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Coordinator: CEU PU Vienna, Austria Principal Investigator: Jasmina Lukic Funding: Marie Skłodowska–Curie Actions – Doctoral Network (MSCA DN) Duration: 1 October, 2022 - 31 September, 2026 Grant Ref: EP/X02556X/1. The aim of EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective is to offer an innovative approach to rethinking European cultural production in the light of complex social and political negotiations that are shaping European spaces and identities at present. EUTERPE intends to do that by bringing together gender and transnational perspectives within an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies. ​ The research is organized into 8 work packages within four main areas: 1. Transnational women’s literature and its travels: points of entry and pathways (WP 1, WP2); 2. Translational genres: crossing borders in gender, form, space, and identity (WP 3, WP4); 3. Transnational women intellectuals, multilingualism and decolonising European pedagogies (WP 5, WP6); 4. Transnational literature and cultural production: intermediality as a form of translation (WP7, WP8). ​ The Doctoral Candidates’ academic training will include two supervisors from cooperating universities, a compulsory secondment period, and an industrial internship with an Associated Partner organization to support bespoke employability enhancement. ​ The major impact outputs of the project: 11 PhD theses; a co-produced open-source Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe with key concepts and bio-bibliographic entries on leading representatives of the field; and a Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library , which will make accessible all relevant material collected during the creation of the Dictionary. ​ As a complex, interdisciplinary project, EUTERPE brings together literary and gender studies, as well as transnational studies, translation studies, migration studies and European studies. ​ This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement nr. 101073012. ​ This project has received funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Research Grant, Grant Ref: EP/X02556X/1. News Check back soon Once posts are published, you’ll see them here.

News Introduction to EUTERPE Doctoral Candidates

Doctoral Candidate 1 Host Institution: CEU PU Mobility Institution: University of Oviedo WP 1: Transnational turn in literary studies: Looking from Central and Eastern Europe Objectives: This individual research project belongs to the overarching research area Transnational women’s literature and its travels: points of entry and pathways, which brings together WP1 and WP2. In this framework DC1 will engage with larger questions of transnational feminist literary theory with an aim to explore impacts of transnational turn upon methods of literary interpretation (narrative methods, close and distant reading, content analyses). The research will focus in particular on specific problems of traveling concepts and traveling theories; problems of studying identities in literary texts; questions of multilingualism and literary translations. ​ Doctoral Candidate 2 Host Institution: University of Oviedo Mobility Institution: CEU PU WP 2: Mapping the "strangeness of Europe" in transnational women's writing Objectives: DC2 will be researching the ways in which women’s writing in Europe, especially those following the routes of migration from Africa and the Caribbean (and, to a lesser extent Asia), produce transnational writing and offer an alternative, gendered and sometimes multilingual map of European cities and conviviality. Applying a framework adapted from postcolonial theory, gender studies and neo- cosmopolitan studies, and embracing the performative theories of literature as a world-making activity, the research will approach diasporic women’s texts and explore the extent to which migrants, refugees and “post-multicultural” writers may constitute today’s cosmopolitans and provide a “hinge” between national cultures and transnational perspectives (Sneja Gunew 2017). It will focus on how literatures produced in the territory of what Chris Rumford (2016) terms “the strangeness of Europe”, the multiple Europes in their “disconnected contiguity”, may create a new narrative of Europe and innovative genres and linguistic practices. ​ Doctoral Candidate 3 Host Institution: University of Bologna Mobility Institution: University of York WP 3: Narratives of connections and complicities in women's transnational minor literary genres Objectives: Employing a diachronic perspective, the researcher will investigate repetitive patterns in women’s transnational culture(s). Moving from this approach, he/she will take into consideration minor genres, which have often become for women and marginal subjects narratives of connections, complicities, negotiations, practices of resistance and changes. These narratives will enable geographies of identity transgressing the traditional boundaries (individual, national and collective). DC3 will focus on minorities’ literatures, and hybrid genres such as utopia, dystopia, science fiction, and/as collective autobiography and intertextual connections between transnational women. ​ Doctoral Candidate 4 Host Institution: University of Bologna Mobility Institution: University of Granada WP 4: Transnational genres: genre/gender crossings in translation and creative practice Objectives: DC4 will select a diverse range of primary texts and transmedia works that cross borders between cultural discourses and cultures but also between genres, genders, and forms. This will be supported by the Centre for Utopian Studies and stakeholders, creative industries outside UNIBO, ERT-national theatre Emilia Romagna, and the Gender Bender Festival for visual art and dance. ​ Doctoral Candidate 5 Host Institution: University of Utrecht Mobility Institution: Coventry University WP 5: Moving perspective: the role of transnational literary intellectuals in shaping public debate around European belonging Objectives: DC5 will investigate the contribution of women-identified, transnational intellectuals and writers into shaping public reception and debate around European belonging and identification. The project will focus on transnational literature as multilingual literature informed by migrant and postcolonial experience. Through this lens, using literary methodology (reception analysis, discourse analysis, archival research methods, combinations of close and distant reading, comparative analysis) and drawing on feminist theory, intellectual history, postcolonial studies, migration literature, media studies and critical theory, ESR5 will cartograph the diverse literary production by established, but especially also minor transnational European writers based in the Netherlands, the UK and Italy. It will analyse how these works contribute to public debate, and how they operate across national borders, gender identities and languages in these three different contexts. Specifically, it will investigate through which media and public platforms (festivals, prizes, publishing industry) they impact, seeking to combine prominent and minor literary figures to assess the diversity of gendered transnational voices. How do these voices challenge geographical and temporal methodological nationalism and create a transnational and translocal sense of European belonging? How do they contribute to rewriting and expanding the European literary canon and to developing a new understanding of the politics of belonging in Europe? ​ Doctoral Candidate 6 Host Institution: University of Oviedo Mobility Institution: University of Utrecht WP 6: The role of transnational literatures in the decolonisation of understanding of gender within the European academe Objectives: 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, DC6 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. ​ Doctoral Candidate 7 Host Institution: University of Granada Mobility Institution: University of Lodz WP 7: Transnational literatures in the making: dialogues with film, social media, streaming platforms, performative arts and new literary genres Objectives: DC7 will be researching on the ways in which transnational narratives (and experiences) resonate, interpelate or enter into dialogue with other discursive forms of expression such as film, performative arts, social media initiatives, streaming platforms, electronic literature or slam literature. This involves translations across literatures and these different media as well as across different national contexts. Such processes are partly enabled by the broad accessibility of different technologies of communication (including film, social media or streaming platforms) as well as new literary genres and literary experiments (electronic literature, slam literature). These socio-cultural transformations facilitate transnational circulation of literary narratives, or of the content of literature, often creatively reworking them in the process. ​ Doctoral Candidate 8 Host Institution: University of Lodz Mobility Institution: University of Granada WP 8: Intermedial diffusions: creative interfaces of transnational women's literature and the arts Objectives: The individual research project will focus on the inter- and transmedial diffusions of the experiences and narratives conveyed by the selected examples of transnational women’s literature and how these transformations are shaped by the shifts of national/cultural/social contexts. The special attention will be paid to the interfaces of literature and the arts. Taking a new materialist approach, the DC9 will focus on the complex intra-action between the form and content, exploring how the change of the medium affects the content of the narrative and vice versa—how the narrative co-constitutes the operations of the medium. The research will focus on how—through trans- and intermediality—the selected narratives of transnational women’s literature reach out to and engage broader audiences, and how they are reshaped once placed in new situations of communications and new national locations. This will contribute to developing a more thorough reflection on European identities and how they are negotiated on everyday basis in and across different national contexts. ​ Doctoral Candidate 9 Host Institution: CEU PU Mobility Institution: University of Lodz WP 1: Transnational turn in literary studies: Looking from Central and Eastern Europe Objectives: DC9 will be researching on points of entry and pathways of transnational literature in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. A space where languages and literatures of numerous small nations traditionally coexisted and mixed in rich variety, CEE is an ideal laboratory to examine transnational encounters, transculturalism, questions of identity and border-crossing. The cultural specificities and symbolic significance of CEE as a specific cultural toponym in Europe have been widely addressed from the 1970s on. However, this scholarship is traditionally leaving out majority of women-identifies writers, being focused on canonical male authors. At the same time, the cultural position and the role of CEE in post-socialist times, and in particular in times of EU enlargement, with shifting geographic and symbolic borders, requires transnational perspective in addressing critically literary production in the region. ​ Doctoral Candidate 10 Host Institution: University of York Mobility Institution: University of Bologna WP 4: Transnational genres: genre/gender crossings in translation and creative practice Objectives: DC10 (externally funded, recruited by partner YORK) will have three main objectives: 1. To build on Walkowitz’s notion of the “born-translated” novel and Preciado’s blending of gender and sexuality studies with migrant/multilingual literary studies in order to interrogate and reimagine the definition of translingual, border-crossing writing not merely as an aesthetic effect in transnational literatures but as a genre in its own right; 2. To deepen understandings of how multilingual and migrant writing shapes and is shaped by nuanced intersections of gender, language, culture, race, class, sexuality, and disability; 3. To experiment with practice-led research methods, using translation and various forms of creative practice (e.g. creative writing, performance, mixed-media artforms), alongside social science methods (e.g. interviews, focus groups), in order to develop innovative interdisciplinary methods for approaching border-crossing artworks that challenge and question existing conventions in literary scholarship. Externally funded ESR10 will select a diverse range of primary texts and mixed-media artworks that cross borders not only between languages and cultures but also between genres, genders, and form. They will be supported by YORK’s interdisciplinary expertise, networks, and facilities for the study and practice of social science and artistic research methods. Furthermore, the Department of English & Related Literature will provide networks and training in translation, creative writing, and the creative industries. ​ Doctoral Candidate 11 Host Institution: Coventry University Mobility Institution: University of Utrecht WP 6: The role of transnational literatures in the decolonisation of understanding of gender within the European academe Objectives: 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, externally funded DC11 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. ​

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EUTERPE is envisaged as a complex, multilayered project, which has several long-term objectives, connected with very concrete tasks in the intersecting fields of gender studies, literary studies, translation studies and European studies. The objectives of the project are the following: 1. To map the field of transnational literary studies in Europe as an interdisciplinary field, which brings together a range of interconnected disciplines and approaches, with gender perspective as the main integrative component and gender as a key analytical concept. 2. To propose an interdisciplinary and intersectional framework for a theory of transnational literature. 3. To contribute to the furthering of the discussion of European identity in academia and beyond by focusing on questions of non-national identity in contemporary European literary and cultural production. 4. To set the frame for a history of transitional women’s literature in Europe by focusing on women-identified authors in the research of Doctoral Candidates (DCs), in the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe , and in the Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library , the major results of the project. 5. To produce the open access Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe as a major contribution to several intersecting disciplines: transnational studies, literary studies, gender studies, European studies, translation studies and migration studies. The Dictionary will consist of two parts: the first will be dedicated to theoretical and conceptual issues, and the second will bring together original bio-bibliographical articles dedicated to major women-identified authors in Europe today. 6. To create the Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library to enhance the cross-border circulation of European cultural wealth by establishing and running an inclusive and flexibly available platform about European transnational literary output. Through the Catalogue all bio-bibliographic entries of the second part of the Dictionary will be online accessible and searchable together with extra links and contents, such as the author interviews of the Podcast Library. 7. To offer comprehensive training in interdisciplinary thinking and intersectional, gender conscious research practices to the employed DCs. 8. To train DCs in socially responsible, open science practices. 9. To provide custom-made employability skills training for all DCs through ‘industrial’ internships within cogent but diverse organizations through associate partnerships across European contexts with libraries, publishing houses, museums, art networks. The Associate Partners offer important skills training in the fields of academic publishing, lexicographic writing, podcast recording, archival and curatorial work in order to open career choices for the DCs beyond academia. ​

< Back Tamara Cvetković Short bio 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. Research topic My 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, I plan 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, my 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. Previous Next

< Back Olga Fenoll Martínez Short bio 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. Research 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. Previous Next

< Back Uthara Geetha Short bio Uthara Geetha is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oviedo, Spain working on ‘The role of transnational literatures in the decolonization of understandings of gender within the European academe’. She was an Erasmus Mundus scholar (2019-21) of Gender Studies from University of York (UK) and University of Oviedo (Spain). She also holds a master’s degree in applied economics from Centre for Development Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her main research interest is on the intersections of gender with race, caste, and class inspired from her Dalit identity. In addition to her academic works, she also writes online articles on popular culture from a decolonial intersectional feminist perspective. Previous Next

Overview of the research and training program ​ Based upon a truly interdisciplinary gendered approach to knowledge production, EUTERPE offers a new and innovative quality of PhD training characterized by synergy between research, training, and supervision. Within a broader area of research that focuses on transnational literature on a European level, EUTERPE creates a considerable added value compared to standard PhD or research programs through its carefully planned collaborative approach that includes several major components: • training at the host university; • training at the secondment university; • consortium-wide specialized intensive training via summer and winter schools; • bespoke employability enhancement with the support of an individually assigned Employability Mentor; • skills development through periods of two-month internships with an Associated Partner organization; • hands-on training in open science research methods, academic publication and alternative forms of content dissemination within the EUTERPE Transnational Literary Research Laboratory while working on the project’s main impact outputs: the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe, the Digital Catalogue and the Podcast Library. ​ The EUTERPE Transnational Literary Research Laboratory as an essential eminent of EUTERPE research across eight universities will represent the project’s central research hub responsible for the conceptualization, investigation, and intellectual design necessary for the project’s overarching impact outputs, the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe , the Digital Catalogue , and the Podcast Library . The Laboratory will rely on the interdisciplinary expertise of the consortium members as well as on the practical know-how concentrated amongst our Associate Partners, but just as importantly, all DCs are expected to be active members of the Laboratory, within which they will have a chance to get hands-on experience with the process of designing, researching, shaping, and launching a top-notch open access academic and literary publication and website, as well as receive training in open science methodology, and learn how to apply it in their own research work. ​

< Back Evangeline Petra Scarpulla Short bio I am a PhD candidate interested in speculative and imaginative genre criticism, contemporary feminist literary theory, and postcolonial theory. I hold a BA with Honours from King’s College London and a MSc from the University of Edinburgh where I explored how contemporary fantasy writers are challenging Western European conventions of the genre through my dissertation entitled ‘Folklore in Fantasy: Challenging the Western Conventions of the Genre through a Critical Comparison of Marlon James’s Black Leopard Red Wolf and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.’ Research topic Building off my previous explorations into broadening representation in imaginative genres and global literature, my PhD thesis will discuss how transnational feminist authors in Europe communicate narratives of resistance through ‘minor’ literary genres, including fantastic and speculative fiction, magical realism, and graphic novels. Investigating the close relationship between form and content, I will discuss how many migrant female authors reach to border-defying and experimentative genres because their characteristics mirror their own liminal social positioning and hybrid identities. By challenging prevailing notions of fixed genres and truth vs. fantasy, these narratives overturn traditional binaries and ideas of nationalism, creating a unique transnational community of writers, readers, and thinkers. My research will be conducted in conversation with postcolonial and contemporary genre critics such as Homi K. Bhaba, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Nnedi Okorafor and Helen Young, contributing to efforts to expand the subjectivities represented in our ‘collective imagination.’ (Thomas, 2019). Previous Next

< Back María Elena Bertos Quesada Short bio Holding a BA in English Studies and MA in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Granada, I recently completed the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Granada and Utrecht University. The MA thesis written for this master entitled “La Malquerida: Encountering Rhizomatic Spectres in the (Re)writing of the Legend of La Llorona” embodies my research interests in gender studies, hauntology and queer time from an interdisciplinary approach. Research topic I am mostly interested in rethinking the spectre as a subversive and liminal space where to negotiate and explore rhizomatic identities as well as to build resistance through affective connections resulting from spectral encounters. For this aim, in this thesis I will adopt a decolonial (Anzaldúa 1987; Schaeffer 2018), posthumanist (Radomska et al. 2020) and corpoaffective (Lykke 2022) theoretical framework combined with a methodology grounded on the notion of 'intra-mat-extuality' as proposed by Beatriz Revelles (2021), following the combinantion of ‘feminist close reading’ (Lukic and Sánchez 2011) and ‘diffractive reading’ (Barad 2007). Previous Next

< Back Laura Bak Cely Short bio Laura Bak is a Gender and Diversity Ph.D. student at the Universidad de Oviedo. She holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a minor in Philosophy, and an M.A in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has focused on the problems and representations of space in exiled Latin American Jewish women’s autobiographical writing, emphasizing in the search and creation of places that have disappeared in the current geopolitical maps. Her research continues to explore the subject of ‘autocartography’ within life-writings by migrant women through the lens of counter-mapping, spatial justice, and geocriticism. Research topic The subject of imagination and representation of lost places in life-writings has been at the centre of my research trajectory. In this research phase, I plan to study how migrant women in Europe produce life-writings in an exercise of creating alternative representations of the spaces they inhabit and transit. I intend to designate this type of writing as counter-autocartographies as they challenge dominant cartographic representations and weave counter-maps that represent the perspective and understanding of the spaces dwelt by migrant women. Previous Next