On Friday, 4 March, Professor Cora Kaplan, Distinguished Professor of English, at Queen Mary, University of London, delivered the second annual Notre Dame / Chawton London Lecture.

This lecture series combines the resources of Notre Dame’s London Centre and Chawton House Library of British Women’s Writing, one of the world’s leading libraries dedicated to women’s writing.

Lectures are given by leading scholars in the field of British women’s writing, and the they draw a strong audience of prominent academics, London Program students and faculty, as well as London based Notre Dame alumni.

The title of Professor Caplan’s talk was: “’I am black’: aesthetics, race, and politics in women’s anti-slavery writing from Hannah More to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

Professor Kaplan discussed the changing meanings and shifting politics of race and its relation to gender in women’s writing in Britain from the late 1780s through the 1840s, and read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s astonishing and disturbing lyric ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’(1847).

Cora Kaplan is a Honorary Professor in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, and is Professor Emerita of English at Southampton University. Her recent publications include Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).

For more photos of this event, please see the gallery.

2011 Notre Dame / Chawton London Lecture