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María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto holds an Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA) from the universities of Granada in Spain and Ł ódź in Poland. She also holds a Master’s Degree in World Languages, Literature, and Linguistics from West Virginia University in the United States. Her research has focused on the teaching of English and Spanish as second languages, and literary analyses with an interdisciplinary perspective. In a broader sense, her research interests span feminist literary criticism, migration studies, transnational literature, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Her teaching experience at the university level has ranged from teaching English and Spanish to Latin American culture and introductory gender studies courses. Research topic For the EUTERPE Project: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, María Auxiliadora’s research analyzes how daily embodiments of transnational self-identified women serve as adaptation and survival strategies in the host countries, and how these same strategies may also represent a sense of autonomy, power, and resistance. The project focuses on the analysis of non-fictional autobiographical works written by transnational subjects who have migrated and resettled in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to identify the different ways in which these embodiments challenge European belonging and identification. Contributions: 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 Previous Next

Laura Bak Cely 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

Team Lodz Dorota Golańska Principal Investigator Dorota Golańska is an associate professor (Cultural Studies and Religion) at the Department of Cultural Research, University of Lodz, Poland. She has degrees in Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and International Studies. Her research interests include feminist approaches to political violence and studies of collective memory, especially in relation to traumatic experiences and their representation in culture. She also works on such issues as creative strategies of resistance as well as intersections of memory, art and activism. Justyna Stępień Researcher Justyna Stępień is an assistant professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture and the co-founder of the Posthumanities Research Centre, University of Lodz (Poland). Her research engages with ways of conceiving ethical and political actions in contemporary art, analysed from the methodological perspective of feminist theories, new materialisms, and critical posthumanism. She belongs to an international research group/collective, The Posthuman Art and Research Group (aka Dori. O), which comprises artists and researchers from Europe and Canada. She is the author of Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary Art and the Body (Routledge, 2022), which explores how art can conceptualise the material boundaries of entangled beings.

Marina Casado Guerrero I hold a BA in English Studies at the U niversidad de Sevilla, an MA in English Literature and Linguistics at the Universidad de Granada and an Erasmus Mundus MA in Gender and Women’s Studies (GEMMA) at the Universidad de Granada and Utrecht University. Before joining EUTERPE, I have already participated in different international conferences in literary studies, such as the European Beat Studies Network conferences. I am part of the organizing committee of the upcoming 13th Feminist New Materialism’s conference that will be held in Granada in 2026. Research topic I am interested in different kinds of artistic forms, especially in poetry, bodily performances, and dancing, as well in their potential intersections, as working with and through the body is one of her major passions. At the moment, I am working on my PhD project that looks into contemporary poetry written by Latin-American and Eastern Europe migrants that are living in Europe, where she applies queerfeminist and decolonial theories/methodologies to approach issues of translation and mobility, looking into queerness as an word(l)dy entanglement that can mobilize poetical/political responses and underscore the relational approach that emerges from the somatic-discursive. I am the co-author of the chapter “Figures of Resistance: Revisiting Cinema and Poetry with Hospit(able)ness and Response-Ability" which can be found in the book “ Feminist Literary and Filmic Cultures for Social Action: Gender Response-able Labs,” edited by Beatriz Revelles-Benavente and Adelina Sánchez-Espinosa, Routledge, 2024. In this book, I approach the poetry of female Beat Generation author Diane di Prima through a feminist new materialist approach, underscoring how di Prima’s subversive and countercultural literary production embodies different modes of diffractive relationality. 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.

Carla Rodríguez González University of Oviedo Researcher Carla Rodríguez González is Senior lecturer in English at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches in the Erasmus Mundus GEMMA and in the Gender and Diversity Master’s Degrees. Her research focuses on contemporary Scottish literature, as well as on postcolonial, gender, space and cultural studies. She is co-PI (with Isabel Carrera Suárez) of the research project “World-travelling: Narratives of Solidarity and Coalition in Contemporary Writing and Performance” (2022-2025), funded by the Spanish National R&D Programme. She was the coordinator of the Gender and Diversity Master’s Degree at the University of Oviedo, Spain (2019-2023). Publications: "Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay" In A Companion to Scottish Literature . First edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2024. Durán-Almarza, Emilia María, Carla Rodríguez González, and Suzanne Clisby. Performing Cultures of Equality. Routledge, 2022.

Séamus O'Kane University of Granada Doctoral Candidate 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 - “Transnational literatures in the making: dialogues with film, social media, streaming platforms, performative arts and new literary genres” - 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.

Gilberta Golinelli University of Bologna 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). Publications: “Educational space(s) and female communities in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1”, «PROSPERO» , 2024, 29. “Of Cimbalin king of England”: The controversial representation of the British past in Cymbeline”. TEXTUS , XXXVII(2), 2024. Gender Models Alternative Communities and Women's Utopianism . Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press, 2018.

Uthara Geetha University of Oviedo Doctoral Candidate 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. Contributions: Prose and Counter-history: Review of The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo

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.

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

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