At the 2008 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers conference (BWWC), Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, and Susan Stanford Friedman presented the opening-night plenary panel devoted to mapping feminist scholarship’s current priorities and concerns. Conference participants reported being both intrigued and perplexed by the speakers’ seemingly bleak view of “women writers” as a useful scholarly category. This essay, conducted by the authors as a year-long email conversation, extends that plenary discussion. In addition to sketching the intellectual history of feminism within the American academy and assessing how Women’s Studies (broadly defined) engages with a host of pressing interdisciplinary concerns, the authors also revisit their discussion of what defines and justifies continued work on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers.

June 2010: Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  Her publications in the area of gender and culture include Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993); Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003); and articles in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Feminist Studies, PMLA, and New Literary History.  She writes frequently on Jane Austen and is editor of the Norton Critical Northanger Abbey (2004).  Her thoughts about the “new” Women’s Studies are elaborated in South Atlantic Review (2008).  She is currently writing about marginal versions of domesticity (queer, post-traumatic, feminist, homeless, etc.).

June 2010: Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2009, she received the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies. She is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies; Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.; and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. She edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, and (with Rachel Blau DuPlessis), Signets—Reading H.D. A Special Issue on Comparison of New Literary History edited with Rita Felski has just appeared, and Contemporary Women’s Writing, an Oxford University Press journal she co-edits, won the 2009 award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, Serbian, and Hungarian. She is at work on books on planetary modernisms and on migration narratives.

June 2010: Miranda M. Yaggi is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, specializing in the 18th- and 19th-century British novel and women writers. She is at work on her dissertation, "Architects of a Genre: Literati, Critics, and the British Novel's Critical Institution," which revises the traditional narrative that features print-journalism at the heart of the novel's "rising" professional institution and proposes, instead, to account for the early institution's heterogeneric and heteroglossic nature.