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

Alice Flinta Alice’s research interests have developed in the fields of translation, postcolonial, transnational, and migrant literature; she has conducted archival research on Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus’s manuscripts, and in her master’s thesis she explored how French author Michel Houellebecq reconceptualises Camus’s absurd, adapting it to the contemporary world. Modern languages are an integral part of Alice’s research: she is fluent in English, French, Italian and Spanish and is currently learning Russian. A creative writing and translation enthusiast, her poems have been shortlisted in regional competitions on multiple occasions; in the context of promoting Finnish literature in Italy, some of Alice’s translations from English into Italian are published online . Alice is undertaking her PhD in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, where she also completed her BA in English and Related Literature. She holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from the University of St Andrews. Research topic Over Borders and Languages: Rethinking Transnationality in Europe Through Mediterranean Women’s Writings Alice’s research is rooted in the core belief that literature helps us understand and challenge our current political reality. For the EUTERPE project she is working on how transnational Mediterranean literature by women shapes a new sense of transnationality in Europe and challenges how we think of Europeanness. With a focus on the literature of contemporary translingual, migrant and second-generation women writers, Alice’s project explores the intersection of gender, race, languages, and colonial histories and how it affects migrant writers’ narratives of identity formation, transnationalism, multilingualism, and translation. Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and Paul B. Preciado’s work are at the core of the project’s theoretical framework. Contributions: Contested Communities: Small, Minority and Minor Literatures in Europe ed. by Kate Averis, Margaret Littler and Godela Weiss-Sussex (review) Previous Next

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

Review of 'Exquisite Cadavers' by Meena Kandasamy From the outset, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. by Samriddhi Pandey 25 March 2025 Review of the Book Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the founders of the 1960s French literary movement “Oulipo”, believed in the generative potential of constraints, systematic rules, and self-restricting techniques to develop innovative literary texts. Inscribing herself into this trajectory, Meena Kandasamy, in the preface to Exquisite Cadavers , states her intention to write a novel based on the principles of Oulipo. The challenge she sets up for herself is to write a story as far removed from her life as possible. A masterful political novel is the result, with authorial decisions, inspirations, and plot points documented in the margins of the main body of the text. As part of documenting her reflections, Kandasamy, in the preface, exposes the racial bias behind even sympathetic reception of art from the so-called Global South and the exclusionary nature of the literary avant-garde. Exquisite Cadavers , she writes, was conceived as a response to the reception of her last novel, When I Hit You , based on her own experience of a violent, abusive marriage. By relegating the novel to the status of a memoir, the reviewers brushed past the formal and artistic aspects of the novel’s construction, reducing the artist to her experience as a rape victim. In Kandasamy’s words, “No one discusses process with us. No one discusses our work in the framework of the novel as an evolving form. No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.” She argues that artists from marginalized groups are often seen as the imitators of the postmodern novel, while the genre itself is commonly viewed as developing through Western innovation. This idea is reinforced by the choice of epigraph from M. NourbeSe Philip: “The purpose of avant-garde writing for a writer of colour is to prove you are human.” In this context, experimental writing for marginalized groups becomes a means to claim kinship in the postmodern novel as a genre rich with artistic and political possibilities. The novel’s title derives its name from the French term cadavre exquis , a Surrealist technique of stringing together a set of words or images. The technique, in turn, is based on a French parlor game called Consequences, where each participant takes turns to draw on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it along to the next, to eventually reveal a fragmented creature. Following this principle, the novel unfolds in two sections. On the right side is the love story of Karim and Maya. On the left, occupying a marginal space, and a smaller font are stories from Kandasamy’s life, her political influences, and explanations behind her creative choices. As these sections gradually unfold and intersect, the constructedness of the novel becomes apparent. It becomes politically necessary for Kandasamy to foreground her work’s artifice and align it explicitly with Oulipo and Surrealism in order to stake her claim over an intellectual tradition typically denied to writers like her. From the outset, as one of the self-imposed constraints of an Oulipo, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. Posing an enigmatic question, “Have the margins always remained disciplined?” Kandasamy invites the reader to see for themselves if it is at all possible to separate fact and fiction, novel and autobiography, form and content. The reader is actively encouraged to engage with the novel, just like in the French parlor game that inspired the title, where players can shape a fragmented trajectory to create a narrative of their choice. The “main” text sets the scene of regular middle-class domesticity and tells the story of Karim, a Tunisian filmmaker, and Maya, his white-passing English wife of mixed-race origins. Their domestic idyll is tenuously constructed and the description carries the ominous hint of an impending collapse. The reader is led through the couple’s everyday struggles in a post-Brexit UK. Even as the novel speaks about the somewhat assimilatory process of homesteading and the coming together of a burgeoning interracial family, there are disruptive forces at work (casual racism, skyrocketing rents, intellectual dissatisfaction arising from creating art palatable to a White, middle-class audience), threatening to disrupt the façade of domesticity. There are layered dynamics at work in Maya and Karim’s relationship: Maya’s cosmopolitan upbringing is contrasted by Karim’s acute awareness of his race and the attendant pressures of keeping his artistic and political vision alive in an environment driving him to self-commodify his art as an Arab man. While Karim tends to view everything, including his wife, through a filmmaker’s lens, Maya sees herself in various characters in films they watch together. They balance each other out, with Maya keeping him in thrall with her unpredictability and Karim balancing out her volatility with his pacifying behavior. While their relationship is far from perfect and characterized by frequent arguments, they stand firmly by each other, especially in the face of the incessant scrutiny coming from the outside world. Maya sees Karim, his artistic vision, his struggles, and people’s racist attitude toward him and drops everything to follow him to Tunisia. In turn, Karim senses the discomfort of Maya’s British and White friends in various social situations, bears all the racist jokes, and, in fact, makes jokes at his own expense to dispel discomfort and cement their social standing. Exquisite Cadavers features relentless social commentary, uncovering exclusionary practices in life and art through juxtaposing fictional domestic struggles of the “main text” with the grim political realities of India, Kandasamy’s birthplace. The intertwining of the center and the margin creates a bricolage effect, reflected at multiple points throughout the novel. Karim’s film ideas, the novel’s cover art, fragments from dictionaries, statistics, news reports, movies, music, anthropology, and philosophy all contribute to creating a bricolage of a transnational milieu where multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures come into contact. By detailing the violence of everyday racism both in the UK (her adopted country) and in India (her birthplace), Kandasamy crucially deconstructs the concept of home, emptying it of any easy romantic significances. If home is a place of refuge, is it still home when a right-wing state continues to kill, persecute, and arrest people who try to challenge its exclusionary narrative of Hindu homogeneity and Brahmin supremacy? Is home still a home if its very foundations lie in the coercive system of caste-based labor and discrimination? Is it still a home where every critical dissenting voice is silenced, censored, and discredited under manufactured charges of terrorism? It is up to the readers to decide. In one instant, Kandasamy derives her idea of home from Tamil poetics. The poetic formulation: Yaadum oore, yaavarum kelir (anywhere is home, everyone is kin) keeps her going as she packs up her life in India, meets new people, creates a budding family with her Belgian partner, and goes through the messy, transformative experience of giving birth, as described in the margins. The delicate cocoon of Maya and Karim’s domesticity breaks towards the end of the novel with the sudden arrest of Karim’s brother, Youssef, on the fabricated charges of terrorism, evoking the real-life arrest of Kandasamy’s human rights activist friend, Rona Wilson. The narrative’s ending remains uncertain, presenting not one but four different possibilities. It remains up to the reader to decide and take charge of the narrative, steering it like players in the game of consequences from which the novel derives its lifeblood and name.

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

Jasmina Lukić: Lecture on the Transnational Turn in Literary Studies In this lecture, Professor and Principal Leader for the EUTERPE project, Jasmina Lukić, discusses the transnational turn in literary studies, providing an overview of key related concepts, and proposing some initial thoughts on how transnational literary theory can be used to think about literature beyond national and linguistic boundaries. In the lecture she cites the work of key scholars who have contributed to the transnational turn, including Susan Stanford Friedman, Azade Seyhan, and Paul Jay. The lecture also emphasizes the importance of taking a feminist and interdisciplinary approach to transnational literary studies. Lastly, she links this discussion to the EUTERPE project’s research on European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, namely the forthcoming two-volume Handbook on Transnational European Women’s Literature . Jasmina Lukić is a Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at the CEU, where she has worked in various capacities since its foundation. A member of the founding team of the GEMMA program, she has coordinated it for CEU since 2006. She was a Principal Investigator at CEU for the GRACE MSCDN (2016-2019) and currently serves as the Principal Leader for the EUTERPE MSCDN (2022-2026). Lukić has published two monographs and numerous articles and book chapters in literary studies, women’s studies, and Slavic studies. The episode transcript can be accessed here . This lecture was originally delivered on 21/01/2026 as part of the “Reclaiming Transnationalism Online Lecture Series Organised by the Young Network TransEurope.” The full recording of the lecture with the slides can be found at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjPx7yvdGU . 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 edited by Evangeline Scarpulla. Thank you to Alexander Walker for the music and to Alice Flinta for the voice over. Thank you also to Ninutsa Nadirashvili, Evangeline Scarpulla and Kris Orszaghova for designing the podcast covers. This episode is also available on SoundCloud.

Hélène Cixous, Echo, Subjectivity, Diffraction (Part 2): A Conversation with Professor Birgit Kaiser In this two-part episode of the EUTERPE Podcast, doctoral candidate Uthara Geetha (University of Oviedo) speaks with Professor. Birgit Kaiser (Utrecht University) about her second monograph ‘Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity – Diffraction. Prof. Kaiser reveals how Hélène Cixous’s poetic fictions perform a radical, anti-essentialist model of subjectivity as “voice”– one that emerges not from a closed individual but from a ceaseless echo of other beings, places, and times. Kaiser introduces the concept of “echology” (ecology with a silent *h*) to reframe Cixous’s much-debated “feminine writing” as a material, relational, and deeply situated mode of becoming that includes the dead, the non-human, and the absent. Through a diffractive reading that thinks with Cixous rather than merely about her, this podcast shows how her work offers a timely, decolonial, and eco-logical path for reimagining selfhood, solidarity, and critique in the twenty-first century. The episode 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: Uthara Geetha . Thank you to Alexander Walker for the music and to Alice Flinta for the voice over. Thank you also to Ninutsa Nadirashvili, Evangeline Scarpulla, and Kris Orszaghova for designing the podcast covers.

Team Granada Adelina Sánchez Espinosa Principal Investigator Adelina Sánchez Espinosa is senior Lecturer at the University of Granada and Scientific Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master and Consortium in Women's and Gender Studies; PI for the "Reception, modes and gender" Andalusian Research Group and the "Gender Responsible Lecturing Labs: Interfacing cultural and visual cultures Andalusian Research Project of Excellence, UGR PI for H2020 MSCA EUTERPE Project (EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender in Transnational Perspective") and a Horizon Chanse project: DIGISCREENS Identities and Democratic values on European digital screens: Distribution, reception and representation. She is Series Editor of the Researching with GEMMA collection (Peter Lang) She was the Vice-President of AOIFE (Association of Institutions for Feminist Research and Education in Europe): Director of International Relations for the UGR, Executive Secretary of the UGR Women's Studies Research Institute and Series Editor for the UGR "FEMINAE" Book collection. Some of her latest publications are: "Feminist Counter-Cinema and Decolonial Countervisuality. Un'ora sola ti vorrei and Pays Barbare (with Calderón Sandoval, Studies in Documentary Film, 2021); Seeking Eccentricity, Special Issue for Sociology and Technoscience Journal and Feminist Research Alliances: Affective Convergences (Peter Lang, 2022). Angela Harris Sánchez Researcher Angela Harris Sánchez holds a BA in Art history (Granada University), an MPhil in Art Therapy (Complutense University), the GEMMA double Erasmus Mundus Master and a double International PhD in Women's Studies, Discourses and Gender Practices (UGR) and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University of Bologna). She has been a National Research Fellow (FPU) and is now UGR-Postdoc and lecturer in the Archaeology Department. Recent publications are "Artherapy, Queer Failure and Horizontal Learning Experience in Students' Postmemory Family Narratives" (co-author). "Beyond Being: Dissident (ificatory) Responses towards a Heritage of Becoming" and "Contesting power in public art spaces. Liminal p(l)aces, diverting methodologies and observant participation in Valor y Cambio". Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Researcher Beatriz Revelles-Benavente is Permanent Lecturer at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation and the local coordinator for the GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada. She is co-editor of one section in the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. She has also co-edited the collection Teaching Gender: Feminist Responsibility and Politics in Times of Crisis and is the author of Feminist Literature as Everyday Use: A New Materialist Methodology for Critical Thinking. Before, she was granted a postdoctoral fellowship "Juan de la Cierva" at the University of Barcelona (UB) at the department of Cultural Pedagogies. She was also part of the board committee of the European Association Atgender: The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Orianna Calderón-Sandoval Researcher Orianna Calderón-Sandoval is Junior Lecturer in Gender Studies and English Cultures at the University of Granada (UGR). She is also affiliated to the Women’s and Gender Studies Research Institute of UGR. Her research interests are located at the intersections of gender/feminist studies and film/audiovisual/transmedia studies. Among her recent publications are “Implementing Gender Equality Policies in the Spanish Film Industry”, International Journal of Cultural Policy (2021); “Debating Sexual Consent in the Teen Series The Hockey Girls: Reactions of Instagram Audiences”, co-written with Isabel Villegas-Simón and Pilar Medina-Bravo, Sex Education (2023); “Entanglements of feminist activism and gender equality policy in the Spanish and Swedish film industries: between convergence and critique”, co-written with Maria Jansson, Journal of Gender Studies (2024); and “Race-ing Masculinity: An Intersectional Analysis of the Spanish Public Platform Series Riders", co-written with Ángela Rivera-Izquierdo and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Feminist Media Histories (2024). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9113-9010 She completed her PhD at the universities of Granada and Bologna, with a research project that focuses on feminist practices in documentary cinema. She was an Early Stage Researcher for GRACE “Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe”, Horizon 2020, Marie Curie Research Project (ESR 13: Visualising Gender Equality in Europe through Art and Screen).

Review of 'The Illiterate' by Ágota Kristóf Ágota Kristóf’s 'The Illiterate' (New Directions, 2023 [2004]) is a short memoir in which the author somatically recalls her childhood in Hungary—before and during the Soviet occupation, the surreptitious border crossing to Austria and the relocation in Switzerland as a refugee. The memoir is organised in short chapters titled after the main resonances that are explored within; while, throughout the work, the writing style juxtaposes descriptive passages with a profound reflexive tone. Landscapes, faces and objects become not only aesthetic resources for the narration but also spaces of embodiment through which emotions and physical sensations are echoed. by Olga Fenoll Martínez 5 July 2026 Review of The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf “I read. It is like a disease. I read everything that comes to my hand, everything that meets my glance”. This is the quote that opens Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate (New Directions, 2023 [2004]), a short memoir in which the author somatically recalls her childhood in Hungary—before and during the Soviet occupation, the surreptitious border crossing to Austria and the relocation in Switzerland as a refugee. After reading Kristóf’s chronicles of the crossing, my mind remembered a quote by Sayak Valencia, who wrote “the memory of my body is my desire and my desire, similarly to my subjectivity, migrates”[1]. This remembrance maybe occurred because in this journey marked by displacement, relocation and dislocation, the activities that connect the discursive with the material—those activities which are located in the in-between of the discourse and the body such as reading and writing—arise as the potentiality of living in the middle of surviving, as a way to catalyse and be able to embody—and write—the desire to live and to remember what was lived. The body hence becomes not a mean but a radical site of immanence, an “embodied affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes, and transforms energies and forces”[2] inscribing memory and remembering as affirmative processes and tools for resistance through writing and reading. This memoir is organised in short chapters titled after the main resonances that are explored within; while, throughout the work, the writing style juxtaposes descriptive passages with a profound reflexive tone. Landscapes, faces and objects become not only aesthetic resources for the narration but also spaces of embodiment through which emotions and physical sensations are echoed. In “Beginnings”, the first chapter, Kristóf introduces her relationship and passion towards reading departing from a childhood memory, in which that activity is portrayed as a viral device that had “infected”, since then, all her life. In “From speech to writing”, oral stories appear as a joyful site of expression later castrated by the Soviet occupation in Hungary, when writing and the desire to write became then a way of “bear[ing] the pain of separation”. “Poems” takes the reader to Kristóf’s arrival to a girl-only boarding school, relocated away from her family. Time passes melancholically and a cry is constantly enacted. As a result of this mental and physical state triggered by the pain of separation and homesickness, poetry arises as a critical and creative space for the littler girl. The whispers of sorrow are turned into rhymes, verses and early poems which draw a mental landscape of the land that was missed. In “Clowning”, silences and absences are brought to the fore as constituents’ elements of the self: silences in conversations with her mother and lack of resources make her discern her abject condition while, joyfully, she tries to navigate those negative feelings by composing light-hearted texts for her classmates. Writing becomes here a site to create affirmative forms of intersubjectivity and survival. “Mother tongue and enemy languages” narrates the linguistic dislocation: first, it is portrayed as something unimaginable—“In the beginning there was only one language (…) I couldn’t imagine that another language could exist”. Then, the dislocation occurs as a result of disidentification and erasure, consequence of colonialisation—“I confront a language that is totally unknown to me. (…) This language [French] is killing my mother tongue”. Kristóf exposes different forms of coloniality beyond forced migrations and exile, such as forgetting one of the core parts of identity: language. The effects of colonialisation continue to be explored in “Stalin’s death”, here the author departs from the childhood memory in which Stalin died to rebuke the cultural consequences and the lack of restorative acts, addressing the consequences of colonialisation and occupation of certain Central and Eastern European countries by Soviet forces. “Memory” and “Displaced persons” narrate the clandestine crossing of the Hungarian border to Austria, the arrival to Vienna and the displacement to a refugee camp in Lausanne and in Zurich (Switzerland). In both chapters writing and reading are claimed as acts of resistance: a way of not losing the remaining sense of identity, of preventing the subjugated stories from being buried. In “Memory”, trauma and losses are the topics explored through the haptic power of words in triggering memories blurred by amnesia. Kristóf tackles how losing memories, losing people, losing objects, and losing writings lead also to the loss of “the sense of belonging to a people”. In “Displaced persons”, attention is also drawn to the gaze[3], and how it can create precarious others insofar as certain faces and bodies are dehumanised, and how those lives become “suspended”[4]. The action of being looked at displaces the possibility of being looked after and activates a process of dehumanisation, exploring also how the space you inhabit creates a particular form of being seen or perceived: as something inhuman. “The desert” describes the new beginning for Kristóf and her family in Vallagin (Switzerland) outside the refugee camps. By recalling their ordinary life and routines—in which writing and reading are still surreptitiously at the core, Kristóf also bethinks solitude resulted from inhabiting “a social desert, a cultural desert” for not sharing the language and for not wanting to be castrated by the new linguistic and cultural landscape. Here resistance, even when articulated by sadness, remains highly political. In “How do you become a writer?”, the author tallies her methods for writing, such as evoking childhood memories and physical feelings, as well as the process of how she got published. In relation to both writing and publishing, she states: “you become a writer by writing with patience and obstinacy, without ever losing faith in what you write”. The last chapter shares its title with this memoir, “The illiterate”. It collects in three pages all the painful becomings enacted by being a dislocated subject. In this dislocation, language is the cornerstone element in the process of othering, which is not only drawn by outside forces, but also by the relationship that Kristóf establishes with language. In the end, the sense of being illiterate emerges as the eternal return of being forced to be separated from her mother tongue and her home. The new language, French, appears as a new landscape to which the author has been forcefully displaced, bringing the joy of being able to write, read, publish and narrate her displaced story, while also circumscribing a challenge that has been “imposed on [her] by fate, by chance, by circumstance (…) something [she is] obliged to do. It is a challenge. The challenge of an illiterate”. The lack and absence of those possibilities that could be to come, or could have been done differently in her chosen terms become also affective and affirmative potentialities for re-signifying rage and pain, catalysing a new landscape by writing from these emotions. A landscape in which the memories of those who are forgotten by History are unburied and rabidly vindicated from a situated narration. The Illiterate is translated into English by Nina Bogin who, within the section of the “Translator’s note”, writes “When I read L’analphabète a year ago, I felt I had to translate it (…) I am deeply grateful to her for having published them [these short texts], because they speak to me as If I had always been waiting to read them”. Translation, a task that remains veiled, also appears here as an affective site for weaving genealogies and for transnationally creating forms of resistance. This affective translational approach helps to render visible those testimonies and narratives aimed to be drawn to silence and subjugation, undoing the idea of History as a homogenous and lineal map towards creating a contested cartography of different voices. [1] Valencia 2019, 77 [2] Braidotti 2006, 41 [3] I echo a Lacanian approach to the gaze here, which considers “the awareness and feeling of being looked at; ‘it preexists the subject’. The subject views the gaze as a threat” (Arya 2014, 194) [4] Butler 2004, 140-143 References Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in The Visual Arts, Film and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Malden: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Valencia, Sayak. 2019. "∀mor decolonial" In El libro de buen ∀mor. Sexualidades raras y políticas extrañas , edited by Fefa Vila Núñez and Javier Sáez del Alamo, 76-85. Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid.

Tamara Cvetković 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

Team Bologna Rita Monticelli Principal Investigator Rita Monticelli is a full professor of English at the University of Bologna; she teaches gender studies, feminists and cultural studies, and theories and history of culture in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her research includes memory and trauma studies, the global novel, utopia and dystopia, travel literature, and memory and trauma studies in contemporary dystopian fiction and visual culture. She also works on issues connected to human rights and intercultural and interreligious dialogues. In these areas, she has published and co-edited volumes and essays. Amongst them are The Politics of the Body in Women’s Literatures (2012) and the recent essay “Transmedia Science Fiction and New Social Imaginaries” in The Edinburgh Companion to the New European Humanities (with other authors). She is a member of international European research networks and PhD programs centred on gender studies and cultures of equality. She is part of the international councils on diversity and social Inclusion and projects on the New Humanities. She directs the Centre for Utopian Studies and coordinates the International Erasmus Mundus GEMMA (women's and gender studies) at the University of Bologna. She is the representative of the University of Bologna for the SSH Deans and the board of the Gender&Diversity group of the GUILD (European Research-Intensive Universities), a member of the governing Board of EASSH (European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities). She is currently a member of the City Council of Bologna and a delegate for human rights and interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Francesco Cattani 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. Gilberta Golinelli Researcher Gilberta Golinelli is an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, where she teaches English Literature, Feminist Methodologies and Critical Utopias. Her main research areas include the Shakespearean canon and the Elizabethan Theatre, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Women’s Utopias in the Early Modern Age. She is the referent of the PhD program EDGES (European Doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies) and vice coordinator of Master Gemma (University of Bologna). Her recent publications include Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women’s Utopianism. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell (2018); Il testo shakespeariano dialoga con i nuovi storicismi, il materialismo culturale e gli studi di genere (2012); the coediting of the volume Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English (2019).

Reshuffling: Feminist Collaboration and Transnational Solidarity with Rebecca L. Walkowitz This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Susan Stanford Friedman. Susan Stanford Friedman's work was seminal for the conception of EUTERPE, and we deeply grieve her passing. She was not only a highly respected and influential scholar, but also a special friend known for her warm personality and intellectual generosity. This lecture series was created in her honour, to celebrate her legacy and to keep her presence alive. This episode features a lecture delivered by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College. The episode also includes an introduction given by Jasmina Lukić, Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna and the Principal Leader for the EUTERPE project. The lecture pays tribute to the legacy of Susan Stanford Friedman as a scholar and mentor by reflecting on the concept of “reshuffling,” which Friedman developed in her later work as a way of thinking about feminist collaboration across differences of generation, nationality, race, religion, and class. Sewing together moments from Friedman’s scholarship across several decades, the lecture highlights her persistent engagement with models of feminist collaboration and transnational solidarity that she finds in the writings of Virginia Woolf, as well as in the work of other readers and re-writers of Woolf’s texts. “Reshuffling” is the methodology Friedman derives from this dynamic of reading and writing over generations. It is a methodology she both describes and performs, and in that sense it demonstrates her commitment to creativity as well as to criticism, to building up ideas in the presence and on the shoulders of distant others, and to making room for future generations to build up anew and to stand on her shoulders in turn. This lecture was originally delivered on 11/09/2024 at the third biannual EUTERPE Doctoral School, held at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. The episode 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 edited by Evangeline Scarpulla. 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.