Award for Kim McLean-Fiander
On October 28, at the 2017 Sixteenth Century and Society Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) gave the digital project, Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO), that Kim McLean-Fiander co-directs (with Professor James Daybell at Plymouth University) an award for “Best Digital Scholarship, New Media, and/or Art of 2016” in the field of early modern women and gender. The SSEMW committee noted that WEMLO’s “impressive website has thoroughly thought through how to digitize women's letters and ensure that they are available to scholars of early modern gender, but also to the larger field of early modern scholars.” They also praised how the WEMLO “website is also open access, meaning that it is available to scholars at all institutions as well as independent scholars work” and how it “ensures that scholarship on women and gender will not be silo-ed.”
WEMLO currently includes nearly 14,000 women’s letter records (letters to, by, or mentioning women) and 21 catalogues of individual women as well as a general union catalogue of other female correspondents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Users can search for women’s correspondence on its own or alongside men’s correspondence from the same time period. The catalogue continues to grow as collaborators from around the world contribute their letter metadata on a regular basis.
McLean-Fiander launched the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded WEMLO resource at the University of Oxford in July 2016. The Cultures of Knowledge project in the Faculty of History at Oxford recently published a news article about the SSEMW award granted to WEMLO.
McLean-Fiander would like to thank those at UVic who have supported her work on WEMLO, including Gary Kuchar who kindly accepted the award on her behalf at this year’s Sixteenth Century and Society Conference.