Introducing Mother Academia 2026: Feminine Soulcraft
Even though we ain’t got hats or badges / We’re a cohort just by saying so
Updated 03 January 2026
Due to the unexpected number of mother academics, I have closed access to the 2026 cohort. I’ll be brainstorming ways to allow for more members next year and, of course, how to create a path for Mother Academia to be completed within living rooms, at coffee shops, and any other common place where friends gather together to contemplate, discuss, and laugh.
Before we begin: If you’re scratching your head, wondering how this landed in your inbox, fear not. Nothing nefarious has taken place. I’ve simply moved my newsletter from Squarespace to Substack where clean lines, integrated media, and ease-of-use call to me. You ought to expect much of the same as before, as I offer a monthly-ish newsletter to share my resources for the classical, Charlotte Mason mother. Today’s letter, though, is of the special variety.
Do you remember that time I sent out the proverbial ‘nerd call’ and the mothers of the internet answered?
At the end of 2023, I decided it didn’t matter if I couldn’t go to graduate school in this season of motherhood.1 The coastline of Scotland may be merely wildly beyond my reach, but the books, ideas, and practices of such a place? Well, those are at my fingertips. I determined to have them.
Thus, Mother Academia was born. I dug through reading lists, programme guides, and syllabi from the University of St. Andrews, St. John’s College, Oxford2, and the like. I bought a new leather journal for narration and pulled out my highlighters for some heavy colour-coding. I ordered more ink for my fountain pen and gloried in my stained fingertips. I donned proper academic dress and ordered my time so I could intentionally study the liberal arts, the medieval mind, and Latin.
I chronicled my musings and lessons from my obsession with Dante’s Comedy and inhabiting history and language through literature, to finding magic in the poetic mode of learning and fighting modernity to make space for contemplation.
I lived my best academic life.
At home.
As a mother.3
And many of you did, as well. For the last two years, I’ve hosted quarterly calls, known as Symposium, wherein we discussed what worked well, what didn’t, what ideas seized us, and how our intellectual studies were changing our daily lives. We contemplated virtue, ate dishes of humble pie, and shared a kindredness over our piles of books. We’ve been a ragamuffin cohort, brought together by our common pursuit of knowledge, even while studying different things and chasing random footnotes.
This year, I’d like to be more than ragamuffins. I want us to be a proper cohort. If Jack Kelly can sing, ‘Even though we ain’t got hats or badges / We’re a union just by saying so…’, then I think by typing it out, I’m saying so.4 (Although I wouldn’t be opposed to hats and badges. A proper uniform is almost always necessary.) We’re going to be a cohort!
So, allow me to introduce the first official Mother Academia course of study: Feminine Soulcraft.
This year, we’ll embark on a journey to study the feminine soul by reading nine novels, memorising six poems, keeping narration and commonplace notebooks, and joining six discussion calls with the cohort over three terms. From stories like Jane Eyre, Hannah Coulter, The Awakening of Miss Prim, Anna Karenina, The Wise Woman, and poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, W.B. Yeats, and Emily Dickinson, we will study and contemplate the woman of virtue. Who is she? How is she formed? What are her practices? To what end does she aim?
How is a woman’s soul crafted by that which is true, good, and beautiful? This is our academic focus in 2026.
It would be a great honour to study with you. I hope you’ll consider joining us.
Venite ascendite et progrediemini en,
My husband is ever so grateful I’ve stopped daydreaming about how we could totally make it work for me to attend the University of St. Andrews—in, wait for it, Scotland—by him ‘working from home’ with four rascal children while I attend classes and somehow still home educate said rascals in the margins of our day when, naturally, he could do the work he couldn’t do earlier in the day because, well, rascals.
Sigh. Resume daydreaming. Remember fondly the day I drank a pint in the ol’ Eagle and Child pub (er, Bird and Baby; IYKYK), wondering which table hosted The Inklings. Yes, we should absolutely move to Oxford.
Never believe, not even for a moment, that one must escape motherhood in order to live.
Headlines don’t sell papes. Newsies sell papes.
Signed up! I'm excited!
This is absolutely lovely, Autumn. What a gift for so many of us at all stages of life to share in this goodness.