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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.

By Alice Flinta In June this year, EUTERPE doctoral candidate Alice Flinta participated in the seventeenth annual Black Europe Summer School – Interrogating Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations . The organisers, Prof. Kwame Nimako, Dr Camilla Hawthorne (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Prof. Stephen Small (University of California, Berkeley), brought us together – an enthusiastic cohort of around thirty-five students from various backgrounds – for two weeks, at IIRE, the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam. BESS is a hub for intellectual, political, and social interrogation over race relations in Europe. This year it opened with an introductory talk by Prof. Nimako delineating a concise history of the coming together of the European Union. The lecture focused on which social and political stakeholders have been involved in the process, and which ones haven’t. Such an approach underscored the analysis of the EU’s power structure, its economic interests and social priorities. It shed light on the emergence of racist, nativist views that are reflected in current systems of “racial citizenship” and are fundamental to the notion of Fortress Europe. [PB1]   The second day, we started by taking a tour of four European port cities and their relationships with Blackness, intellectually guided by Prof. Olivette Otele (SOAS), whose copies of African-Europeans: An Untold Story  (London: Hurst & Company, 2020) were resting on most desks that day. From day three, we started to zoom into the different national realities, and approached race and race relations on a country-by-country basis. We started with Dr Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak (Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin) guiding us though “Black Poland,” to then move onto “Black Germany” with Dr Madeline Bass (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen), “Black Britain” with Prof. Stephen Small, “Black Italia” with Dr Camilla Hawthorne, and “Black Portugal” with Dr Cristina Roldão (University Institute of Lisbon). In one of our last seminars, Dr Giovanni Picker (University of Glasgow) prompted us to move beyond the framework of the nation-state and adopt a transnational and transhistorical lens to assess the potentialities of juxtaposing Black European and Critical Romani Studies. [PB2]  Participants had the chance to present their research, projects and ideas at the day-long Inside Black Europe and African Diaspora Symposium  that took place on Friday, 27 June. The symposium was organised around four panels, the topics of which ranged from literature to sociological, ethnographic and methodological research, and a preview screening of a documentary on Afrori Books – Books by Black Authors  bookshop in Brighton (UK). Inspired by Dr Hawthorne’s “Black Italia”, I gave a presentation on how Afroitalian literature draws on the Mediterranean (as a relational space, but also as a philosophical framework) to disrupt and challenge racial affiliations in Europe. Fundamental to BESS is experiencing and engaging with legacies, memories and responses to Europe’s colonial past. For this purpose, the participation of the School’s cultural attaché, Jennifer Tosch, founder of Amsterdam’s Black Heritage Tours , was invaluable. From a boat tour of Amsterdam’s colonial past to a visit to Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition at the Van Loon Museum , from a guided excursion of the Royal Palace to a preview talk and walk on the site of the forthcoming National Slavery Museum , to the unforgettable Keti Koti Day on 1 st  July, Tosch brought to life many of the discussions that took place throughout the two weeks of workshops. Finally, the tour of the Wereldmuseum’s exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance  and the lecture by Wayne Modest were crucial to spark conversations on the management and remembrance of colonial legacies and their future. BESS is a fundamental experience not only for those who think, write and feel with and through questions of race and Blackness in Europe, but also for those who think, write and feel through Europe. As the many workshops, talks, lectures and presentations have made clear, Blackness has been, and regretfully remains, a marginal question within the European project – be it intellectual, social or political. Black Europe  is not just an educational programme, but also a social and political mission that leaves us, participants, with both an invaluable range of tools and frameworks to make our work more careful, caring and attuned to reality, and a renewed sense of engagement and purpose.

During this year’s Feminisms in a Transnational Perspective Postgraduate Course  held May 12-16 at the Dubrovnik (Croatia) IUC , we had a chance to present some of the results of the EUTERPE project. Under the title “The Otherwise of History”, the 18 th  Postgraduate Course gathered feminists across disciplines to consider the subversive potential of feminist and women’s history and to discuss how thinking historically from a transnational and feminist perspective can contribute to a politics of solidarity and alliances. As part of the panel Women, Counter Memory, and Feminist Resistance , Tamara Cvetković, EUTERPE DC based at the CEU, presented her research on women’s counter-narratives on Chechen asylum seekers in Austria based on the novel Losses in Friction by Mascha Dabic. On a roundtable about the GEMMA ERASMUS Mundus program – Transnational Futures, Thinking Across Generations, Jasmina Lukić, the Principal Leader of EUTERPE, talked about the importance of feminist networks, knowledge dissemination, transnational connections, and about the cooperation between EUTERPE and GEMMA program. The roundtable was moderated by EUTERPE’s Granada PI, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa.   https://www.facebook.com/interuniversitycentre/ https://www.instagram.com/iucdubrovnik/?hl=en

Tamara Cvetković Central European University Doctoral Candidate Tamara Cvetković holds a master’s degree in Gender Studies from Central European University and bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Belgrade. Prior to her engagement as a Junior Visiting Researcher within the EUTERPE Project: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective and the enrollment in Ph.D. Program in Comparative Gender Studies at CEU in 2023/2024, she spent several years working as a program manager in an NGO based in Serbia that dealt with migration issues, intercultural education, and interdisciplinary approaches to transcultural phenomena. Over this period, her main areas of interest were gender studies, transnational migration, postcolonialism/decolonial theory, Orientalism/Balkanism, feminist and critical pedagogy, use of literature and art in activism. Her research focuses on the literary production of transnational women-identified contemporary authors from the Balkans whose work thematize migration, identity, linguistic and cultural translation, as well as their complex relationships with literary ‘classics.’ Focusing mainly on the authors from the Western Balkans, she plans to analyze border-crossings and travelling though physical and imagined geographies, fictional worlds, literary traditions and genres, and cultural traditions with an aim to map their trajectories through the lens of feminist interpretation as well as to map cultural translations that are framing their works. In addition, her aim is to explore the ways in which they (re)use literary ‘classics’ in revolutionary ways (Standford Friedman, 2019) to create new works, and how these works continue their transnational circulation. Contributions: Review of Sexe et mensonges by Leïla Slimani

Dorota Golańska University of Lodz Principal Investigator Dorota Golańska is an associate professor (Cultural Studies and Religion) at the Department of Cultural Research, University of Lodz, Poland. She has degrees in Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and International Studies. Her research interests include feminist approaches to political violence and studies of collective memory, especially in relation to traumatic experiences and their representation in culture. She also works on such issues as creative strategies of resistance as well as intersections of memory, art and activism. Publications: Hamarowski, Bartosz, and Dorota Golańska. 2023. “A Wicked Vestal: Subverting the Androcentric Imaginaries of the Smart Home.” Australian Feminist Studies 38 (117): 267–86. Golańska, D., & Woźniak-Bobińska, M. (2023). Spaces of fluidity: articulating ‘politics of presence’ through place-based activism in Iqrit (Israel). Cultural Geographies, 31(1), 47-65.

A Conversation with Author Alejandra Ortiz In this podcast episode, doctoral candidate Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto and transnational author Alejandra Ortiz took a walking tour around different places in Amsterdam that are important to the author. Ortiz is the author of the book De Waarheid zal me Bevrijden , published in 2022 by Lebowski Publishers. In her book, Ortiz recounts her migratory experience from Mexico to the United States and Netherlands and her varied experiences in these countries as a trans migrant woman. Together with some information about her book, this podcast invites listeners to experience Amsterdam from Ortiz’s transnational gaze, far away from the touristic places and the typical representations of the city. At each stop, Alejandra’s short monologues explaining why these places are meaningful to her were recorded. The audios contain ambient sounds and noises that were experienced that day with the intention to offer listeners the experience of the movement of the conversation and the city. This small project also has photographs that were taken during the walk. These photographs and Alejandra’s experience will be published as a written report in an edited volume titled Amsterdam Diaries, Life Writing and Identity: Urban Lives in October 2025 by Amsterdam University Press. Check out the links below for more information about this piece. Edited volume - Amsterdam Diaries, Life Writing and Identity: Urban Lives (forthcoming, Amsterdam University Press, 2025): www.vu.nl/en/events/2023/urban-lives-amsterdam-diaries-and-other-stories-of-the-self Boost Amsterdam: www.boostamsterdam.nl T-Huis: www.transhuis.nl Papaya Kuir: www.papayakuir.com Winq Community Awards: www.winq.nl/winaar-winq-community-award-2023-alejandra-ortiz/103934 The episode transcript can be accessed here. An English translation of the transcript can be accessed here. This episode is part of the EUTERPE podcast Library on European Literatures and Genders from a Transnational Perspective. The podcast is powered by the European Union, UKRI, and the Central European University Library. Grant Agreement: 101073012 EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project. For more information about the EUTERPE project please refer to the official project webpage https://www.euterpeproject.eu/ , or follow us on Instagram @euterpe_project_ or Facebook at EUTERPE Doctoral Network Project . This episode was produced and edited by: María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto Thank you to Alexander Walker for the music and to Alice Flinta for the voice over. Thank you also to Ninutsa Nadirashvili and Kris Orszaghova for designing the podcast covers.