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Francesco Cattani University of Bologna Researcher Francesco Cattani is Adjunct Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where he teaches “Literatures of English Speaking Countries”. He also collaborates with the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree GEMMA, Women's and Gender Studies, for which he teaches "The Re-vision of the Body in Women's Literature" and "English Women's Literature". He is member of the Diversity Council of the UNA Europa European University Alliance and of the Working Group on Equity, Inclusion and Diversity of the University of Bologna. His research blends postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender studies, science fiction, dystopia, and the posthuman to tackle repetitive patterns in the construction of the non-human. Another area of interest is black British literature and visual culture. He has published essays on the deconstruction of European identity from a transnational perspective, Bernardine Evaristo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Ingrid Pollard, Hanif Kureishi. Publications: Cattani, F. (2024). "Transfigurazioni mostruose. Tra rabbia, disforia ed euforia". DIVE-IN , 4(1). Cattani, F. (2020). L'utopia ambigua dell'Australia: Picnic at Hanging Rock tra mito e futuro possibile. Canterano (RM): Aracne editrice.

Review of 'White is for Witching' by Helen Oyeyemi Helen Oyeyemi’s 'White is for Witching' combines elements of the gothic tradition, vampire stories and haunted house stories to craft a narrative which probes issues of xenophobia and racism in contemporary British society. The novel follows Miranda, a young woman with vampiric qualities, as a sentient house intervenes in her life to protect, control and possess her. by Séamus O’Kane 23 April 2025 Review: Oyeyemi, Helen. White is for Witching. Helen Oyeyemi found literary success early. She wrote her prodigious debut, The Icarus Girl (2005), and secured a publisher while she was still in secondary school. The years since then have seen her produce a tremendous output: seven more novels, two plays and one short story collection. Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Oyeyemi’s nomadic trajectory has taken her to Paris, Berlin, New York, and, finally, Prague, where she now resides. White is for Witching (2009) is Oyeyemi’s third novel and garnered her the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 2010, placing her in the company of such luminaries as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Zadie Smith. White is for Witching opens with a cryptic and disorienting prelude as its protagonist, Miranda, lies already dead, with competing accounts of how this occurred. These segments set the stage for the narrative perspectives that make up the novel: Miranda herself, Eliot (her twin), Ore (her friend and partner), and the house itself, 29 Barton Road. The house is in Dover, a coastal town in England which serves as a major port to Calais, and therefore acts as a main entry point into England for many migrants and refugees. This setting allows Oyeyemi to examine contemporary issues of racism and xenophobia in her setting of England in the year 2000. Much like the welcoming façade of the house, the locals of Dover are superficially friendly but harbour a deep-seated racism. Refugees from Kosovo are stabbed, with Miranda’s twin, Eliot, blaming other refugees for the crime. Chinese migrants die in a truck trying to cross the border. There are protests outside the immigrant detention centre after a man commits suicide. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother, Lily, inherited the house, their father, Luc, persuaded his wife to turn the seven-bedroom Devon home into a B&B. Upon moving into the house, Miranda develops the same eating disorder which afflicted her great-grandmother. This disorder, pica, causes her to constantly chew on chalk and plastic, spurning regular food unless she makes a sustained effort to eat, usually to please her parents. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother dies, shot dead at a polling station in Haiti, Miranda finds herself in a psychiatric clinic for six months. Her memory of the events is already untrustworthy as she cannot recall how she got there. Consequently, an ambiguity persists when events are recounted from Miranda’s perspective. Physically weak from her eating disorder, her perception of reality is also unreliable, meaning that it is difficult to separate the supernatural events of the novel from Miranda’s own hallucinations. The house itself often casts aspersions on the reliability of Miranda and Eliot’s stories, whilst slyly suggesting multiple possibilities of its own. When recalling the fate of one of Miranda’s predecessors, the house presents two competing stories: she could have been strangled to death or allowed to reside within the house’s walls until she reached middle age. As the novel progresses, we learn more about the house, including the origins of its sentience, beginning at the time of Miranda’s great-grandmother. Thereafter, the house’s desire to “protect” the female members of the family becomes a corrupted, unwanted inheritance, as its desire manifests as possession and control, seeking to deny them any agency or autonomy. Miranda’s eating disorder is implied to be part of this supernatural inheritance as it afflicts subsequent generations who are connected to the house. As part of this disorder, she symbolically internalises chalk, connecting to the novel’s larger themes of racialisation and whiteness. This repeated act not only allows the house to symbolically extend its xenophobia beyond its physical boundaries, but it also weakens Miranda, causing her to become reliant on the house, and foreshadows the novel’s ending where the ultimate aims of the house’s idea of protection becomes clear. One of the novel’s focalisers is Ore, a woman with a Nigerian mother and white adoptive parents, who strikes up a friendship and romance with Miranda in Cambridge in some of the novel’s most touching scenes. Her perspective gives an insight into the discomfort and impostor syndrome of an elite academic environment. Furthermore, we see how Ore is subjected to the casual, mocking racism of her white cousins, who read aloud sections of leaflets distributed by the fascist British National Party. These scenes further add to the various manifestations of racism within the novel, emphasising how the xenophobia that the reader encounters is not simply a supernatural curse that is generations old, but a contemporary reality which can personally impact characters even in a familial context. In White is for Witching , neither the family nor the home, both traditionally associated with safety, can provide refuge. Oyeyemi’s novel subverts the trope of the monstrous, racialised Other, turning it back onto the white, colonial culture of England (indeed, the house has a fondness for the glory days of Rule Britannia). The uncanny is now the British family home. Sade, the Yoruba housekeeper, uses her culture’s charms and superstitions to counter the house’s malevolence. Ore, meanwhile, recalls the Nigerian folktale of the soucouyant, a shape-shifting old woman who feeds on the souls of her victims. She projects her understanding of this tale onto her experience of the haunted house, allowing her to defend herself against it. Miranda’s eating disorder leaves her pale and thin, visually recalling the vampire, a metaphor for the parasitic, colonial draining of resources and, indeed, her relationship with Ore leaves her lover in a similarly weakened state. A kissing scene towards the novel’s climax also heightens the novel’s supernatural elements and further troubles the boundaries between perception and reality. Drawing on Gothic tropes, Oyeyemi’s novel brilliantly conveys a sense of unease, foreboding, creeping uncertainty and inescapable decline throughout its narrative. Oyeyemi’s pages list various authors of dark fairytales and gothic stories which presumably shaped her writing, including the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Sheridan LeFanu. However, it is the influence of Edgar Allen Poe which is felt most strongly in the novel. Humorously, one scene features Miranda and Eliot discuss how they could easily deal with the events of a Poe story. Indeed, one could view the novel as a reworking of The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), with its sentient home tied to a doomed bloodline. Oyeyemi’s story, like Poe’s, hints that there is an incestuous connection between the twins. Miranda possesses many characteristics shared by the Usher twins: she suffers from a mental illness which manifests itself physically, she has uncanny, pale white skin, and soft, ethereal hair. Like Roderick Usher, her fate is inseparable from the home. The reader is left to question whether she has control of her own actions. Upon the novel’s conclusion, it is natural to return once again to the prelude, now armed with the knowledge of what happens to Miranda and able to slice through its disorienting opacity. Yet, despite everything they have read, the reader will wonder about her fate long after the book is closed. This encouragement of circularity mimics the novel’s own themes, triggering many questions and unsettling any easy resolution. Although there are scattered, individual acts of resistance to the house and its xenophobia, it ultimately achieves its goal, raising the question of whether it is possible to break the cycle of victimhood and the continuity of a colonial past. Will the house, and by extension, the racist spectre of empire, continue to haunt British society forever?

Sandra Ponzanesi Utrecht University Principal Investigator Sandra Ponzanesi is Chair and full Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands, where she is also the Founding Director of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI ). She has published widely in the field of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and cinema, with a particular focus on Postcolonial Europe from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is currently project leader of the project ‘Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine : Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament ’ funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council) and Utrecht University PI with Birgit Kaiser in the MSCA EUTERPE project on ‘European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective’, responsible for (WP 5, WP6): Transnational women intellectuals, multilingualism and decolonising European pedagogies. Publications: Leurs, K., & Ponzanesi, S. (Eds.) (2024). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and Practices of the Everyday . (Media, Culture and Communication in Migrant Societies). Amsterdam University Press. De Medeiros, P., & Ponzanesi, S. (Eds.) (2024). Postcolonial Theory and Crisis . (culture & conflict; Vol. 25). De Gruyter.

Suzanne Clisby Coventry University Special Project Advisor and Supervisory Expert Advisor Suzanne Clisby (FRSA) is Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Lincoln with longstanding experience and expertise in academic research and leadership, teaching and authorship. She has conducted over 15 research projects, totalling circa. £8m and has trained numerous scholars in feminist methodological approaches and qualitative methods. She provides expertise in gender analyses, participatory development, life history narrative methods and creative praxis across a range of academic and NGO contexts, including a University of Iceland/UNESCO international fellowship programme. Professor Suzanne Clisby was the UK PI of the Horizon Europe European MSCA EUTERPE project (2022-24) and continues to work closely with the EUTERPE Consortium as a Special Project Advisor, Supervisory Expert Advisor (Coventry) and Employability Mentor (Granada). Professor Clisby was the Co-Director of the UKRI GCRF Global Gender and Cultures of Equality  (GlobalGRACE) Project (2017-2022), PI and Director of the Horizon 2020 MSCA Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (GRACE) Project (2015-2019), and, for over a decade, Co-Editor of the Journal of Gender Studies. Her research focuses on gender, education and development. Publications: Gendering Women: identity and mental wellbeing through the life course  (with Holdsworth, 2016, Policy Press) The State of Girls Rights in the UK   (with Alsop, 2016, New Internationalists Publications) Theorising Cultures of Equality  (with Johnson & Turner, 2020, Routledge) Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands: Queering the Margins  (2020, Routledge) Investigating Cultures of Equality (with Golańska and Różalska, 2022, Routledge) Performing Cultures of Equality (with Durán-Almarza and Rodríguez-González, 2022, Routledge).

Samriddhi Pandey Samriddhi's research centers on investigating the impact of the transnational turn in autobiographies as a gendered literary genre. Her academic interests span gender studies, literary-historical analysis, posthumanism, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English Literature at Hansraj College, Delhi University, and Shiv Nadar University, India, respectively. During her master's program at Shiv Nadar University, she received the Graduate Teaching and Research Fellowship, teaching courses on Academic Writing and Literary Culture of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Subsequently, she worked as an Editorial Project Manager at Palgrave Macmillan and Elsevier for two years before commencing her Ph.D. at the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, in 2023. Research topic The Center Cannot Hold: Transnational Autobiographies as a Gendered Genre Areas of Interest- gender studies, literary-historical analysis, posthumanism, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. Previous Next

Team Utrecht Sandra Ponzanesi Principal Investigator Sandra Ponzanesi is Chair and full Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands, where she is also the Founding Director of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI ). She has published widely in the field of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and cinema, with a particular focus on Postcolonial Europe from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is currently project leader of the project ‘Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine : Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament ’ funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council) and Utrecht University PI with Birgit Kaiser in the MSCA EUTERPE project on ‘European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective’, responsible for (WP 5, WP6): Transnational women intellectuals, multilingualism and decolonising European pedagogies. More info: https://www.uu.nl/staff/SPonzanesi Birgit M. Kaiser Researcher Birgit M. Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Bielefeld University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. In fall 2009/2010, Birgit was Chair of Western European Literatures (Vertretungsprofessur) at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). Birgit has also been visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy at Paris Nanterre University (spring 2017) and at the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University (fall 2017/2018), as well as DFG-Mercatorfellow at Leuphana University Lüneburg (fall 2023/24). Research profile Birgit's research spans literatures in English, French and German from the 19th to the 21st centuries, always with a focus on literature as a mode of poetic knowledge production. Specific research interests are the relation of literature and philosophy, theories of subjectivity (post-structuralist, feminist new materialist, psychoanalytic, and ecosophical), the history of aesthetics and affect, multilingualism and un/translatability in literature, as well as post- and decolonial literary critique. Intersecting post/decolonial with feminist new materialist approaches, Birgit also works on changing forms of critique and criticality in the 21st century, as well as contemporary methods of reading. Research collaborations and leadership With Kathrin Thiele, Birgit founded the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica and together they coordinate the network since its beginning in 2012. Terra Critica holds annual international academic meetings as well as regular ReadingRoom sessions for a wider public in Utrecht (in collaboration with Casco Art Institute). The network has established collaborations with a range of leading international academic institutions in Europe, Australia, the USA and Asia. She is currently coordinator of the research community "Critical Pathways ", an interdisciplinary research community within the UU strategic theme Pathways to Sustainability, focusing on a just sustainability. "Critical Pathways" brings together colleagues from the faculties of Humanities, Geosciences, Social and Behavioural Sciences, and Law, Economics and Governance. "Critical Pathways" researches how to move beyond an understanding of sustainability narrowly focused on technological solutions and how to address social and cultural norms, political power relations, and global inequalities in order to make more sustainable futures possible. Since 2022, Birgit is researcher and supervisor in the EU-HORIZON MSCA Doctoral Network "European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective" (EUTERPE ; 2022-2026), which brings together gender and transnational perspectives within an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies. EUTERPE is a collaboration of Central European University Vienna, University of Oviedo, University of Granada, University of York, University of Coventry, University of Lodz, University of Bolgona and Utrecht University, supervising and training a group of eleven PhD candidates. In this context, Birgit is also on the editorial board of the open source publication Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe (CEU Press) with key concepts and bio-bibliographic entries on leading representatives of the field. Between 2016-2020, she was a core member and researcher of “Creativity in World Literatures: Languages in Dialogue”, a research network funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council within the Open World Research Initiative (OWRI). Publications Her book Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY 2011) explores—with recourse to Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. Rather than being ignorant or stupid, the “simpletons” that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville display a way of affective thinking, whereby Kleist and Melville continue a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. The book reflects on what thinking looks like if we take affectivity into account and how literature is a practice that continues to raise this question. Birgit's second monograph Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction (Bloomsbury Publishers 2024, open access) is part of the series Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing (editors Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Jennifer Gustarargues). It argues that Cixous's poetic fictions, from 1967 to today and in critical conversation with psychoanalysis, present Echo as a figure of relational subjectivity. The book demonstrates how Cixous's writings offer an anti-narcissistic figuration of selfhood that can be called ec(h)ological: critical of colonial appropriation and patriarchal oppression of difference, Cixous pursues how we are always embedded in ecologies with many others, and at the same time how we always carefully negotiate myriads of echoes that make up an "I". Cixous's poetic fictions thereby offer an important critique of modern Man and an alternative fabulation of being human in the Anthropocene. In the context of her research on subjectivity and post/decolonial critique, Birgit has published two edited volumes : Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze. Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (with Lorna Burns, Palgrave Macmillan 2012) and Singularity and Transnational Poetics (Routledge 2015). With Kathrin Thiele, she edited a special issue of PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism , entitled ‘The Ends of Being Human? Re-turning (to) the Question’ (8/1, 2018). Another edited volume entitled The World in Theory. Rethinking Globalization Through Derrida and Nancy (with Laurens ten Kate and Philip Leonard; Edinburgh University Press) is currently in preparation (forthcoming 2024). Birgit's work has appeared in international journals including Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, International Journal for Francophone Studies, Interventions, Parallax and Textual Practice. She is currently also member of the editorial board of the Dictionary of Transnational Women's Literature in Europe (with Jasmina Lukic (editor-in-chief) and the editorial board of the HORIZON DC-network EUTERPE, Vienna: CEU Press, forthcoming 2027). In the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica , Birgit's research focuses on the future of the humanities and their critical heritage, as well as on changing forms of critique and criticality in the 21st century. She has edited with Kathrin Thiele a special issue of Parallax on ‘Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities ’ (2014; also republished as book in the Routledge Series SPIB , 2018) and two edited volumes : Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (with Kathrin Thiele and Mercedes Bunz; meson press 2017, open access) and The Ends of Critique (with Timothy O’Leary and Kathrin Thiele; Rowman & Littlefield 2022, open access). Another Terra Critica collaboration is in preparation (Thinking About Doing: Practice and Theory Across Continents (edited with Anirban Das and Kathrin Thiele; forthcoming with Oxford University Press India, 2025). With Timothy O’Leary and Kathrin Thiele, Birgit is also editor of the book-series New Critical Humanities (Rowman & Littlefield). Links Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities Critical Pathways Gender & Diversity - Institutions for Open Societies New Critical Humanities book series (Rowman & Littlefield International) Academia.edu

Our Time in Utrecht: Transnational Reflections Authors: Anna Hulsen, Franka Stauber, Giada Quaranta, Marta Scalera, Stella Ivory, Viola Ruggieri, and Ninutsa Nadirashvili What you see here is a collaborative collage and a co-written creative reflection made with love by the seven of us – transnational students who found each other during a fall semester at Utrecht University. Setting off on an adventure is never easy. It is scary, troubling, and, quite frankly, one of the most excruciatingly hard things to navigate. You face the unknown, the void, you close your eyes and jump. It’s a leap of faith. The first months in Utrecht have been brutal. Battling bureaucracy and the weather of doom? Not for the weak. Adjusting to an entirely different academic system? A game of survival. And yet, it is among the difficulties, the tears, and the ‘I can’ts’ that I have found community, care, and solidarity. Looking back on this past year as a transnational student, I realize that the initial and apparent glamour of living abroad has faded. There’s something deeply tiring about having multiple nests, multiple homes scattered across different places. Of course, there is a significant degree of privilege in living abroad, but once the excitement of a new adventure wears off, you are left facing a new language, new people, and a new bureaucracy (and yes, Dutch bureaucracy can be truly exasperating). The months I spent in Utrecht felt a little like sinking into dark blue water. It was a time of vulnerability. Being in the classroom felt both frightening and safe. Much of the study material, like the university system, was new, heavy, and exposing. I felt vulnerable in the academic environment: I wasn’t used to speaking so much, to writing, and being read. I felt that it was expected to explain where we come from, what our families are like, what kinds of chosen families we are building, and where. In the gender studies classrooms, I searched for a space to listen, read, and learn from those who live, and have lived, under fire. I found a space for grief and reflection, but also a space of comfort and privilege. Studying gender in Utrecht felt like watching a long, beloved film that makes you cry every time – one that connects you to pain, but in a place where you’re allowed to feel it. Being open to intimacy and risking being wounded is one of the most difficult but bravest things one can do nowadays. Making yourself vulnerable in a world driven by toxic, painful, and harmful systems that drain and decelerate you requires a lot. Though over and over again, community and companionship pushed me through the systemic sludge that was aiming to make me feel miserable in Utrecht. Looking for and finding genuine connection with people was the bridge I needed when coming to Utrecht and finding myself in a random place I should call home out of nowhere, in the middle of a breakup and a horrendous global political climate. Staying soft in hard times has been a life goal of mine for a long time now, but this last year has reminded me yet again that it is not possible to stay soft with oneself without intimate friendships that hold, balance and catch you. Tough times can’t be dealt with on your own. And there were a lot of tough times, believe me. This work required a reconfiguration, but for long stretches in the Netherlands winter, we couldn’t find our way through. We were trapped in the density of texts, in the thick raindrops made bigger through the impact and speed of our bikes, in a constantly shifting social and political landscape in our classroom, amongst our peers, and beyond. We huddled, stuck in confusion and sticky with commiseration for months. The world is on fire, but the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house, so what do we do with these words? A constant questioning that our teachers failed to answer, if they even listened to hear us ask. Important liberatory theories stretched above us, out of reach, eluding any application in our bodies or on the earth. As a Gemma, I felt accepted by other GEMMAs and part of the community, but there was the lingering feeling that I was still on my own because everyone had different countries, classmates, teachers, and courses. It feels a little cringy to even write this out, but I was so angry all the time. I think I was flying in rage, constantly, and I wanted to land so badly it made my soul ache. No wonder then that my semester in Utrecht was painful. I smoked more cigarettes than I should have and walked up more stairs than my body was willing to. The wind routinely cut through to my bones; the rain drenched those cuts like alcohol thrown onto a fire. And the protests, and the encampments, and the lecturers complaining about students missing class. Weren’t they angry, too? I kept thinking. Why weren’t they also shooting up, high with rage over the flat landscape of the Netherlands? At first glance, this picture of two figures putting on their rain jackets in our collage is nothing but an unsuspecting moment of shared routine (although I’ll admit it has caused a hysterical amount of giggles) that could easily be washed away by the greater coming-of-age-movie kind of memories. And yet, the person who chose this picture saw in it something more: the promise of care. Helping each other weather the storm – a simple gesture, an act of care that tells you, “You do not have to face this alone” – you zip each other’s rainjackets up and up and away you go, a little bit warmer, a little bit stronger. When the glamour of the international experience begins to fade, something far more meaningful takes place: the deep bonds formed with those who truly understand your struggles – because they’re going through the same thing. And so, the glossiness is replaced by something warmer: regular coffee and croissants at “Vegitalia”, where you talk, vent, and comfort one another. You build a nest in this new country – a temporary one, because it is only a matter of time before you must leave and start building all over again. I often felt intimidated by others, and I felt certain that each person, though it takes a great deal of privilege to get there, was guided by a fire inside, a story that deeply motivated them to arrive in that classroom. I think I’m still intimidated by the reasons behind the fire inside me, but I know that this fire is alive. Riding my bike on cold nights to find a warm place where we could share and embrace that mixture of rage, fear, and the desire to build something was essential for me. To me, Utrecht felt like dark blue water, but also like a warm room. I see myself searching for markers on a Saturday night, knowing that even in a new city, there was a house where I could be welcomed. Now those memories feel farther away. Summer is over. I don’t know what our families look like today, or where the connections we built are going. What was that summer for us? And where, now, do we find space to grieve those who did not survive the summer under fire? Oh, I can’t count the times I was sitting at home, in my room, burning. Burning from anger, frustration, and sadness. But one person after another contributed their little, cooling drop of water to ease my fire, to gently restrict it, to channel it into motion instead of letting it numbly burn me. And for that, I am grateful every day. Grateful that I risked it. Grateful that I found personal, political, and spiritual intimacy that was worth every burn along the way! And who knows, maybe one day, we’ll master the flames and throw them right back at the injustices of the world. Together. Eventually, the light returned, and with cheap coffee (2 euros before 11 am, dankjewell), we got braver and found ways to loosen our focus on the imperfections in our writing and perspectives. When we laughed together, the lofty ideas dripped into our crevices and those between us, gradually saturating and permeating us. Despite the endless rain, a new world began to, at least, feel possible, as long as we had each other. It’s the memories with all of us that make this past year so special. In our group, we have grown closer, as friends, humans, and international students trying to navigate life with all its intricacies and hardships. We have shared tears, laughter, hugs, discomfort, joy, and so many more things. But this is why we made it through. Every class, coffee, and meeting at night was an experience of sharing how we felt. I learned how to feel with and through all of you. It is okay to sit with but also share my discomfort. There was so much frustration that we all shared the burden of, but also so many lovely moments, small or big, full of gentle kindness or much-needed life advice. But we are not alone in this, and we also do not have to be. Each of us is good enough with all our complicated, heavy, and happy moments and personalities. This is what spending time in Utrecht has shown me and what I will always treasure. We hugged each other in the damp, clutching onto our keffiyehs and knowing that was all we could do. I was furious. I had so much joy inside me, and I wanted to spread my arms wide and rise into the endless grey, radiant, toward the sun. Instead, I shook in the gales like a protest poster, begging for someone to do something. The only solace I found in this place that was not mine was the sight of you careening across the clouds with me, just as angry, just as tired. I knew you were also full of joy, with it nowhere to go, being choked by everything, everything. I could reach out, hold your hand, and bat my wings a little harder. So maybe you could rest for just a second. Works cited in our collage Angelou, Maya. “Alone.” Poem. In Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. Random House, 1975. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Preface: (Un)natural bridges, (un)safe spaces.” In This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. Routledge, 2022, pp. 1-5. Blofeld, John, trans. I Ching: The Book of Change. London: Mandala, 1978. Davenport, Michael A. “3,090 Degrees Fahrenheit.” Oil on canvas, 2025. https://michaeladavenport.art/paintings/ Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend: The Four Volumes. Translated by Ann Goldstein. London: Europa Editions, 2025. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation . Translated by Betsy Wing. London: Penguin Books, 2025. Hobbs, May. Born to Struggle . Plainfield, Vermont: Daughters, 1975. Jansson, Lars. Moomin: The Complete Lars Jansson Comic Strip. Vol. 8. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2015. Mbaye, Aminata Cécile. Feminist Research Practice: Session 2 (Presentation). Utrecht. September 18, 2024. Minoliti, Ad. “Fantasias Modulares.” MASS MoCA | Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, March 9, 2021. https://massmoca.org/event/ad-minoliti-fantasias-modulares/ . Oliver, Mary. “When I Am Among the Trees.” Poem. In Thirst: Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Pillow, Wanda. 2003. “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 (2): 175–96. doi:10.1080/0951839032000060635. Putuma, Koleka. “Graduation.” Poem. In Collective Amnesia: Poems . Cape Town: uHlanga, 2019. Wynter, Sylvia. “The Pope must have been drunk, the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity.” In Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada in the Hood . Edited by Ruprecht Alvina and Cecilia Taiana. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995, pp. 17-41. Zhadan, Serhiy. “So That’s What Their Family Is like Now.” Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Bob Holman. Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine , 2017. https://www.wordsforwar.com/so-thats-what-their-family-is-like-now .

Jasmina Lukić Central European University Principal Leader Jasmina Lukić is Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, the Principal Leader for EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, a Marie Curie Doctoral Network project (101073012  EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project, 2022-26), and the CEU Coordinator for EM GEMMA MA Program in Women's Studies and Gender Studies. She has published two monographs, numerous articles, and book chapters in literary studies, women’s studies, and Slavic studies. Recent publications: Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation  (with Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó, CEU Press 2019) “To Dubravka Ugrešić, with Love”, CEU Review of Books  (No 1/2023) “Reading Transnationally: Literary Transduction as a Feminist Tool”, in Swati Arora, Petra Bakos-Jarrett, Redi Koobak, Nina Lykke, and Kharnita Mohamed (eds.), Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place  (Routledge 2024).

Jasmina Lukić Central European University Principal Leader Jasmina Lukić is Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, the Principal Leader for EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, a Marie Curie Doctoral Network project (101073012  EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project, 2022-26), and the CEU Coordinator for EM GEMMA MA Program in Women's Studies and Gender Studies. She has published two monographs, numerous articles, and book chapters in literary studies, women’s studies, and Slavic studies. Recent publications: Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation  (with Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó, CEU Press 2019) “To Dubravka Ugrešić, with Love”, CEU Review of Books  (No 1/2023) “Reading Transnationally: Literary Transduction as a Feminist Tool”, in Swati Arora, Petra Bakos-Jarrett, Redi Koobak, Nina Lykke, and Kharnita Mohamed (eds.), Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place  (Routledge 2024).

EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective 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. Objectives 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. 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.

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 Mária Auxiliadora Castillo Soto Latest Publications: Challenging European Identity: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Marrón by Rocío Quillahuaman Challenging the Idea of Europe: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Chérissa Iradukunda's Broken Object