Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender
Description
The Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender promotes research into the history of women and gender and public histories of women.
The Centre research interests include Tudor Queens; eighteenth-century women in business and engaging with the law; women and the Nation of Islam; female activists in twentieth-century Pakistan; gender and power in confederate households; LGBTQ and Oral Histories; Empire, gender race and sex; nineteenth-century men's dealings with bankruptcy; masculine and feminine objects in Victorian drawing rooms; and alcohol and gendered drinking cultures in twentieth-century Britain.
The Institute has three primary goals: to support faculty and student research and research collaboration in the study of gender and sexuality, to support teaching and learning of and around gender and sexuality, and to produce resources for community engagement and impact around gender and sexuality.
More particularly, the Centre’s aims are
- Promoting research in the history of women and gender - including masculinity and the ways gender identities intersect with other class, racial, religious and sexual identities.
- Creating networks of scholars working in these fields in the UK and internationally
- Fostering teaching in the history of women and gender for undergraduates and taught and research postgraduate students.
- Inspiring discussions about women in the past that relate to current debates and public history.
- Forging links between historians of women and gender and feminists outside the academy.
- Engaging with wider publics through the media, heritage organisations, online communities and schools.
The Centre builds on the long standing contribution of Bedford New College, the first college of higher education for women, founded in 1849, which joined with Royal Holloway in 1986, to women’s higher education and intellectual lives.
Located in the South Tower of Royal Holloway’s iconic Victorian Founders Building, the Centre was founded in 1999.
The Centre pioneered the field when the study of the history of gender first came to be a major part of women's history, and gender scholars were establishing the primacy of the subject for the discipline as a whole.
The Centre is linked to the Royal Holloway Archives and Special Collections, which contain substantial collections relating to the history of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.
The Centre is also affiliated to and actively collaborates with the British Academy funded Gender Institute at Royal Holloway.
In 2016, the Centre launched the Bedford Centre Blog in order to widen historical debates, engage with academics and the public in the UK and other countries; and to promote research.
A fundamental part of its mission is the promotion of links between scholars of women and gender, and collaborations with overseas institutions. The Centre also acts as an important forum for the dissemination of research. Members have previously co-organised events with the Society for the History of Women in the Americas and the Women's History Network. In addition, the Centre holds an annual lecture, and hosted international conferences that have shaped the field in recent years.
Offers funding
No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.
Founding year
1999
Contact details
Egham Hill
Egham
TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
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University affiliation(s)
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham Hill
Egham
TW20 0EX
Last modified:
2023-09-20 15:00:00