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In March, doctorate candidate Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto was invited to participate in an event titled “Feminism in the Global South: Shedding a Light on Underrepresentation,” organized by UNICEF Student Team Utrecht and Feles in Felium (FIF) at Utrecht University. Castillo Soto presented her experience as a Latin American early-career scholar in the Netherlands, where she is completing her PhD trajectory. She talked about her research and the Euterpe project and the different output that the consortium has developed so far. The stage was shared with Ana Maria Miranda Mora, an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies, and Vinícius Garcia Fonseca, a PhD candidate in Gender Studies. On the one hand, Miranda Mora presented her work on different feminist groups in Mexico, positioning structural violence and imperialism as undeniable players in violent acts against women. She explained how different feminist groups raise their voice and act against these social and governmental oppressors. On the other hand, Garcia Fonseca presented her personal experience and connections to feminism in Brazil, his home country, and how the work he does on memory studies focuses on uncovering stories and voices purposely left out from hegemonic historical accounts. At the end of the evening, there was a panel discussion where participants asked questions to the three speakers. The conversation was fruitful and engaging around the topics of transnational feminism(s), academia, legislation, and important topics around the event’s main theme.

When the planning for the EUTERPE Project started in 2021, one of the first people we reached out to for support and participation was Susan Stanford Friedman (1943–2023). Known for her research in literary and gender studies, whose wide interests included women’s literature, modernity, migration/diaspora studies, global and transnational literatures, and postcolonial studies , Susan Friedman was an author whose work was seminal for the research done in EUTERPE. We were happy and honoured when she accepted our invitation, looking forward to four years of cooperation. However, unfortunately, soon after the start of the project she passed away. It was a hard blow for many of us gathered around EUTERPE, because for us Susan was much more than a highly respected and influential scholar. She was a special friend known for her warm personality and intellectual generosity. She selflessly shared her knowledge, supported the work of her colleagues and engaged in teaching and promoting young scholars.  This lecture series was created in her honour, to celebrate her legacy and to keep her presence alive. Thank you to Susan’s friends, colleagues, students, and admirers who hosted and delivered these memorial lectures. And thank you to Susan, a dedicated feminist who has touched our lives and who will continue to inspire us in the years to come.  Lecture Titles:  Reshuffling: Feminist Collaboration and Transnational Solidarity with Rebecca L. Walkowitz “Use the Words You Have to Get the Words You Need” with Kimberly Campanello Ruins, Fragments, and the Word: War, Memory, and Utopian Vision in H.D.’s Late Poetry with Raffaella Baccolini The three lectures were delivered at one of our biannual EUTERPE Doctoral Schools hosted by participating universities.  The lectures can be accessed on our website, youtube channel, and soundcloud: https://www.euterpeproject.eu/podcast-library https://youtube.com/@euterpepodcast?si=nZT7Q6iRLvWSigYN https://on.soundcloud.com/khGxy7GFM6JDJ2TeuF

In September, doctorate candidate María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto organized and delivered a workshop as part of her internship with ILFU. ILFU  is the International Literature Festival in Utrecht, who hosts and organizes the biggest literature festival in the Netherlands. This year’s festival lasted two weeks and presented over 200 authors from different countries to an audience of +20,000 who attended the different events offered. Aside from the festival, ILFU also organizes other public events and offer a range of writing and reading courses through their ILFU Academy platform. It was in this platform that our doctorate candidate hosted the ILFU Academy Workshop on Life Writing . The workshop was open to the public. Auxi Castillo Soto introduced varied concepts on transnational life writing and provided different prompts to practice free and speed writing on a topic of the participants’ preference. Participants shared their writing experience and their written texts with others. In subgroups, they listen to each other, provided feedback and generated discussions. Life writing serves as a healing process of expression, more so, if done in communal spaces. Auxi Castillo Soto make sure to provide participants with a safe space to experiment and practice with life writing as a tool to find their own voice and share their stories. Besides the participatory aspect of the workshop, participants discussed the topic of life writing with  Alejandra Ortiz  and  Chérissa Iradukunda,  two first-time authors who published their migratory journeys to the Netherlands. First, the authors read excerpts from their transnational life writing narratives, and later, participants asked them questions about their books, their stories, and their experiences as life writing authors. This Q&A session was recorded and it can be found as a podcast in EUTERPE’s Podcast Library . This was a great experience for Auxi Castillo Soto who learned about the Dutch working environment and acquired important soft skills to enhance her professional profile and CV. We want to thank for becoming a project’s partner and allowing the doctorate candidate the space to develop such an enriching workshop.

Ninutsa Nadirashvili Ninutsa Nadirashvili is a Georgian-American gender studies scholar, editor, and translator. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Studies at Boston College and completed a dual master’s program in Gender Studies at the Universities of Utrecht and York. Since 2020, Ninutsa has been actively involved in NGO initiatives based in Georgia, collaborating with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Women’s Fund in Georgia, and the Equality Movement. In 2019, she spent a year working as an English teaching assistant through a program facilitated by Fulbright Austria. In 2022, she completed a Fulbright research fellowship in Tbilisi, focusing on an intersectional analysis of Georgian literature and language textbooks. This year, as a doctoral student joining the Centre for Global Learning at Coventry University in the U.K., Ninutsa will explore how transnational texts have influenced the decolonization of Women’s and Gender Studies programs across Europe. Her research will involve interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including curricula case studies, textual analysis of syllabi, interviews, and participant observation. Vision Statement I am a first-generation Georgian-American. This background has informed my undergraduate and graduate work in comparative literature and film analysis, which I paired with theories on anti-colonialism, nationalism, social reproduction, and representations of humanness. I intend to maintain this perspective as I begin my PhD studies at the Centre for Global Learning. Research topic “The role of transnational literatures in the decolonisation of understanding of gender within the European academe” Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including pedagogical and textual content analyses, curricula case studies, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators, students and transnational intellectuals in cross-European contexts, this research will investigate the ways in which transnational literatures (including text, novels, poetry, play texts, digital literary media) have influenced processes of pedagogical decolonisation within the teaching of Women’s and Gender Studies. The research asks to what extent transnational intellectuals and literatures that challenge thinking about European gender identities have been deployed to develop, extend, and decolonise theoretical frameworks for rethinking politics of identity within interdisciplinary gender studies. Research interest list Feminist storytelling; contemporary cultural theory; relationalities; anti-colonialism; migration and nationalism; film studies; poetry; queer theory; literary and critical theory. Previous Next

Séamus O'Kane Séamus O’Kane is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada and his mobility period will take place at the University of Lodz. He holds an MA in Humanities from TU Dublin and he is also a graduate of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture (CLMC). As part of this programme, he completed an internship researching digital literature for children for the Bibliotheek LocHal, Tilburg, and wrote a thesis on transmedia narratives at Aarhus University. His current research continues his interests in digital literature, adaptations and transmedia narratives. He will analyse a range of media to investigate discourses of communications technology, new media and the mediated world, and how these interrelated phenomena impact upon interpersonal relationships, selfhood and agency in transnational women’s literature. Research topic “Transnational literatures in the making: dialogues with film, social media, streaming platforms, performative arts and new literary genres”. Previous Next

Olga Fenoll Martínez Univeristy of Lodz Doctoral Candidate Olga Fenoll-Martínez holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting (University of Granada) and an MA in English Literature and Linguistics (University of Granada). She has been granted with different scholarships for early researchers provided by the Spanish Government and the University of Granada, and she has also engaged in R&D research projects. In her works, Olga has aimed to display a queer approach through different intra-actions such as contemporary queer poetry, translation studies or located audiovisual cultures from a feminist new-materialist lens. Olga’s PhD project aims to tackle located and nomadic transnational womxn’s art and writings as assemblages that are in-the-making by exploring the plastic potentiality of those works through a diffracted approach guided by onto-epistemological new materialist optics and interferenced logics.