The Gender and Authority project, jointly supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute, aims to explore and question received notions of social and cultural authority, specifically as they intersect with issues of gender. Provoked initially by the idea of the canon, ‘the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality’ (OED), we wish to consider three points: how do social and gender norms determine ‘quality’? How permanent is authority? What is ‘work’? We propose an expansive definition of work...