Thinking Transnationally and Imagining Feminist Futures: The EUTERPE Final Conference

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After four surprisingly short years, the EUTERPE Project has officially held its final conference, Thinking Transnationally: European Literatures and Gender, at the Central European University in Vienna, from September 23 to 25, 2026.

The three-day event brought together the consortium members, doctoral candidates and external project contributors to present panels and roundtables on the project’s output and to enjoy poetry readings, a literary performance, and a keynote by our project leader, Jasmina Lukić.

Jasmina Lukić has been one of the guiding forces behind the EUTERPE project since its inception, so it was fitting that her keynote lecture “From Regional to Transnational: Why Universities Need Gender Studies,” would mark the conclusion of the project. It also bridged the opening of the EUTERPE conference with the closing of CEU’s Gender Studies Department’s 30th anniversary conference, aptly symbolising the importance of solidarity and cooperation across feminist institutions and organisations.

Addressing the current crisis in academia and the defunding of the humanities, Lukić’s lecture argued that gender studies programs are essential to universities and to wider society as spaces for critical, plural, and imaginative knowledge production. Supporting these arguments, Lukić drew on the work of several transnational feminist writers and theorists, including Dubravka Ugrešić, and Susan Stanford Friedman, who was an early contributor to and inspiration for the EUTERPE project and whose memory we celebrate at each and every one of our gatherings.

Lukić concluded by introducing the concept of feminist “futures literacy” (Miller): the capacity to critically engage with today’s challenges through discussions of ideas, expectations, and concerns for the future. The lecture thus offered a hopeful and forward-looking vision of the future of academia and gender studies and an example of the importance of critical practice in shaping such a vision. Although the lecture may have marked the final conference of the EUTERPE project, it was by no means a conclusion, but rather an invitation to early career scholars trained by the Doctoral Network and by CEU to take up this critical work and continue exploring and pursuing new ways of thinking across borders. The full live stream of Professor Lukić’s lecture can be viewed here.

Over the following two days, the conference carried the hopeful and energetic spirit of the keynote into discussions of the extensive work accomplished by the EUTERPE consortium. A series of panels highlighted the project’s major outputs, in particular the forthcoming Handbook of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe, a two-volume guide to transnational women’s writing in the contemporary European cultural sphere, to be published by CEU Press in 2027. The Handbook brings together theoretical and critical approaches to transnational European literature while contributing to debates across literary, gender, translation, and post/decolonial studies. The panel sessions were made up of the editors and contributors to the volumes and centred on the aims, process and challenges of editing and writing for the publication. Additionally, we discussed the intentions and potential uses of the Handbook, exploring together how it might become a lasting resource for research and teaching on transnational literary and gender studies.

Our doctoral candidates were an integral part of the planning and delivery of the conference. Alongside participating in the panel discussions on the Handbook, they organized a roundtable on the EUTERPE Podcast Library, another major project deliverable. During the roundtable, four doctoral candidates shared clips and reflected on the process of creating the podcasts, from the EUTERPE-organized training activities and the hands-on experience of interviewing the guests and editing the episodes, to questions of literary performance, digital media, linguistic multiplicity, and transnational storytelling.

During the final day of the conference, the doctoral candidates presented their individual thesis research through an interactive poster session, during which the conference attendees were able to freely wander around the poster exhibit, while engaging in one-on-one discussions with the candidates. The visually-engaging and informative posters will continue to circulate and be displayed in various locations, contributing to the ongoing dissemination of the consortium’s research output.

Finally, the conference programme featured readings by transnational poets Julia Cimafiejeva (Юля Цімафеева) and Anthony Capildeo, which were also live-streamed on our YouTube channel, and a literary performance by Ethiopian-Italian writer Gabriella Ghermandi, author of Queen of Flowers and Pearls: A Novel. These generous and impassioned creative contributions were the perfect way to celebrate the end of the EUTERPE project, which is deeply interested in connecting with, and showcasing, the unique and groundbreaking work currently being produced by diverse transnational writers and artists in Europe.