Programme and registration
‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: Histories, Forms, Communities’
The Open University: 5, 6, 7 November 2025
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
All times are GMT. Please click the ‘register here’ link under each panel title to sign up. To help you with your choice of sessions, you’ll find abstracts and biographies, here.
We very much look forward to welcoming you. Attendees are asked that all contributions are expressed respectfully and professionally at this event.
DAY ONE: Wednesday 5th November
PANEL 1 0935 – 1040 Welcome and opening remarks from the conference director + Early-Modern Humanists and Letters
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Chair: Jonathan Gibson
Before the first panel begins, Prof Sara Haslam, director of the conference, will deliver opening remarks.
Download them here:
Halszka Leleń (University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland): Voice, Faith, and Dialogic Poetics in Thomas More’s Prison Letters
Martina Hacke (Independent scholar): Johann Amerbach’s Network of Letters (1483 – 1513)
M.A. Katritzky (Open University): Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) and Gottfried Burghart (1705–71): atypically-bodied itinerant performers in ‘theatre letters’
PANEL 2 1045 – 1140
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Chair: Daria Chernysheva
a) Sixteenth-Century Form and Style
Guillaume Coatalen (University of Versailles Saint Quentin): The letters of John Lyly.
b) Illustrated Epistolary Texts
Eleanor Dodd (Open University): ‘For children everywhere: First Class‘: How the history and evolution of movable picturebooks influenced the creation and success of The Jolly Postman [Lightning talk]
Lik Hang Tsui (City University of Hong Kong): The Many Lives of Epistolary Manuscripts in Imperial China: From Calligraphic Artifacts to Engraved Models [Lightning talk]
Alex Cohen (Freelance writer): A thousand words: illustrated letters and their place in art history [Lightning talk]
BREAK 1140 – 1200
PANEL 3 1200 – 1255 Renaissance correspondences
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Chair: Edmund King
Jonathan Gibson (Open University): Elizabethan ‘letters to show’ in life and literature
Molly Ziegler (Open University): Staged letters in early modern drama
Tim Hammond (Open University): England’s Heroicall Epistles: Michael Drayton’s love letters to the theatre
Liz Ford (Open University): ‘Here it is written’: correspondence and genre in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Please note that following the end of this panel, there will be an automated slideshow featuring information about research groups in English and Creative Writing, and Languages and Applied Linguistics.
BREAK 1255 – 1330
1330 -1425 Keynote speaker: Mel Evans (University of Leeds): ‘What letter’s that?’ Exploring style and literariness in early modern fictional correspondence
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Chair: Rachele de Felice
PANEL 4 1430 – 1525 Staged letters
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Chair: Hannah Lavery
Kerry Cooke (Mary Baldwin University): “Streamers, white, red, black, here, here, here”: The weaponization of epistolary practice in Tamburlaine.
Alexandra E. LaGrand (Texas A&M University) Much Ado About Beatrice: Anne Scott in Sir Walter Scott’s Letters [Lightning talk]
Godfred Ogoe (Ohio State University): The Communal Reception of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Letters
BREAK 1525 – 1545
PANEL 5 1545 – 1620 Form and Societal Ethics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Letters
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Chair: Richard Jones
Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University): Mapping the World’s First Social Network: Electronic Enlightenment: Letters and Lives
Ashley Walker (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) ‘To the Vertuous Ladies, and Gentlewomen of England’: Gender, Morality, and Authority in Wye Saltonstall’s Ovid’s Heroicall Epistles
PANEL 6 1625 – 1720 Eighteenth-century Writers and Epistolary Cultures
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Chair: Jonathan Gibson
Clare Brant (King’s College, London): Loopholes and nets: William Cowper’s correspondence
Una Tanović (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Epistolary self-fashioning in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
Alain Kerhervé (University of Brest): Famous authors in eighteenth-century epistolary manuals: the case of Samuel Richardson
BREAK 1720 – 1830
PANEL 7 1830 – 1925 Creative Correspondences
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Chair: Emma Claire Sweeney
Roberta Zanasi (University of Bologna): “To write? Or not to write? That was the question with Geoffrey”: love letters in Victorian novels
Jennifer Burek Pierce (University of Iowa): Letters to Mary Ellen: lace, ribbons, and flowers
Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty (Paris-Est Créteil University): “I do hope you will agree to a few paid letter-sessions”: Sylvia Plath’s letters to Ruth Beuscher
PANEL 8 1930 – 2100 The Postal Museum: Reading postal history 1800-1920
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Chair: Sara Haslam
Joanna Espin: Introducing The Postal Museum, speakers and panel; Susannah Coster: Accessing The Postal Museum’s Collections; Mathilde Jourdan: Letter writing in the 1800s, with Jane Austen as a case study; Georgina Tomlinson: The Penny Post revolution; Chris Taft: The First World War, with a focus on Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Letter’; Laura Gibbs: Post-war Censorship, with James Joyce as a case study
DAY TWO: Thursday 6th November
PANEL 9 0900 – 0955 Nineteenth-century poets and epistolary networks
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Chair: Molly Ziegler
Lynda Pratt (University of Nottingham): Editing Robert Southey’s Letters for the Twenty-First Century
Amy Wilcockson (University of Glasgow): Literati and Letters: Thomas Campbell’s Networks
Richard Storer (Leeds Trinity University): ‘The best letters I’ve ever read!’: Rediscovering / re-editing T. E. Brown
PANEL 10 0850 – 0955 Letters, Literature and Intimacy
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Chair: Ed Hogan
Clare Best (Open University): Writing between the lines
Selina Packard (Open University): Claire Clairmont’s Letters and her Literary Reputation
Ayşe Nur Öğüt (Independent scholar): The Intimate Act of Writing: Literacy, Letters, and the Transformation of Privacy in Ottoman Novels
Sweta Sry Reddy (CHRIST University, Bangalore): Unsent and Undone: Epistolary Intimacy and Crip World-making in Sejal A Shah’s “Letters I Never Sent” [Lightning Talk]
PANEL 11 1000 – 1055 ‘Austen’ and the Epistolary
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Chair: Emma Claire Sweeney
Eve Annuk (Estonian Literary Museum): To write or to take care of: the letters of Estonian writer Elisabeth Aspe (1860-1927)
Samuli Kaislaniemi (University of Eastern Finland): Imagined letters folded by hand: Pride and Prejudice, simulacra and epistolary materiality
Naomi Walker (Open University): Beyond the Grave: Letters to and from Jane Austen
PANEL 12 1100 – 1155 Nineteenth-century English Literature and Letters
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Chair: Samuel Sargeant
Irina Rabinovich (Holon Institute of Technology): Exploring Literary Dialogues: Grace Aguilar’s Epistolary Exchange with Isaac D’Israeli – Insights into Gender Dynamics, Literary Heritage, and Cross-Gender Mentor-Mentee Relationships
Antonia Saunders (Open University): An Amende Honorable: The early correspondence of Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai, and a previously unpublished letter from Maria to her aunt and cousin [Lightning talk]
Adam Baldwin (Open University): The Case of the Missing Letters: correspondence, power, knowledge, law, and morality in two Sherlock Holmes stories
Karen Paine (Open University): The Subversive Confessional Letter of old Allan Armadale in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale [Lightning talk]
BREAK AND SHORT FILM 1155-1210 – An opportunity to view an OU/BBC short film in which biographer Paula Byrne discusses Jane Austen’s letters. The film is introduced by Emma Claire Sweeney. Register here.
PANEL 13 1210 – 1255 Letters and Friendship: A conversation on Elizabeth von Arnim and David Jones
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Chair: Jasmine Hunter-Evans
Jasmine Hunter-Evans (Open University); Juliane Roemhild (La Trobe University); Anna Svendsen (University of St Thomas, Houston); Jennifer Shepherd (Open University)
Please note that following the end of this panel, there will be an automated slideshow exhibiting the wonderful postcards sent to us by contributors as part of a letters-themed optional task.
BREAK 1255-1330
1330 – 1425 Keynote speaker: Emma Clery (Uppsala University): The epistolarium, modern letters editions, and the case of Mary Wollstonecraft
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Chair: Sara Haslam
PANEL 14 1430 – 1525 Ford Madox Ford’s Letters, Writing Life, and Networks
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Chair: Seamus O’Malley (Yeshiva University, New York)
Helen Chambers (Open University); Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University); Sara Haslam (Open University); Max Saunders (University of Birmingham)
BREAK 1525 – 1545
PANEL 15 1545 – 1640 The Brontës; Vernon Lee; Elizabeth Gaskell: Epistolary (counter-) Narratives and Fictions
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Chair: Shafquat Towheed
Júlia Mota Silva Costa (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil): Charlotte Brontë’s letters as counter-narrative: on editing and defending Emily Brontë
Sophie Geoffroy (Université de La Réunion): Epistolary Genesis: Vernon Lee’s Letters and the Making of a Literary Life
Anne Longmuir (Kansas State University): Epistolary Fictions: Authorial Persona and Narrative Form in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Correspondence and Periodical Fiction
PANEL 16 1545 – 1640 Letters, Literature, Space and Identity
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Chair: Jennifer Shepherd
Mark Borthwick (Open University): The Aeolian Epistolic: Geographic Imagination and Spiritual Experience in John Muir’s Letters and Journals
Alexis Peri (Boston University): Sailing the Mississippi Together: Huckleberry Finn in Cold-War Correspondence
Julia Fernilius (Stockholm University): ‘I really want the little cottage […] and you!’: Rethinking Domestic Correspondence in the Making of Modernism
PANEL 17 1645 – 1740 Letters, Literature and Politics
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Chair: Alex Tickell
Khadija Alexander (McMaster University): From Robber to Writer: How one letter changed a prisoner’s life [Lightning talk]
Barbara Hochman (Ben-Gurion University): Words of Warning: Autobiographical Letters to Black Children
Dean J. Hill (University of Birmingham): George Orwell’s Letters: Authenticity and Political Community in Literary Networks
Isabelle Parsons (Open University): The weight of letters in The House of Mirth [Lightning talk]
BREAK 1740-1830
PANEL 18 1830 – 1925 Teaching Letters
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Chair: Daniel Smith (King’s College, London)
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado, Boulder); Alison Wiggins (University of Glasgow); Leah Veronese (University of Oxford); Louise Curran (University of Birmingham); James Daybell (University of Plymouth)
PANEL 19 1930 – 2100 Letters and Literature PGR/ECR panel
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Chair: Anne Wetherilt
Ishan Tripathi (University of Manchester): The Unsent Letter in Partition Fiction: Epistolary Haunting and Deferred Address
Maya M. Haidar (Sorbonne): Intimacy and Distance in the Letters of Emily Eden (1837-1840) and Toru Dutt (1873-77): a comparative study [Lightning talk]
Anita Schwartz (Open University): ‘The ideals and traits of character that it has taken thousands of years to form are not affected by a mere external change’: Correspondence, Courtship, and Nationhood in Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal’s Novel An Unfinished Song (1913) [Lightning talk]
Talissa Ancona Lopez (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil): From letter to poem: aspects of Ana Cristina Cesar’s epistolary poetry
Patricia Ferguson (Open University): C. S. Lewis’s first reading of George MacDonald’s Phantastes shows how letters can reveal the ‘authentic self’ [Lightning talk]
Lucía Alonso Ramírez (Complutense University of Madrid): A kaleidoscope of paper fragments: the aestheticization of epistolarity in Gloria Fuertes’ envelopes [Lightning talk]
Larissa de Assumpção (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg): The political and literary use of letters in nineteenth-century Brazil: the case of Emperor Pedro II’s correspondence with American and European writers [Lightning talk]
DAY THREE: Friday 7th November
PANEL 20 0900 – 0955 Spain and Latin America
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Chair: Fiona Doloughan
Encarnación Trinidad Barrantes (Open University): Exploring letters and literary creativity through Isabel Allende
Silvina Katz (Open University): Reading Ocampo’s Letters in the Twenty-First Century: A Translator’s Perspective
Avril Tynan (University of Turku): Fax or Faux? Nonnarration in Jorge Semprun’s Short Story Les Sandales
PANEL 21 1000 – 1055 Twentieth-Century Poets and Letters
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Chair: Daria Chernysheva
Sarah Bennett (Durham University): Friendship, Literary Criticism and the Epistolary Gift in the Irish Poetry Archive
Astrid Fizyczak (Sorbonne-Nouvelle): Epistolary Geographies of Loss: the Letter as Space of Absence in Elizabeth Bishop’s Writing (1911 to 1979)
Andrew Swarbrick (University of Huddersfield): Philip Larkin’s Letters of Exile
PANEL 22 1100 – 1155 Digital Epistolary
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Chair: Francesca Benatti
Jack Orchard (Bodleian Libraries): Gaming the Letter: Technology and Mediated Affect in Eighteenth-Century Letters and Contemporary Video Games
Nadia Georgiou (Sheffield Hallam University): Digital, print, neo-romantic: exploring tensions through twenty-first century epistolary forms
Suzanne R. Black (University of Edinburgh): Mediated communication and subjectivity in the twenty-first century romance plot
Please note that following the end of this panel, there will be an automated slideshow exhibiting the wonderful postcards sent to us by contributors as part of a letters-themed optional task.
PANEL 23 1200 – 1255 Creative Writing and Letters I
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Chair: Joanne Reardon
Melissa Bailey (Open University): Making and unmaking Empire through letters and fiction
Gwyneth Jones (Open University): Stupid letter from Fanny [Lightning talk]
Siobhan Campbell (Open University): The Other Side of the Letter: Margaret Maher and Emily Dickinson in Dialogue [Lightning talk]
Kim Wiltshire (Edge Hill University): The Letter Never Sent – Using the Letter Form in Creative Writing Workshops for NHS Staff During the Covid Pandemic
BREAK 1255-1330
1330 – 1425 Keynote speaker: Jon McGregor (Nottingham University): An Audience of One: The letter as a natural literary form
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Chair: Ed Hogan
PANEL 24 1430 – 1525 Exploring the Magical and Meaningful: Archives and Literary Correspondence
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Chair: Sarah Prescott (University of Leeds)
Khadija Alexander (Archives Processing Librarian, McMaster University); Ruth Burton (Thomas Hardy Project Archivist, Dorset History Centre); Tom Duckham (Charles Dodgson Project Archivist, Christ Church, Oxford); Jessica Smith (Creative Arts Archivist, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester); John Wells (Senior Archivist, Cambridge University Library)
BREAK 1525-1535
PANEL 25 1535 – 1630 Letters and Literary Lives in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
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Chair: M.A. Katritzky
Delia da Sousa Correa (Open University): Selecting Katherine Mansfield’s Letters
M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain): Reading Between the Lines: Louisa May Alcott’s Letters and the Construction of a Professional Authorial Identity
Chris Mourant (University of Birmingham): Aspects of the (Epistolary) Novel: E. M. Forster to the Letter
PANEL 26 1635 – 1730 Creative Writing and Letters II
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Chair: Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill
Kanupriya Dhingra (Max Planck Institute): Mere Cupid, Mere Prem Devta: Old Delhi’s Subversive Love-Letter Writing Manuals
Lania Knight and George Sandifer-Smith (Open University): Apostrophe and Address, Poetry at Play as Letters to ‘You’ [Creative Response / reading]
Neil Redfield (New York University): ‘The Unbridgeable Gap’ [Creative Response / reading]
BREAK 1730-1800
1800 – 1855 Guest Authors Talk Letters I: Karen McCarthy Woolf
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Chair: Jane Yeh
PANEL 27 1900 – 1955 Fifty Years of Writers’ Letters at Carcanet Press
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Chair: Robyn Marsack
Stella Halkyard (author and literary archivist); Robyn Marsack (editor for Carcanet Press 1982-99; Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000-16); Michael Schmidt (co-founder (1969) and Managing Director of Carcanet Press, and co-founder (1971) and editor of PN Review)
2000 – 2055 Guest Authors Talk Letters II: Sigrid Nunez
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Chair: Emma Claire Sweeney
A Note on Next Steps
A Note on Next Steps
The conference team was delighted by the enthusiastic response to the call for papers. It’s a packed schedule as a result and the Q&As can’t be as long as we would probably all like. We are thinking of ways to continue the conversation after the conference. Do keep an eye on the News section of our Letters and Literature conference website. Meanwhile, if you’d like to keep in touch about further opportunities and collaborations in the area of literary correspondence or update us about collaborations that emerge from the event, please drop us a line on sara.haslam@open.ac.uk. A themed Special Issue, for example, remains on the team’s list for post-conference discussion, but early exploration of this coupled with the wide range of responses suggest other outputs may work better. The team is keen to support such discussions.
With grateful thanks to OpenARC, MK Lit Fest and SHARP along with Faculty colleagues for supporting this event, to panel chairs, and to all speakers for your patience through multiple emails as we worked to finalise the programme. Eleanor Dodd’s vital contribution to the smooth planning and running of this event is also gratefully acknowledged.
Sara Haslam, on behalf of the programme team
Banner image: detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restrictions.
