Girl and the Heiress: Christian Revolution and Languages of Love Between Women in the London Slums.

Professor Pauline Phipps, University of Windsor, Constance Maynard’s Atonement: The Passions of an English Educational Pioneer (1849-1935).

Other Speakers

Professor Laura Doan, The University of Manchester, Constance Maynard and the Historiography of Sexuality.

Angharad Eyre, Queen Mary, University of London, PhD candidate, Militant love and friendship: Constance Maynard and the female missionary tradition.

Professor Carol Mavor, The University of Manchester, An open secret, lit by something lightly incestuous: Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Paul and Virginia (1864).

Professor Sue Morgan, University of Chichester, Sex and Common-Sense: Maude Royden, Religion and Modern Sexuality.

Helena Whitbread, Author, Anne Lister 1791-1840 ‘I was not born to live alone. I must have the object with me & in loving & being loved I could be happy.’ (Anne Lister - 21st April 1823).

Roundtable

Including, Dr Thomas Dixon, Queen Mary, University of London, Professor Elisabeth Jay, Oxford Brookes University, Professor Amanda Vickery, Queen Mary, University of London.

Reception

A reception and exhibition by the Archives on the works of Constance Maynard is concluding the symposium.

Location and Registration

Directions to Queen Mary, University of London, in Arts Two Building, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, can be found here: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/index.html

To book a place visit http://maynard.eventbrite.co.uk/ For more information email archives@qmul.ac.uk

Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Constance Maynard

Constance Maynard’s experience of love, desire, melancholy, and religion are recorded in her personal writings, which are the inspiration for the themes explored in the symposium.

Constance Maynard’s personal writings include her ‘Green Book’ diaries written between 1866 and 1834, in which she describes her ‘inner life’, and an unpublished autobiography, written in her latter years in the style of a reflective diary.

This symposium is a celebration of the digitisation of the ‘Green Book’ diaries and autobiography, published by Queen Mary, University of London Archives in April 2012:
www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives/digital/constance_maynard

More information about the Archives can be found here: www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives

***

Gender and Justice in South Asia since 1757

Thursday 12-Friday 13 September 2013
Wolfson College, University of Oxford
Recent popular campaigns in South Asia designed to highlight and root out corruption at both the local and national level show that the subject of `justice´, fairness and equitable treatment, remain a pressing issue. South Asian women´s social, cultural, religious and economic position has also repeatedly been identified since the eighteenth century as an area particularly deserving of attention.  This has led to a thriving women´s movement, as well as problematic colonial notions of `eternally oppressed South Asian women´ that are still used as a symbol to justify a plethora of conservative viewpoints in the West.

This international and multidisciplinary conference will explore the manifold ways in which the ideas of gender and justice have been approached in South Asia and in the South Asian Diaspora since 1757. Its aim is to foster dialogue between scholars from different fields and to provide an historical dimension to contemporary issues and debates around the broad themes of gender, sexuality and justice. Papers which have a transnational and/or
comparative focus between countries in South Asia and elsewhere in the world are particularly welcome.

Keynote Address: Dr Joanna de Groot (University of York)

Provisionally confirmed speakers include:
*Professor Clare Anderson (University of Leicester) *Professor Uma Chakravarti (Miranda House) *Dr Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield)*Dr Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham) *Dr Andrea Major (University of Leeds) *Dr Anshu Malhotra (University of Delhi) *Professor Clare Midgley (Sheffield Hallam University) *Dr Kaveri Qureshi(University of Oxford) *Professor Janaki Nair (Jawaharlal Nehru University) *Professor Shirin Rai (University of Warwick)

It is envisaged that the conference will result in one or more publications.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a one-page CV to daniel.grey@wolfson.ox.ac.uk by 31 December 2012. Notification of acceptance will be given before 31 January 2013.

***
History & Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society
Annual Conference 2013
Monday 25th - Wednesday 27th March, 2013 University of Surrey, Guildford
DSM: The History, Theory, and Politics of Diagnosis
Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Parker

2013 marks the 40-year anniversary of the vote by the members of the American Psychiatric Association to remove ‘homosexuality’ from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). 2013 is also the publication date of the fifth edition of the DSM.

To mark this anniversary and this event, the History and Philosophy Section have themed the 2013 conference 'DSM: The History, Theory, and Politics of Diagnosis.'

For further information, expressions of interest, etc. please email g.bunn@mmu.ac.uk

 

Looking back at the Berks, before it all fades entirely

Panels I attended:
Friday:

'The True Sex? cases of gender ambivalence and their impact in Europe'; four papers, one on the various later  redeployments of the tale of Phaethousa the bearded lady in the Hippocratic corpus; two on cases of 'hermaphroditism' in late C19th Denmark (covering some of the same material but with a different slant); the case of Lili Elbe and her (posthumously created) autobiography Man into Woman. This was a tightly run panel that worked well. Papers very much about how society uses stories of gender ambivalence for various purposes.

'Healthy babies, healthy families: generations of health care in South Asia': this also had four papers, but could have done with rather stricter moderation as the session ran out of time - it was already at time when the discussant started to comment. This was a pity, because they were all very interesting pieces in themselves: the politics of milk and infant welfare in early C20th Madras; reconstructing ideas of masculinity and fatherhood in late C19th Bengal; the role of A Pillay and the Bombay-published International Journal of Sexology within mid-C20th sexology; the time and place-specific nature of a post-Partition translation/version of the Kama Sutra

Saturday:

'Love, Desire, Community and Friendship: reconsidering female same-sex relationships in the early to mid C20th': this was the panel I organised and spoke on. I think it went well - the room was encouragingly full, we all kept to time, and there was good discussion. But what would I know.

'Leatherwomen's histories: international perspectives from academic and public historians': 'international' in this context actually meant the USA and Canada (and I think one of the participants had worked on curating materials in Mexico) - however, it was clear that there were distinctive differences in history and that the crisis points were not the same in these two close and fairly culturally similar milieux. Panel also shed some light on the development of communities which seemed of much wider application (from a small group looking outward, or defining itself against that larger world, to a larger but less cohesive, even riven, group). Also, issues of marginalisation of certain categories within already marginalised groups.

'Contesting the boundaries of Christian sexuality': unfortunately one panelist had dropped out (English Catholics, contraception and the response to Humanae Vitae), but the two that were left worked very well together - one on Mary Scharlieb and her emphasis on the importance of sex education in the context of social purity, and  the other on D Sherwin Bailey's elaborate theology of marriage produced at more or less precisely the mid-point of the C20th. V useful.

Sunday:

The Sunday morning sessions were all round-tables with precirculated papers. I hadn't actually managed to read any of the papers, but I went to the excellent and wide-ranging 'Motherhood and the State in the waning age of Empire', which covered a broad geographical range and raised a lot of exciting questions about mothering, invisible labour, the role of the state, NGOs, race, class, colonialism, ambivalence responses to apparently coercive and colonialising practices, the impact of wider global phenomena on policy, etc etc etc.