Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures?
Drinking Studies Network Women and Alcohol Cluster Conference
19-20 June 2025
Museum of Literature, Dublin
Day 1 (19 June 2025)
9.15 Introduction
9.30 Panel 1: Drinking Spaces
- Vanessa Höving, Sober Pleasures. Renunciation and Gender in Contemporary German Life Writing, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
- Marta Ramón García, Where Women Drink: drinking spaces and female agency in Victorian Ireland, University of Oviedo, Spain
- Katie Snow, ‘We were to enjoy ourselves’: Somerville and Ross’. In the Vine Country and Female Pleasure, University College Dublin, Ireland
11.00 Break
11.15 Panel 2: Taboos
- Judith Boyle, Assessing the Impact of the Irish Equality Act on Women's Rights to Public Alcohol Consumption, Technological University Dublin, Ireland
- Sarah Fox, ‘Izzat means everything’: South Asian women’s experiences of alcohol use, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
- Geoffrey Hunt, Women, intoxicated sexualities and pleasure, Aarhus University, Denmark
- Shannon Hughes Spence, Balancing pleasure and danger in the Night Time Economy, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Panel 3: Women and Medicine
- David Clemis, ‘A vice detestable in all, but prodigious in Women’: The Moral Agency of Drunken Women in Early Modern English Law and Medicine’, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada
- Fionnula Simpson, ‘I takes what ye call wee sterics’: Female Drinkers and their Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction (1864-1895), University College Dublin, Ireland
- Iain Smith, ‘True Alcoholic Insanity’ – A Focus on the Women in Glasgow Asylums in the Late Nineteenth Century who had their insanity attributed to Intemperance, University of Glasgow, UK
- Dan Malleck, More than a druggist's dilemma: Invalid wines and the definition of medicine during Canada's prohibition, Brock University, Canada
15.45. Break
16.00 Round table: Projects working on women & alcohol
Day 2 (20 June 2025)
9.30 Panel 4: Women and Alcohol in Midlife
- Antonia Lyons and Kate Kersey, ‘I don’t want to change my lovely habit of having a glass of wine’: Women at midlife, alcohol and cancer risks, University of Aukland, New Zealand
- Maree Patsouras, ‘Mummy’s little helper’: A mixed methods exploration of stress, gender norms, alcohol use and the impact of commercial interests among a sample of Australian working mothers, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
- Madeline Rowe, A qualitative exploration of women’s alcohol use and wellbeing during menopause, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
11.00 Break
11.15 Panel 5: Visualising Pleasures
- Megan Bennett, The [Un]Knowable Power of the Georgian Landlady: Art and Literature 1742-1802, University of Sheffield, UK
- Dorota Dias Lewandowska, Intoxicating landscapes. A visual representation of the drinking women's progress: from pleasurable tasting to dangerous addiction in nineteenth-century Poland, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
- Hannah Halliwell, Whose Pleasure? Solo and Sociable Drinking in Fin-de-Siècle French Art, University of Edinburgh, UK
12.45 Lunch
13.45 Panel 6: Defiant Pleasures
- Lucy Cogan, ‘A Fearless, Whiskey Drinking Virago’: The Uncontrollable Woman Drinker in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature, University College Dublin, Ireland
- James Kneale, Secret drinking and private drinking: Jane Feast’s tragic spree on Cruikshank Road, University College London, UK
- Pam Lock, ‘[H]ave what you’re a mind to, Poll. I’m going’ to stand treat’: Women drinking for pleasure and company, University of Bristol, UK
15.15 Break
15.30 Panel 7: Women and Temperance
- Catherine Carstairs and Aidan Hughes, ‘Drinking like a girl’: Advice from Seventeen, 1970-1990, University of Guelph, Canada
- Lara Martin Lengel, Women’s Sobriety in Straight Edge: Gender and Resistance in a Subcultural Social Movement, Bowling Green State University, US
- Scott Martin, ‘Drinking Women’ and Female Influence: Explaining Women's Drunkenness in the Antebellum United States, Bowling Green State University, US
