In 1902, King's College London renamed its Ladies' Department the Women's Department, dismissing 'lady' as a word with 'no definite meaning'. Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia takes this small but telling moment as a way into a larger question: how did the first generations of women at King's claim agency within an institution that had only recently admitted them? Drawing on fifty issues of the student magazine published between 1897 and 1914, alongside undigitised archival materials, the paper follows a slow but unmistakable shift in tone — from apology and self-justification towards a confident claim on academic life. Using a 'middle-distance' approach that sits between close reading and large-scale analysis, it shows the magazine operating not merely as a record but as an instrument, through which women collectively performed their legitimacy in examinations, clubs, committees, and the civic life of the College. Rooted in feminist digital humanities, the paper argues that women's agency in this period is best understood not as a succession of individual achievements but as a collective infrastructure — built, rehearsed, and made visible through the shared work of writing themselves into the institution. This talk will be followed by a reception.
Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia is Lecturer in Digital Products & Industries in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. Her research applies computational methods to cultural history, with a particular focus on social network analysis and feminist digital humanities approaches to recovering marginalised narratives. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph in the Cambridge University Press Elements series on Marion Scott and the Society of Women Musicians, which uses network analysis to reconstruct creative women's leadership in early twentieth-century London. Prior to joining King's in 2022, she was Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, where she founded and led the Digital Humanities Centre. She completed her PhD at Saint Petersburg State University in 2016 and held the Willard McCarty Fellowship at King's College London in 2018-2019.
This event is organised by the Oxford Digital Scholarship Society (OxDSS) with support of St Cross College, Oxford and Digital Scholarship @ Oxford.
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About OxDSS Public Talks: “Digital scholarship” (→ What is Digital Scholarship?) has become increasingly important, as the rise of digital methods continues to transform well-established research practices across all disciplines. Through the OxDSS Public Talk Series, we invite speakers from across the University of Oxford and beyond to share insights into how “the digital” has reshaped their academic and professional practice. Here, we aim to enable attendees to explore and discuss how those methods or insights developed within one field may be transferable or adaptable to other or their own disciplines and research interests.
About OxDSS: The Oxford Digital Scholarship Society (OxDSS) is a student-centered society at the University of Oxford designed for scholars to meet, collaborate, and explore digital tools and methods. It provides a space to discuss digital challenges, create research partnerships, and connect with peers, supported by broader digital humanities initiatives across the university.
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