Call for Papers: In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing

Symposium at Buckingham House Lecture Theatre, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, 19 June 2025

Organisers: Dr Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of St Andrews, and Bye Fellow, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; Prof Linda Goddard, Professor of Art History, University of St Andrews; and Harriet Loffler, Curator of The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College

For centuries, women artists have produced autobiographical accounts of their lives and careers, using diaries, letters and other types of writing as a means of resistance, reflection, and self-fashioning. Taking a broad geographical approach, this symposium will address how women artists, between 1900 and the present, navigate their artistic identities through writing. We aim to explore women artists’ life writings not simply as biography or confession, but as creative and strategic sites of agency, where women articulate alternative scripts for the artistic life.

We welcome artists, curators, writers and scholars at all stages of their careers to join in discussions that reflect on the various forms that life writing by women artists can take, and the uses that we make of these writings. Structured as a series of short papers and roundtable conversations, the conference aims to foreground discussion and debate.

The symposium will accompany the Relative Ties exhibition that will explore the work of three generations of women artists from the illustrious Nicholson family, from the early twentieth century to today. Featuring paintings, wallpaper, fabrics, rugs, stencils and works on paper – many of which have never been on public display – the exhibition will unite works by Mabel Nicholson, Nancy Nicholson, EQ Nicholson and Louisa Creed. Tracing the influence between these women, the exhibition will reveal how creative legacies are inherited through matrilineal lines and will be accompanied by a new commission by artist Katie Schwab. Piecing together the entangled relationships of these women has been made possible via letters, exhibition ephemera and anecdotes passed down by the surviving generations. The exhibition provides the perfect backdrop to a symposium that looks at the remnants, traces and archives that document and outlive these women artists.

We invite short papers on any aspect of women artists’ life writing from 1900 to now, regardless of geography, from artists, curators, writers, critics and researchers.

Please send proposals (max 200 words) and a brief bio (50–100 words) for a 15-minute paper to womensart@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk by 9 January 2026.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Women artists’ autobiographical self-fashioning, via diaries, letters, memoirs, and other forms of writing
• Matrilineal and intergenerational links as expressed or forged through life writing
• Collaborative life writing projects and shared themes linking women artists’ writings across time
• Creative uses of women artists’ life writing in fiction, or in text-based art
• Critical considerations of how we use women artists’ life writing in research and curatorial projects
• Oral histories and interviews as forms of life writing
• Anecdote, gossip and storytelling

Participation in the conference is free of charge for speakers (lunch and refreshments included). A modest honorarium will be provided to assist with standard-fare travel expenses where necessary.