Call for Papers
LONDON FOUNDLING HOSPITAL CONFERENCE
INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
OCTOBER 16, 2026

Proposal Deadline: August 1, 2026

Interdisciplinary Subject Fields
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British History and Economics / Gender, Family, Cultural, Political, Music, and Literary Studies

Hidden Identities in the London Foundling Hospital Archives, New Questions and Discoveries
Over the last two decades, scholarship on the London Foundling Hospital has expanded well beyond Ruth McClure’s Coram’s Children. The opening of the vast collection of the Foundling Hospital Archives under the auspices of the notable charity, Coram, has added to our broader awareness of exactly how central the Foundling Hospital was to the life of London between 1741 and 1929. Its hub-like records offer many opportunities for interconnected institutions that developed over the eighteenth century and emerged as part of the social welfare state in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Within the 800 linear feet of the Coram records at the London Archives, some of which is now available freely online, the condition of women, children, and their gendered world emerges boldly and bluntly. Researchers have shown how institutions such as social hierarchies, churches, schools, hospitals, and prisons shape identities. We are interested in papers that uncover heretofore hidden histories, including, but not limited to, intersectionality between the benefactors, institutional administrators, petitioners, and children; we are also interested in connections between contemporary literature and nonfiction works that provide insight into underrepresented categories of identity, including disability, race, gender, and class; we are also interested papers that examine and analyse the life cycles of children and the configuration of hospital life within changing popular understandings of who is in and who is outside of the family, both legally and culturally.

The Foundling Hospital records also hold insights into intimate domains, including pre-nuptial sexuality, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood. Evidence for these relationships appears in the formal and informal work of motherhood, and in the production of goods and domestic services, embedded in the extensive archives. Additional sources, coupled with court records, medical texts, popular media, oral histories, and digital spaces, invite fresh interpretations of how social identities are produced, regulated, and contested.

We invite the following: a three-person panel with three twenty-minute papers, each with fifteen minutes for comments; a four-person panel with four fifteen-minute papers and a fifteen-minute comment; or an individual twenty-minute paper. Please send the proposal and abstracts, along with short bios, to Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, PhD, jsheetznguyen@uco.edu by 1 August 2026.

Additional Contacts:
Kristen Renzi, PhD, renzik@xavier.edu; Janette Bright, PhD, janette.bright@london.ac.uk