Please join us for Suzanne E. Biever's Doctoral Defense titled Changing Women’s Minds: Gender, Brain Science, and Scottish Women Writers in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Dissertation Committee
- Steve Newman (chair)
- Talissa Ford
- Carissa Harris
- Megan Coyer (external)

Abstract
Efforts to control women’s bodies have been employed for centuries through patriarchal scaffolding. More recently, however, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in June of 2022 has reignited questions regarding women’s physical agency. Yet, these questions have far preceded these temporal and geographical boundaries. I specifically turn my focus to Scotland in the Long Eighteenth Century to focus on four Scottish women authors—Joanna Baillie, Anne Bannerman, Susan Ferrier, and Mary Somerville—and argue for their creation of a liberatory discourse of their own through their employment of Cartesian dualism. By focusing on these four authors and the select publications they produced during the Long Eighteenth Century, I analyze how they engage with contemporary texts and beliefs surrounding brain science and the philosophy of the mind in order to advocate for a deeper respect for and liberation of women’s mental faculties and subsequently a casting off of traditional embodiment. This expansion of women’s mental faculties beyond any imposed or imagined physical restrictions is enacted through their implementation of dualism as well as the sublime. These authors enter the male-dominated discourses of medicine, philosophy and science through the inherent slippages occurring in definitions of Englishness and Scottishness following the Act of Union of 1707. By partaking in such discussions surrounding national identity, Baillie, Bannerman, Ferrier and Somerville are able to similarly pose challenges to gender identity and enact their agendas of women’s mental liberation.

Please contact James O'Brien ([click-for-email]) for the meeting link.