Keywords in Context

In celebration of the Women Writers Project’s thirty-year anniversary, we launched a series called “Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas,” a collection of short explorations of Women Writers Online. Each contribution to the series covers a single topic—such as reading, childbirth, war, servants, clothing, or the environment—as an entry point into the WWO collection, providing a brief discussion or introduction and then guiding the reader through a set of illustrative examples and quotations. While the series was launched in association with the WWP’s anniversary, it proved such a useful framework for exploring early women’s writing that we have renamed it “Keywords in Context” in reflection of the fact that this will be an ongoing part of Women Writers in Context.

We are happy to accept new submissions in this series, to be published on our open-access Women Writers in Context platform, which offers capabilities such as a timeline view, pop-outs for biographic and bibliographic information, and embedded textual excerpts. Contributions should provide basic contextual information to orient the reader in the topic, but they do not need to be exhaustive—and the framing needn’t be analytical or argumentative, but can be exploratory or associative. Although the genre we’re imagining is simple, it does offer considerable flexibility and opportunities for experimentation, and we hope authors will feel free to explore its expressive potential. We would like each contribution to discuss at least five texts, and ideally more in the range of eight to fifteen, to give readers a view of the diversity of the collection and the perspectives of different authors, time periods, and genres. You can see the exhibits published thus far on Women Writers in Context

If you are interested in authoring an entry for this series—or if you just want to suggest an idea and some accompanying texts—please contact us at wwp@neu.edu.