Early Modern Women: Figures, Labors, Afterlives (RSA 2026)
This panel invites papers that examine how early modern women were imagined and represented across genres and cultural contexts. From historical figures to literary characters, how were women positioned in relation to authority, virtue, sexuality, or empire? How were women written, circulated, obscured, or celebrated in early modern texts? What roles did women play in shaping narratives of gender, race, and power? This panel welcomes work that attends to both the forms of representation and the structures that produced or obscured women’s presence in the early modern world. What kinds of authority or ambivalence did gendered figures carry, and how did race, class, and empire shape their depiction or erasure?