Welcome to the homepage of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. We promote and facilitate national and international research on contemporary writing by women in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. CCWW activities and events focus predominantly on a rich and fascinating corpus of post-1968 authors and texts, but a wider understanding of ‘contemporary’ is also welcomed.

The Centre was launched officially on 16 October 2009 with a reading by three authors. Click on the link for more info and to watch a recording of the event: Writing Childhood - Ana Luísa Amaral, Anna Mitgutsch, Nicoletta Vallorani

The objectives of the CCWW:

- We act as an umbrella organisation for scholars interested in women’s writing in each of the Centre’s language areas

- We stimulate and host networking opportunities

- We foster cross-cultural collaboration amongst scholars in the field of contemporary women’s writing

- We provide a variety of on-line research resources

- We organise both single language and cross-cultural events (conferences, study days, seminars, book launches, readings, workshops, reading groups, round-tables)

- We generate and carry out or facilitate research projects, especially comparative and cross-cultural collaborations

If you would like to find our more about us and/or to be added to the CCWW mailing list, please contact gill.rye@sas.ac.uk

Research Profiles

Dr Andrew Asibong
Senior Lecturer in French Studies Co-Director, Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC www.bbk.ac.uk/brakc/), Birkbeck, University of London

Andrew Asibong's interests lie in recent French literature (particularly the writings of Marie NDiaye) and international cinema (particularly fantastical or non-realist representations and reconfigurations of the family, the couple or the group). He is the author of François Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008) and co-editor (with Shirley Jordan) of Marie NDiaye: L'Étrangeté à l'Œuvre (Septentrion, 2009). He is currently working on Blankness and Recognition,a monograph on Marie NDiaye, for Liverpool University Press.

Professor Elizabeth Boa
FBA, Emeritus Professor of German, University of Nottingham

Besides feminist readings of male authors in the German canon from the 18th to the 20th century, Elizabeth Boa has published widely on women writers from the 1920s to the present. She was co-editor with Janet Wharton of Women and the Wende (German Monitor 31, 1994), which explored literary reflections on and social effects of unification on east German women. She also co-edited with Heike Bartel two volumes of essays on contemporary women authors: Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words (German Monitor 56, 2003) and Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck (German Monitor 64, 2006).

Dr Maria-José Blanco
Lecturer in Spanish, IGRS

Dr Maria-José Blanco’s research interests lie in Contemporary Spanish writers with a special focus on Women Writers and Life-Writing. Her PhD thesis (UCL) focuses on the use of life-writing and writing as therapy in the work of Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000) her Cuadernos de todo and her 1990s novels. Maria-José edited a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on the theme of diaries written by women in the luso-hispanic world. She organised a conference in 2007 on the theme of Diaries and is organising a conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Carmen Martín Gaite’s death in December 2010. At the IGRS she convenes the Contemporary Women’s Writing in Spanish seminar and the Spanish Reading Group. Maria-José teaches XXth century Spanish Literature at King’s College London.

Dr. Amaleena Damlé
Junior Research Fellow in French, Churchill College, University of Cambridge

Amaleena Damlé’s research interests lie in intersections between twentieth-century and contemporary theory and literature, with a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her doctoral thesis examined articulations of female corporeality and transformation in contemporary women’s writing in French, within the context of a dialogue between Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of nomadism and becoming and recent (post)feminist and queer formulations of corporeality. She is currently working on a project that considers the notion of the posthuman in relation to representations of sexuality and desire in contemporary literature in French. She has written articles on Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, and Marie Darrieussecq, and is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).



Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo
PhD-candidate
Queen Mary University of London

Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo completed her BA (Hons.) in English Language and Literature at the University of Alicante, Spain. She did her MA degree in Women’s Studies at the University of York. Currently, she is completing her PhD thesis on the works of Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal.
Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish literature, with a particular interest in Catalan women writers, feminist theories and feminine poetics. Together with Dr. Maria José Blanco, she is responsible for content on Catalan pages of the CCWW website.

Dr Adalgisa Giorgio
Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, University of Bath

Adalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bath, where she is also Chair of the Equalities and Diversity Network and a coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Research Network. Her main areas of research are Italian contemporary women's writing and Neapolitan narrative. Recent publications include the edited volumes Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Contemporary European Narrative by Women (2002), (with Anna Cento Bull) Speaking Out and Silencing. Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s (2006), and (with Julia Waters) Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy (2007). She is currently working on a monograph on Neapolitan writing.

Anna Klobucka
Professor of Portuguese and Affiliate Professor of Women’s Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Anna Klobucka is the author of O Formato Mulher: A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2009) and The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), published in Portuguese as Mariana Alcoforado: Formação de um Mito Cultural (Lisboa: IN-CM, 2006). She has also co-edited After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994 (with Helena Kaufman; Bucknell, 1997) and Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (with Mark Sabine; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Her current research focuses primarily on representations of gender and sexuality in Portuguese literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Alexandra Kurmann is a PhD-candidate in the Departments of French and German, University of Melbourne, Australia. She completed a BA in French at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, before commencing a Masters in Comparative Literature at The University of Kent at Canterbury. Her doctoral study began on a part-time basis at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies. She is now a funded doctoral candidate and tutor of French language at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research employs Heideggerian and Lacanian theories on death, to analyze and compare the degree of ontological engagement in the works of two exiled women writers. One of these is the Vietnamese-French author Linda Lê, whose work was heavily influenced by that of the Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. The working title of Alexandra’s thesis is: Dying in Exile: An Ontological Analysis of Exiled Women’s Writing.

Professor Carol Lazzaro-Weis
Professor of French and Italian, University of Columbia Missouri.

Carol Lazzaro-Weis's teaching and research interests include the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French novel, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature, contemporary Italian and French women writers, genre, and feminist literary theory. Her research has been supported by grants from the ACLS, NEH, the Fulbright Association and the Bogliasco Foundation. In addition to numerous articles on French and Italian writers she has published the following books: Confused Epiphanies: L’abbe Prevost and the Romance Tradition (1991) From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writings (1969-1992) (1993); La Signorina and Other Stories, a translation with Martha King and a critical introduction to a collection of short stories by Italian women writer Anna Banti and the Italian edition of the collection, both published by the MLA Texts and Translations series (2001). Her critical edition of Voyages dans la Louisiane et le Missouri will be published by the Heritage Series for Francophone Literatures of North America  (Centenary College Press) in the Fall of 2010. She is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on women’s historical novels in Italy, Francophone Canada and the Caribbean. Professor Lazzaro-Weis is the President of the American Association of Italian Studies, the largest association of university professors of Italian in North America and serves on several editorial boards. She is an affiliate of Women’s and Gender Studies, Canadian Studies Program and the Black Studies Program at the University of Missouri.

Professor Abigail Lee Six
Professor of Hispanic Studies, Royal Holloway

Abigail Lee Six's research area is Spanish prose narrative from 1868 to the present day. While she has recently published a monograph on Adelaida García her current research focuses on Gothic fiction since the 19th century.

Eliana Maestri
Lettrice in Italian, Oxford University;
Phd-candidate, Department of Italian, University of Bath

Eliana is finishing her PhD at the University of Bath on contemporary autobiographical narratives written by women in English and their Italian and French versions. She is currently part-time Lector in Italian at the University of Oxford and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England in Translation Studies. Previously, she was a Lector in Italian at the University of Bath and a tutor in Italian at the University of Bristol, Language Centre. She has also tutored translation and interpreting for the MA in Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bath and lectured on ‘Giovani Cannibali’ (contemporary young Italian writers). Eliana has published a number of chapters in books with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Troubador and Norwich papers on the autobiographies of J. Winterson and A.S. Byatt and their Italian and French versions.

Eduarda Mota
Camões Fellow in Portuguese, IGRS

Eduarda Mota holds the position of Camões Fellow. At the IGRS since November 2007, her main role is to promote Lusophone-related cultural activities. She teaches Portuguese as a foreign language at King's College London and for Portuguese citizenship purposes. Her MRes thesis at  the University of Coimbra was a comparative study of two of the most prominent Modernist authors in Portuguese - the Brazilian Mário de Andrade and the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa/Bernardo Soares - focusing on the ways in which both authors dealt with the city as a central theme in their works. Her current research interests lie in 20th-century Portuguese literature and in the Portuguese literary canon as it has been perceived and used by government decision-makers in conceiving the official programmes of Portuguese at pre-higher education level.

Professor Pilar Nieva de la Paz
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, Spain

Research Scientist at the Center for Human and Social Sciences (Spanish National Research Council), Network Cordinator (Red Transversal de Estudios de Género en Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Jurídicas. GENET/ Mainstreaming Gender Studies Network in Human, Social and Legal Sciences; http://genet.csic.es) and Director of the Master-Ph.D. Official Program on Gender Equality Studies in Human, Social and Legal Siences (Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo/CSIC). Since 2007, she is Vice-chairwoman of the Institute of Language, Literature and Antropology (CSIC) and Member of the CSIC’s Women and Science Commission. Author of more than fifty essays on Gender Contemporary Literary Studies, in the last five years she has published titles as Roles de género y cambio social en la Literatura Española del siglo XX (Ámsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2009); Mujer, Literatura y Esfera Pública: España 1900-1940 (Philadelphia, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2008; co-edited with Sarah Wright, Catherine Davies and Francisca Vilches-de Frutos), Narradoras españolas en la Transición política (Madrid, Fundamentos, 2004), and some articles on Contemporary Spanish Women Writing and Feminine Identity in the Spanish Contemporary Literary Cannon. She is Editor of Annals of Contemporary Spanish Literature (ISI review: U. of Temple, Philadelphia).

Dr Cláudia Pazos Alonso
Lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, UK

Cláudia Pazos Alonso's research centres on women writers, genre and gender, canon-formation, personal and national identities. She is the author of Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca (1997) and co-author (with Hilary Owen) of a forthcoming study on 20th-Century Portuguese women's writing. She is co-editor with Claire Williams of Closer to the Wild Heart. Essays on Clarice Lispector (2002) and with T. F. Earle and Stephen Parkinson of the Companion to Portuguese Literature (2009). She has organized or co-organized several conferences to increase opportunities to reflect on the Lusophone world from a gendered perspective.

Professor Hilary Owen
Professor of Portuguese and Luso-African Studies, University of Manchester

Hilary Owen is the author of Mother Africa, Father Marx. Women’s Writing of Mozambique 1948-2002 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007) and of Portuguese Women’s Writing, 1972-1986. Reincarnations of a Revolution (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). She is co-editor with Phillip Rothwell of Sexual/Textual Empires. Gender and Marginality in Lusophone Africa Literature (Bristol: University of Bristol - HiPLA, 2004). She has published widely on women’s writing in Portuguese and is particularly interested in the interface between feminist criticism and postcolonial theory in Lusophone contexts, and in questions of empire in Portuguese cinema.

Dr Xon de Ros
Lecturer in Moden Spanish Literature, University of Oxford

Dr Xon de Ros's areas of research are Spanish modernism, with a particular interest in the interrelations between literature and the visual arts, and cinema. Recent publications include Primitivismo y Modernismo: El Legado de María Blanchard (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), Words in Action,. Co-edited with F. Bonaddio. Special Issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Vol lxxxiii (January 2006), Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture (Oxford: Legenda, 2003, co-edited with Federico Bonaddio), and the forthcoming Companion of  Spanish Women’s Studies (Boydell & Brewer, co-edited with Geraldine  Coates). She is a member of the advisory board of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS).

Dr Gill Rye
Director of Centre
Reader in French, IGRS

Prof. Gill Rye 's research interests and publications centre on contemporary French literature, especially women's writing, feminist theory, gender, mothering, mourning and trauma. She convenes the Contemporary Women's Writing in French seminar  and is Director of the Centre for the study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute. Her main publications are Narratives of Mothering (2009), Reading for Change (2001) and Women's Writing in Contemporary France (2003, co-edited with Michael Worton), plus edited special issues of Dalhousie French Studies (2004), L'Esprit Créateur and, with Carrie Tarr, Nottingham French Studies(2006). 

Dr Anne Simon
Chargée de recherche au CNRS, CRAL/EHESS (Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) Paris, France

A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and with a doctoral thesis on Proust (Sorbonne), Anne Simon is now a researcher at the CNRS and the Director of the Research Programme Animalittérature. Her main areas of research are the representation of the body and the theme of animality in contemporary French and Francophone Narrative, with a special focus on women writers. From 2005 to 2009 she was a member of the Executive Committee of the Research Program "Writing with(out) Veil: Women, Maghreb, and Writing". Her main publications are Proust ou le réel retrouvé (PUF : 2000 ; new edition Champion : 2010) and À leur corps défendant : les femmes à l’épreuve du nouvel ordre moral (with Christine Détrez ; Seuil : 2006). She has co-edited various collective publications, including Nomadismes des romancières contemporaines de langue française (with Audrey Lasserre ; PENS : 2008), and online publications, Projections : des organes hors du corps (2008),  Le Discours des organes (2006) and Voyages intérieurs (2005). In 2011, with Anne Mairesse, she will organise the 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, « Humain-Animal », and co-edit « Face aux bêtes », a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur.

Catherine Smale
Phd-candidate, Department of German, Trinity Hall, University fo Cambridge

Catherine Smale completed a BA in German and French, followed by an MPhil in European Literature and Culture, at the University of Cambridge, where she is now writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Webber. Her current research focuses on ghosts and haunting in post-1989 German fiction. Focusing in particular on texts by Irina Liebmann and Christa Wolf, it explores the ways in which writers creatively adapt features of the Romantic ghost story – as displayed paradigmatically in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann – in their literary engagement with the legacy of German division and reunification. Catherine has published articles on Wolf and Liebmann, as well as on Ruth Klüger’s Holocaust autobiography and the First World War poet Frida Bettingen. She has supervised several undergraduate courses, including twentieth-century literature, medieval and early-modern literature and a general introduction to German literature and culture.
Together with Jeanine Tuschling, Catherin is responsible for content on the German pages of the CCWW website.

Jeanine Tuschling
Phd-candidate, Department of German, University of Warwick
Email: j.tuschling@warwick.ac.uk
Webpage: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/csde/gsp/eportfolio/directory/pg/gsrhab/

Jeanine Tuschling is a third year doctoral candidate the University of Warwick's German Department. She has studied in Bremen, Paris and Frankfurt before coming to Warwick to do her doctoral studies. She holds the degree of Magistra Artium in German Studies and Cultural Studies from the University of Bremen (Germany) and is currently working on her dissertation with the title: Reflexions upon Authorship in Elfriede Jelinek’s Series of the Deadly Sins. She has published on authorship and on Elfriede Jelinek.
Her general research interests are: Theory and social history of literary authorship; Contemporary women’s writing, especially since the 1990s; Authors and literature on the internet; Literature and Media: Hypertext theory, digitalisation and media shifts.
Together with Catherin Smale, Jeanine is responsible for content on the German pages of the CCWW website.

Dr Godela Weiss-Sussex
Senior Lecturer in German, IGRS

Dr Godela Weiss-Sussex's main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the following areas: the representation of the city in literature and the visual arts; the relationship between literary text, contemporary aesthetic theory and the visual arts; the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile. Her current research project is a study of German-speaking Jewish women writers 1900-1938. Her publications include: 'Not an Essence but a Positioning': German-Jewish Women Writers (1900-1938) (ed. with Andrea Hammel, 2009); London German Studies XII: 'The Racehorse of Genius'. Literary and Cultural Comparisons (ed. with Martin Liebscher and Ben Schofield, 2009);  ‘Verwisch’ die Spuren!’. Bertolt Brecht’s Work and Legacy – A Reassessment (ed., with Robert Gillett: 2008); Berlin. Kultur und Metropole in den Zwanziger und seit den Neunziger Jahren (ed., with Ulrike Zitzlsperger: 2007); Urban Mindscapes of Europe (ed. with Franco Bianchini: 2006);  Georg Hermann. Deutsch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und Journalist, 1871-1943 (ed. 2004);  and Metropolitan Chronicles. Georg Hermann's Berlin Novels 1897 to 1912 (2000).