Search Results

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.

Overview 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 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.

Publications Reading for Each Other Creative book reviews that facilitate an exchange of literature between doctoral candidates, allowing them to better understand each other's lives and work. Publications by Doctoral Candidates Publications by Doctoral Candidates A collection of writing – papers, articles, peer-reviewed publications, books and other media produced by the doctoral candidates.

The Consortium

University of York Boriana Alexandrova Principal Investigator Nicoletta Asciuto Researcher

University of Granada Adelina Sánchez Espinosa Principal Investigator Angela Harris Sánchez Researcher Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Researcher

Coventry University Katherine Wimpenny Principal Investigator Jaya Jacobo Researcher Suzanne Clisby Special Project Advisor and Supervisory Expert Advisor

Doctoral Candidates Samriddhi Pandey Central European University Tamara Cvetković Central European University Marina Casado Guerrero Central European University Evangeline Petra Scarpulla University of Bologna Ninutsa Nadirashvili Coventry University Séamus O'Kane University of Granada Olga Fenoll Martínez University of Lodz María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto Utrecht University Laura Bak Cely University of Oviedo Alice Flinta University of York Uthara Geetha University of Oviedo

Teams Team Bologna Button Team CEU Button Team Coventry Button Team Granada Button Team Lodz Button Team Oviedo Button Team Utrecht Button Team York Button

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

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

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