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Becoming Visible: Women's Presence in late Nineteenth-Century America

The volume was an outcome of the 'Visible Women' colloquium which Floyd convened at King's (and for which she raised funds from the British Association of American Studies and the US Embassy). The colloquium was also linked to the Society of American Women Writers, a scholarly association in the US (on the advisory panel of which Floyd served between 2007 and 2011), which had an active branch in Britain during this period involving colleagues from a dozen American literature/ American studies departments.

Alison Easton (Lancaster) and R. J. Ellis (Birmingham) and Floyd edited the essays, and then Floyd wrote the proposal, prepared the manuscript and worked with the publisher's series editor.Floyd co-wrote the introduction (pp. 1-13) and then contributed her own essay ' "Magnificent Equipment": Body, Sound and Space in the Representation of the Female Singer' (pp. 201-17).

This volume represents a partial conclusion to the work that dominated her submission on the last RAE round. Her first 2002 monograph and subsequent articles on the figure of the pioneer woman, as well as an earlier edited collection, Domestic Space (1999), examined the ways in which cultural arguments were conducted through certain highly visible female figures in nineteenth-century North America. The contention of Becoming Visible was that there was a very significant increase in the cultural visibility of women across the range of class and ethnicity in the US during the late nineteenth century and that this visibility drove social and political change on a number of levels.