Below is an abstract for Lindsay Rose Russell's brownbag talk as well as an accompanying bio.
"Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Grenre, and English Language Lexicography"
Lindsay Rose Russell
Abstract: This talk details the significance of women in the field of lexicography: As prominent patrons and readers, women sponsored English's earliest bi-and monolingual dictionaries; as volunteers and employees, they contributed to the most well-known male-attributed dictionary projects in history; as observers of and participants in dictionary making, they critiqued the androcentrism of dictionaries that ignored English as it was spoken by women and the sexism of dictionary work that paid prominent men working alongside overlooked and underpaid women, and, as dictionary makers, s, they compiled a great many fascinating dictionaries ranging traditional to radical in form, content, and function. By combining methods from rhetorical genre studies and feminist historiography, Russell recasts the authoritative object of the dictionary as, instead, a lively system of social activity where women’s contributions have been and remain to this day both necessary and valuable.
Bio: An associate professor of English and Writing Studies at the University of Illinois, Lindsay Rose Russell's scholarship combines lexicographical and rhetorical studies with queer and feminist historiography. Russell's first book, Women and Dictionary Making, appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2018, and a second, Sex & Lex, is in progress; both explore how a genre thought to be neutral, infallible, and objective is, in fact, animated by fluidity, multiplicity, divergence, and complex negotiations of power, identity, and human legibility. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Sharper Tools: Women Missionary Lexicographers in Asia,” “Feminist Historiography of Lexicography," "Defining Moments: Genre Beginnings, Genre Invention, and the Case of the English Language Dictionary," and “The Queer Art of Genre Failure." Recent and forthcoming courses include "Rhetoric and the Body," "Profanity, Obscenity, and Vulgarity," and "Sparkling Conversation."