Janet Bowstead British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
I am currently (2016-2019) a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. My project is “Women on the move: the journeyscapes of domestic violence.” My research continues to explore domestic violence Continue reading
2 May 2017 Speculation and Meaning in the 1980s Swedish Art World: The Making, Display, and Dispersal of the Financier Fredrik Roos’ Art Collection Jenny Sjoholm
9 May 2017 Etched in Bone Screening Martin Thomas (Australian National University), discussant: Luciana Martins (The session will start at 2pm and finish around 4.30pm)
16 May 2017 Writing for the Broader Public Emily Brown (The Conversation), Sasha Engelmann, Fraser Macdonald (University of Edinburgh), Oli Mould
23 May 2017 Convening Conference Sessions and Editing Special Issues
Sarah Evans, RGS Conference Officer
30 May 2017 Yr1 Presentations
31 May 2017 CGH event: Digital GeoHumanities: Digital Maps, Scale and Digital Film-making Co-convened by Harriet Hawkins, Ella Harris and Mike Duggan
128 Piccadilly, home of the Lyceum Club. Taken from “Wonderful London”, edited by St. John Adcock (1927–28).
For the last ten years I’ve gradually been piecing together the story of ten days in the history of British geography—between the inauguration (on 13 November 1912) of the Geographical Circle of the women-only Lyceum Club and the balloting of the fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, on 20 November, on the question of women’s entry. The results of this work, drawing on contemporary press coverage and archival sources, have recently been published in The Professional Geographer as part of a special focus section on “Gender and the Histories of Geography”.
I first became aware of the Geographical Circle during my PhD research on the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, whose visit to the Lyceum Club in 1912 coincided with the Circle’s inauguration. Among Semple’s papers I encountered a menu card from the luncheon held by the Circle in her honour. It was, I subsequently discovered, one of the very few surviving material traces of the Circle’s existence. Notwithstanding the fact that the Circle was arguably the leading forum for women travellers and geographers during the Edwardian era, it has remained almost entirely invisible in histories of the disciple. The Circle hasn’t so much been written out of the history of British geography; it’s simply never been written in. My paper (the abstract of which follows) is an attempt to rectify that omission.
“A Royal Geographical Society for ladies”: the Lyceum Club and women’s geographical frontiers in Edwardian London
This article reconstructs the history, organization, and campaigning function of the Geographical Circle of the Lyceum Club—a membership group that, under the leadership of Bessie Pullen-Burry (1858–1937), sought to promote and legitimize women’s geographical work in early twentieth-century Britain. Through an examination of archival material and contemporary press coverage, I document the Geographical Circle’s efforts to establish itself as a professional body for women geographers and to lobby for their admission to the Royal Geographical Society. Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women geographers’ individual contributions to the discipline, their cooperative, professionalizing endeavors have been comparatively neglected. In tracing the parallel history of the Circle as an example of women’s self-organization, and of Pullen-Burry as an independent campaigner, I argue that a nuanced account of women’s professionalization in geography demands attention to both individual and collective endeavors.
Innes M. Keighren
Landscape Surgery 