Being for Another: New Forms of Life-Writing by Women

Le CERMOM a le l'honneur de vous inviter à la journée d'étude "Being for Another: New Forms of Life-Writing by Women" organisée par l'Inalco et L'Université de Londres.
Ecritures orientales
Ecritures orientales © Inalco‎

Programme

9h15-9h30 : Opening remarks

9h30-11h : 

Panel 1: New Forms of Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World

  • ‘Intergenerational Autofictions and Impossible Conversations in Contemporary Spanish and French Women’s Life Writing’

Hannie Lawlor (University College Dublin

  • ‘Our other stories: Life-writing in Latin(as) America’

Liliana Chávez Díaz (University of St Andrew’s)

  • ‘Biofiction and the Portuguese American woman life writer’

Carmen Ramos Villar (University of Sheffield)

Chair: Claire Williams (St Peter’s College, Oxford; CCWW)

11h-11h30 : Coffee break

11h30-13h : 

Panel 2: New Forms of Life-Writing in Hebrew

  • ‘Reviving Communal Life through Personal Memories: Gina Camhy’s Writings in post-Holocaust Bosnia’

Zeljko Jovanovic (CERMOM, INALCO, Paris)

  • ‘Orot BeAfala [Rays of Light]: Women Writing Life after October 7’

Judith Müller (Buber-Rosenzweig-Institute and the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Centre for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics)

  • ‘“Back then I couldn’t read any Yiddish”: Tea Arciszewska Narrates her Youth for Jewish Children in Postwar Paris’

Sonia Gollance (University College London)

Chair: Elisa Carandina (INALCO, Paris; CCWW)

13h-14h30 : Sandwich lunch

14h30-16h : 

Panel 3: Postgraduate Seminar Discussion

16h-16h30 : Tea break

 

Organisatrices 

  • Claire Williams, St Peter’s College, Oxford, CCWW
  • Elisa Carandina, Inalco, CERMOM, CCWW

 

Notes on contributors

Hannie Lawlor is Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, where her comparative doctoral project focused on twenty-first-century Spanish and French women’s life writing in response to traumatic loss. Her broader research interests include autobiographical and autofictional practices, intergenerational transmission of memory, the staging of dialogue, and narrative perspective in twentieth and twenty-first-century prose and film in Spain. She is co-editor of the volume The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, 2022) with Dr Alexandra Effe, and her thesis monograph, Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2024).

 

Liliana Chávez Díaz is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and journalism, particularly women’s, nonfiction and travel writing. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Cambridge and has published two books: Latin American Documentary Narratives: The Intersections of Storytelling and Journalism in Contemporary Literature (2021) and of Viajar sola: Identidad y experiencia de viaje en autoras hispanoamericanas (2020).

She is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany and she has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas - Austin, Columbia University in New York and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. She has been a researcher at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City and at Freie Universitat in Berlin. Liliana is also a journalist, and she currently writes a column on travel writing, ‘Viajar sola’, in the Mexican newspaper Milenio.

 

Carmen Ramos Villar is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests centre on Portuguese American literature and Portuguese American life writing. She is currently working on a project that examines Portuguese American experience in the United States through life writing by women.

 

Claire Williams is Associate Professor in Brazilian Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Centre for the study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW), SAS, University of London, and the Grupo dos Estudos em Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea (GELBC). Her research and publications explore literature by women and minority groups from the Lusophone World. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2021), with Hilary Owen and After Clarice: Reading Lispector in the Twenty-first Century (Legenda, 2022), with Adriana X. Jacobs. With Maria José Blanco, she has co-edited three volumes of essays on women’s life-writing: Feminine Singular: Women Growing up through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World (2017), Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders (2021), Feminine Plural: Women in Transition in the Luso-Hispanic World (forthcoming 2024). She is preparing a monograph on life-writing by contemporary Brazilian women.

 

Zeljko Jovanovic works as a full-time lecturer in Judeo-Spanish language and Sephardic cultural studies in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Inalco in Paris, France. His work focuses mainly on the role of memory in reconstructing the past and the Sephardic culture before and after the Holocaust, and the ways in which Sephardic women have contributed to transmitting and reshaping the communal identity. He has published a monograph which deals with these issues: Twentieth-Century Sephardic Authors from the Former Yugoslavia: A Judeo-Spanish Tradition (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020) in addition to a number of articles and book chapters dealing with memory and memorialisation, gender studies, and oral literature. Upon completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall) in 2015, he was awarded two postdoctoral contracts: the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe Fellowship and the Marie Sklodowska Curie Followship by the European Commission.

 

Judith Müller is a research associate at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main and throughout the summer semester a fellow at the Central Library in Zurich. She is the coordinator of the Buber-Rosenzweig-Institute and the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Centre for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics. Müller is currently finalising a book project on European-Hebrew literature before and after the First World War. Other research projects deal with the reception of Hebrew literature among Jews in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and questions of multilingualism in Jewish literature. Müller received her doctorate from the University of Basel and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. From 2018 to 2022, she worked as research and teaching associate for Jewish literature at the Centre for Jewish Studies in Basel. She published various research articles in journals and collected volumes on Hebrew literature and Weltliteratur, the authors David Vogel and Gershon Shofman as well as the representation of Paris in Israeli literature.

 

Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. Her book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021) was a National Jewish Book Awards (USA) finalist. She co-edited a special issue of Feminist German Studies on ‘When Feminism and Antisemitism Collide’ (with Kerry Wallach, 2023) and a special issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies on ‘Murder, Lust, and Laughter, or Shund Theater’ (with Joel Berkowitz and Nick Underwood, 2023). Her ongoing translation of Tea Arciszewska’s 1958 play Miryeml was supported by a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center.

 

Elisa Carandina currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Contemporary Hebrew Literature at INALCO (Institut National des Langes et Civilisations Orientales), Paris. In 2021 whe published the book La cura dell’accidentale: Forme di racconto di sé e dell’altra nella poesia ebraica e nell’arte israeliana contemporanea (Archivio di studi ebraici, Napoli), devoted to a new literary and artistic model that she defines as “horizontal toledot” and that she discusses with respect to contemporary women’s Hebrew poetry and Israeli photography. She has also published numerous articles on contemporary Hebrew literature, mainly from a gender perspective. Her research interests include the theme of sacrifice and its rewritings, life-writing by women, and the female body in different artistic forms.

 

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