Women’s History Month: Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing

The start of Women’s History Month is one week away. Last year, SASiety organized the International Women’s Day Symposium, this year we are doing a series of blog posts on women’s writing. The Institute of Modern Languages Research here at our university has a whole Research Centre dedicated to the study of it. Professor Godela Weiss-Sussex is the Co-Director and kindly agreed to tell us a bit more about the centre, its work, and upcoming events.

Professor Godela Weiss-Sussex

CCWW Co-Director

Women’s history is captured in all kinds of ways – not least in literary writing and film. We at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) | The Institute of Modern Languages Research (sas.ac.uk) are a forum for research and discussion of creative works by women; and – whether you are interested in Elena Ferrante, Marie Darrieussecq, Carme Riera, Ana Luisa Amaral, Juli Zeh, or in any other contemporary female author anywhere in the world – we invite you to come and join our events and online activities.

Founded in 2009 as one of seven research centres of the IMLR (University of London), CCWW has grown and expanded steadily and now hosts a full annual programme of seminars, conferences and author readings. Our website provides research support in the shape of dedicated author pages, podcasts of past events, and a blog. Anyone is welcome to use these resources, and if you’d like to host your own seminar or conference on a subject in the field, we want to hear from you, too!

We have a whole raft of events coming up this spring, starting with a series of seminars and a conference on the subject of care in March. The seminars (entitled ‘Who Cares?’), curated by Early Career Researchers Dr Jasmine Cooper (Cambridge) and Dr Katie Pleming (Edinburgh), foreground the politics of care in their investigations of contemporary writing and film; they take place in the afternoons of 7, 21 and 28 March. See: ‘WHO CARES?’ In Contemporary Women’s Writing & Film – Session 1 | The Institute of Modern Languages Research (sas.ac.uk). These events are complemented by the conference, on 18 March, on ‘Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care’, co-organised by Profs Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway, London) and Shirley Jordan (Newcastle/IMLR): Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care | The Institute of Modern Languages Research (sas.ac.uk).

Further ahead, two more conferences are coming up this academic year, for which registrations are invited now: Politics of Vulnerability, 19-20 May 2022 (organised by Dr Sandra Daroczi and Dr Adina Stroia) and “A new ‘feminist’ novel?”, 16-17 June 2022 (organisers: Dr Sandra Daroczi and Dr Adalgisa Giorgio and). Join us if you can!