Les femmes en science

Women in Science: historical perspectives
 

Conference 

Tuesday 18 November 2025 at the Royal Society
 

9.30am Welcome and opening remarks
Alison Noble FRS

9.45am Session 1
Chaired by Patricia Fara, University of Cambridge

9.45am Between London and Lucca: Emilie Du Châtelet and the Royal Society
Sarah Hutton, University of York

10.00am ‘A thankless enterprise’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, gendered authority, and
communicating vaccine science
Rachel Hindmarsh, University of Oxford and Zakiya Leeming, Royal Northern College
of Music

10.15am Wives, widows, invisible labour: the case of two Marys
Pragya Agarwal, University of Cambridge10.30am Discussion

10.45am Coffee and Networking
 

11.15am Session 2
Chaired by Louisiane Ferlier, Royal Society Library

11.15am A seat at the table: collaborative observation in the Herschel household
Odile Lehnen, Durham University 

11.30am Julia Herschel, Caroline Herschel and collaborative experience 100 years apart
Emily Winterburn, teacher and historian of science 

11.45am ‘The admirable tact and taste of Mrs Sabine’: the scientific persona of
nineteenth-century women translators
Alison E Martin, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany 

12.00pm ‘It would of course be an entire novelty to appoint a lady as an official eclipse
observer’: Annie Maunder’s eclipse expeditions
Megan Briers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

12.15pm Discussion 

12.30pm Lunch

1.20pm Session 3
Chaired by Isabelle Charmantier, Linnean Society

1.20pm Catherine Strickland: the woman behind dodos
Xinyi Wen, University of Cambridge

1.35pm Eleanor Ormerod and her networks
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford

1.50pm Patroness of plant hunters: Ellen Ann Willmott (1858-1934) and the business of
botanical exploration
John Schaefer, University of Cambridge

2.05pm Nora Barlow and the accession of Darwin material to Cambridge University
Library
Joe Caygill, University of Leeds and Cambridge University Library

2.20pm Discussion

2.35pm Coffee and Networking

3.00pm Session 4
Chaired by Veronica van Heyningen FRS

3.00pm Women researchers and the Government Grant, 1897-1914
Danielle Farrier, University of St Andrews

3.15pm Organising beyond borders: twentieth-century images of women’s
transnational work in STEM
Graeme Gooday and Emily Rees, University of Leeds

3.30pm Women, academic mobility, and scientific lives: Indian scientists in postwar
British universities
Nilakshi Das, University of Leicester and University of Warwick

3.45pm Motherhood and science in Britain since the 1950s
Paul Merchant, National Life Stories and Sally Horrocks, University of Leicester

4.00pm Discussion

4.15pm Break

4.25pm Keynote: introduction by Athene Donald FRS
Breaking the glass ceiling of science: the first eleven women to become
Fellows of the Royal Society 1945-1954
Stella Butler, Librarian Emeritus at the University of Leeds

4.45pm Discussion and conclusions

5.00pm Close