Registration now open for ‘Scandal and sociability: New perspectives on the Burney family’

Registration is now open for ‘Scandal and sociability: New perspectives on the Burney family 1750-1850’, an international symposium to be held at Cardiff University on 1 September 2015. Registration (which is free for postgraduate students) closes on 30 July. All information about the programme and registration process can be found here: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/burney/index.html

In recent years, much scholarly interest has moved beyond the novels of Frances Burney to encompass the influence and activities of the rest of her family, including: her father Charles (historian of music and man of letters) her sister Susan (musician and critic), her brother James (rear-admiral who sailed with Captain Cook and acted as interpreter for the famous Tahitian Omai), her brother Charles (bibliophile, collector and schoolmaster), her half-sister Sarah Harriet (author of seven novels 1796–1839), her stepsister Elizabeth (better known as ‘Mrs. Meeke’, the author of twenty-six novels 1795–1823), and her cousin Edward Francisco Burney (artist and illustrator). Between them, the Burneys knew most British luminaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries working in the fields of literature, art, music, politics, botany, exploration, and court and Church circles. However, no conference or publication has specifically considered the Burney family as a composite whole, asking how their sociable network and often tumultuous internal dynamics influenced the remarkable spate of cultural and sociable activity carried out by its polymathic members. This interdisciplinary symposium will do so. Featuring thirteen speakers drawn from several disciplines and universities across the world, it will set exciting new directions for Burney studies and will be of wider interest to literary scholars, historians, art historians, musicologists and philosophers whose research addresses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.