"Margaret Cavendish: A Lunchtime Conversation."

Over the past two decades, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1674), prolific and polymathicauthor of poetry, novellas, plays, letters, commentaries on philosophy and the new science, an autobiography, and a biography of her husband, has attracted a great deal of interest across several disciplines and become recognized as a major figure in seventeenth-century English thought and culture. Joanne Wright, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, is currently completing a study of Margaret Cavendish tentatively entitled Politics and War in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Professor Wright is the author of Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power and Citizenship (2004), which is a comparative study of the construction and use of narratives about the beginnings of politics in works by Plato, Hobbes, and second wave radical feminists.