The conference “Madwoman and the Institution” could be of interest to h-madness readers. The conference aims to reconfigure our understanding of female institutional experience of insanity in long nineteenth century. This online event takes place on the 15th and 16th of July 2021. The keynote lecture will be given by Prof Hilary Marland about “Breaking Down and Breaking out: Women, Mental Disorder and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Asylums and Prisons”.
You can register on Eventbrite for
The programe:
Day one:
13.00-13.15 – Welcome
13.15-14.45 – Panel 1: Criminal Lunacy and Delinquency
· Alison Pedley: “The Unknown Criminal Lunatic Asylum”: Fisherton House Lunatic Asylum through the experiences of four infanticidal mothers, 1848-1868
· Maria Sæther: “I think it would be sufficient with accommodations for 50 men and 15 women for a short period of time” – the establishment of high-security psychiatric hospitals in Norway from a gender perspective
· Helen Johnston: Representations of Borstal girls: Institutionalisation, mental deficiency and mass hysteria, 1908-1950
14.45-15.00 – Break
15.00-16.00 – Panel 2: Treatment, Care and Passage
· Hannah Blythe: Mental After-care: Women’s Release from Asylums in the Late Nineteenth Century
· Rebecca Wynter: ‘Surrounded by a wire globe’: Women, the Colney Hatch Asylum Fire, and Being Lost in the Institutional World
· Claire Phillips, ‘A Regular Little Vixen’, Girls in the Northumberland Lunatic Asylum
Day two:
10.00-11.30 – Panel 3: Literature, Representations and Female Insanity
· Anna Mukamal: Therapeutic Writing as Technology of Social Reform
· Laura Blair: ‘Warping the Woman’s Nature’: Reading as Cause and Cure of Female Insanity in the Asylum
· Len Smith: A Georgian Tale of Madness and Mystery: Louisa, the ‘Maid of the Haystack’
11.30-11.45: Break
11.45-12.45 – KEYNOTE – Hilary Marland: Breaking Down and Breaking out: Women, Mental Disorder and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Asylums and Prisons
Conference Ends
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