Keynote Speakers
Fertile Imaginations: Reprodcutive Health in Literature, 27th-28th August 2026
Prof. Dr. Jennifer Heller
Jennifer Heller researches the intersection between material culture and gender identity in early modern England. She is the author of the article "Mother's Advice Books" for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing, forthcoming in October 2026. Her most recent published articles are "Reading Wrecks of History and the Harley Family Narrative," which appeared in The Seventeenth Century and "To Follow Pleasure's Sway: Atomism in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House," which appeared in Modern Drama. She is also the author of the monograph The Mother's Legacy in Early Modern England, which is the first full-length analysis of the genre. Heller teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, where she has been honored with the Raymond Bost Distinguished Professor Award, given annually to honor an LR faculty member for outstanding teaching and mentorship, and the Faculty Scholar Award, which is presented to the faculty member who has made the greatest contribution to their discipline during the academic year.
Dr. Lisa Smith
Lisa Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and the Chair of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. A founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, she has published widely on infertility, fertility, embodiment, recipes, remedies, food, gender, and caregiving. Her most recent publications are a book chapter on 'Beautiful Fertility in Eighteenth Century England and France' in A Cultural History of Beauty in the Enlightenment (2026) and a co-authored book, The King's Dinners: Family, Nation and Identity on the British Table 1760-1820 (2026). She is currently revising a co-authored article on the reproductive care provided by two women in eighteenth-century Lyon, as well as developing a project on the sensory experience of herbs in early modern England and France.
Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Podnieks
Elizabeth Podnieks is a Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her publications include articles and chapters that have appeared in, among others, The Jounal of Popular Culture, Life Writing, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, the Journal of Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, the Encyclopedia of Motherhood, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood, and Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing. She is the editor of the critical edition Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937; Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture; and Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man. She is the co-editor of Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures; and The Palgrave Handbook of Parenthood in Popular Culture. Her monographs include Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin; and Maternal Modernism: Narrating New Mothers.
Dr. Isabel Davis
Isabel Davis is a researcher and Research Theme Leader in Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum, London. She is a free-time-traveling cutlural historian, although she began in the late Middle Ages. Her recent work focuses on the history of human fertility health in environmental perspective. She is the author of Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present (MIT Press, 2025). The book is illustrated by long-term collaborator, artist Anna Burel, and is shortlisted for the V&A Illustrations Awards 2026.
