Great to see this list of 100 Great Films By Female Directors from film magazine Little White Lies (LWL). Yet another symptom of the growing conversation around women and canons in many media and contexts.

This list comes at the end of a countdown and as part of a longer history of pieces in LWL asking questions like ‘Where are all the women screen writers?’. It’s great to see these discussions happening all over and we’re very much looking forward to picking up some of these strands and hearing everyone’s responses to them come January. Before that, remember to send your 250 word  abstracts to with a brief biography to womencanonconference@gmail.com by 15 September.

via 100 Great Films By Female Directors: The List At A Glance – Articles | Little White Lies.

This essay by ‘Jeanne de Montbaston’ – aka medievalist Lucy Allen – on speech & language policing as it intersects with gender and difference is both a thought-provoking engagement with speech, language and canon, and a call to arms.

Among many other hard truths, she raises the possibility that:

‘it may in fact not be possible to design a non-misogynistic English degree’

precisely because of the history of literary production, scholarship, and assessment:

‘Say you’re an academic setting the questions for next summer’s final exam. There are obvious pitfalls (which people mostly try to avoid, but don’t always manage): Do you pick questions on Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and John Lydgate, or Christine de Pizan, Marie de France and Julian of Norwich? Do you use quotations from Paul Strohm and Derek Pearsall or Jill Mann and Carolyn Dinshaw?’

Thoughts?

‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’: On Speech and Language Policing

Christ Church, University of Oxford – 22-23 January 2016

Welcome to the website of ‘Women and the Canon’, an interdisciplinary conference which will seek to problematize received notions of canonicity, and therefore of artistic and intellectual authority, by approaching them through their relationship to gender.

We are seeking to hold an interdisciplinary debate in which ‘work’ includes all forms of artistic and intellectual endeavour, thus opening the discussion to researchers in the social sciences and humanities broadly conceived.

Our full call for papers is available here (or by clicking on the relevant tab above) and we are particularly keen to encourage early career researchers and graduate students to propose presentations.

Cover illustration from:

Mary Barber – Writer of Verse, “Poems on several Occasions. [With a letter from Dean Swift to Lord Orrery, prefixed; and laudatory verses to the author, by Constantia Grierson.]” (London: C. Rivington, 1734)

Courtesy of the British Library’s Mechanical Curator…