Séminaire OAB Marion Leclair et Emma Roques

Marion Leclair
‘To persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach’: le roman radical anglais et ses lecteurs, 1790-1840.
L’exposé, en anglais, portera sur les romans publiés dans le cadre du mouvement radical qui agite l’Angleterre dans les années 1790, en s’intéressant tout particulièrement à la question de leur lectorat. Si leurs auteurs et autrices (William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, John Thelwall, etc.) affichent leur dessein d’utiliser la fiction comme moyen de dissémination élargie des idées politiques, l’analyse des conditions matérielles de diffusion des romans, couplée à des témoignages de lecteurs contemporains, suggère une moindre portée populaire du roman, avant l’industrialisation de la production du livre et le développement du roman-feuilleton – lesquels permettront cinquante ans plus tard à un corpus (croupion) de romans radicaux d’être ré-enrôlés au secours des causes oweniste et chartiste auprès d’un lectorat effectivement populaire.

Marion Leclair est Maîtresse de conférences à l’Université Paris Nanterre. Spécialiste du radicalisme en Angleterre aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, elle travaille plus précisément sur les rapports entre littérature et politique, en particulier dans l'œuvre de William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, auxquels elle a consacré sa thèse et plusieurs articles. Elle est également traductrice, notamment d’un court roman de William Morris (Un rêve de John Ball, 2010) et, avec Edward Lee-Six, d’un recueil d’essais posthume de l’historien E.P. Thompson, Les Romantiques : l’Angleterre à l’âge des révolutions (2023). Elle participe également à la traduction collective des articles du New-York Daily Tribune publiés en anglais par K. Marx et F. Engels dans les années 1850.

Emma Roques
The Emergence of Feminist Collectives within the Art History Discipline in the 1970s England: the Women’s Art History Collective (1972-1975)
The 1970s in England are a much-debated decade within the fields Social Sciences and History; for a few years now there has been a general movement of rediscovery and rewriting of the history of that decade, especially from the viewpoint of gender studies. The global socio-political turmoil of the period is marked by a political alternance, social revolution and the rise of the students’, queer and feminist movements. In this context of the development of feminism and of the Women’s Liberation Movement, many collectives were born, such as the Women’s Art History Collective (WAHC), a group of art history students and artists – among whom the art historians Griselda Pollock (1949-), Lisa Tickner (1944-) and the journalist / writer Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) – reflecting on the making of art history and more precisely on the invisibilization of women artists along the centuries. Influenced by the political turmoil, students and feminist revendications, along with the emergence of new theories in social sciences and art history, they inscribe themselves into the New Art History Movement. This movement – epitomised by John Berger’s answer to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation through his own BBC programme Ways of Seeing – questions the positivist conception of art history and the patriarchal foundations of art and the discipline of art history. The WACH challenges the positivist and traditional conceptions of art history in England, within its very institutions such as the Courtauld Institute and London art schools. They faced resistance from these institutions and were victims of machismo by the male (and also occasionally female) defenders of the establishment. The collective was also influenced by American scholars such as Linda Nochlin and her famous article « Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? », though they had a slightly different conception of feminism in art. Eventually, they shared their analyses and productions through various channels: night class education, conferences in Art schools, articles in feminist magazines such as Spare Rib and eventually through the publication of an essay ten years after the creation of the Collective, entitled Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981).

Emma Roques is currently a PhD student at Paris Nanterre Université, belonging to the OAB (Observatoire de l’Aire Britannique) within the CREA (Centre de Recherche en Etudes Anglophones) and the doctoral school 138 « Langues, Littératures et Spectacles ». she is supervised by Pr. Charlotte Gould and is conducting her thesis alongside her work at the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Rercherche), in Paris, where she is in charge of studies on gender and professional equality. Working full-time and doing her PhD was a choice, and the two activities are interconnected and each one fuels the other. Before working at the ANR, she worked two years at the Hcéres (Haut Conseil à l’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur) as a Project Officer and Equality Officer from June 2022 to May 2024. Emma graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay in the English Departement in June 2023, after completing a Master’s Degree in Etudes Anglophones, spécialité Civilisation at the Université Paris-Cité. She did her master’s thesis in Cultural Studies / History and worked over « Monty Pythons’ Flying Circus and the “Permissive Society” in England (1969-1974) ». In 2020-2021, she did an academic exchange at the Bologna University, Alma Mater (Italy) where she studied Art History, Cinema and Social Sciences, fuelling her aspiration for interdisciplinarity. In 2022-2023, she completed a Master’s Degree in Art History at Université Paris Nanterre and wrote her master’s thesis on the 1972 Womanhouse exhibition (1972). She started her PhD in October 2023, on the Women’s Art History Collective, a feminist reaction to the traditional, patriarchal (positivist) teaching of art history in Britain.