Women Writers in History

Overview

The underrepresentation of women in cultural historiography has been challenged since the 1970s by a number of feminist responses in the form of supplementary female canons. Women Writers in History takes this task a step further, and investigates historical sources until 1930 to find out whether female authors were read in the past. Evidence of readership, translations and commentary is contained in a database, which serves as a collaborative research tool for the working group. Its latest incarnation is a virtual research environment (VRE) named New approaches to European Women’s Writing (NEWW). The group also runs a BRILL book series and pursues methods of incorporating this new knowledge at the different levels of education through regional groups. Further concerns consist in finding openings for outreach and for funded, future research projects.

Latest News

• Dear colleagues, NEWW-DARIAH WG and CEEPUS NETWORK WWIH call for webinars CONNECTING WOMEN WRITERS WITH DIGITAL TOOLS has been successfully answered. We are pleased to announce the three webinars for the next three months:

* Thursday, April 27th, 15h-16h CEST
Lucreția Pascariu, Alexandra Olteanu, Tiberiu Bădeliță (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania)

Mapping women’s jobs and social status in the Romanian ELTeC collection

The researchers will explore level 2 of the Romanian ELTeC collection, part of the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), which currently has 100 Romanian novels published between 1840 and 1920. They will analyse the distribution of women’s occupations vs. social status in the Romanian ELTeC collection. They will present the problems encountered (those related to the lack of instruments for the Romanian language); the extractions of NE (females’ name)  and possible lists of nouns, adjectives, and verbs that show the women’s jobs and social status; their data analysis.

* Thursday, May 25th, 15h-16h CEST
Alba Comino (Institute of Contemporary History, Lisbon, Portugal)

Latin American Women Travel Logs in the 20th Century: some digital approaches to Clorinda Matto de Turner

The interdisciplinary project REWIND develops an original approach to analyse the European Cultural Heritage (ECH) as a construction of collective memories using travel books written by Latin American women who visited Europe before the Second World War. The researcher will use the book Viaje de Recreo (1909) by  the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909) as a case-study. She will applies XML-TEI encoding to tag all the references about monuments, museums, historical places, artworks, etc., that Matto de Turner visited during her travel around Europe in 1908. After geo-semantic annotation, she will map this data to visualize her itinerary and  will connect the information about the ECH using LOD.

* Thursday, June 22nd, 15h-16h CEST
Ivana Hadjievska (State Archives of North Macedonia, Macedonia)

History of women and transgression of methodological nationalism: the experience from the research project “Invisible archives”

The researcher will present Invisible archives, a project dedicated to systematization, historical analysis and digital preserving and presentation of women’s participation in periodicals from the Macedonian past. The researcher will focus on educational web-outlet (https://nevidliviarhivi.mk/ ) and  the digitization of the magazine Makedonka – Organ of Women’s Antifascist Front of Macedonia.

Interested in participating? Please email Katja Mihurko (katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si) or Amelia Sanz (amsanz@ucm.es) for the link details.
Interested in submitting a new webinar? Please contact the organisers (we are preparing the 2024 agenda!): Katja Mihurko (University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia): katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si
Amelia Sanz (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain): amsanz@ucm.es

• New volume of the Brill series Women Writers in History has been published: an Open Access publication Women Writing Intimate Spaces: The Long Nineteenth Century at the Fringes of Europe (eds Birgitta Lindh Estelle, Carmen Beatrice Duțu and Viola Parente-Čapková).
• The CEEPUS Women Writers in History Network and the Women Writers Route Association held their week-long International Summer School ‘Intimacy in women’s writing and reading’ from 22 to 27 August 2022 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
• The Women Writers Route was certified in June 2022 and becomes the 48^th Cultural Route of the Council of Europe. It is the first of these tourism routes that demonstrate the shared and living cultural heritage of the different countries of Europe to be based in Slovenia and to focus specifically on women.
• A new portion of Isabelle de Charrière’s digitised correspondence has been launched; c. 900 of these letters are now available A symposium was held on November 23, 2021 to mark the occasion. Video recordings are available online.

Board

• Prof. Alicia Montoya – Chair, Radboud University database hosting and development, Coordinator of WWiH
• Prof. Amelia Sanz – Chair, Collaboration between research and teaching
• Dr. Isabel Lousada – Contacts between participating countries
• Prof. Katja Mihurko Poniž – Collaboration with the Central European Exchange Program for University Studies Network (CEEPUS)
• Prof. Marie Nedregotten Sørbø – International collaborative research projects
• Prof. Marie-Louise Coolahan – Collaboration with DARIAH WGs and other women’s writing projects
• Dr. Suzan van Dijk – Collaboration with Wikipedia and other forms of citizen science
• Prof. Viola Parente-Čapková – Chair, Communication

Past Meetings and Workshops

DARIAH Annual Event 2022: Athens, June 2022

Women Writers in History Research panel

DARIAH Annual Event 2019: Warsaw, May 2019

Women Writers in History Working Group Programme
Internal Meeting Minutes

Membership

Colleagues interested in joining the Women Writers in History working group can contact Chair Alicia Montoya (contact details below). The full list the working group members, updated in July 2022, is available in a PDF.

Links

Regional teaching and research networks

Central and South-Eastern Europe

CEEPUS network Women Writers in History CIII-SI-1515-02-2122

The Netherlands and Belgium

Huizinga Research Network Women’s Writing in History

Affiliated research projects

About the reception of women’s writing

• The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700 (RECIRC)
• Texts on the move: Reception of women’s writing in Finland and Russia 1840–2020

About reception

• Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe, 1665-1830 (MEDIATE)

Digital editions of the letters of women writers

• A.L.G. Bosboom-Toussaint’s letters
• La Correspondance d’Isabelle de Charrière / De briefwisseling van Belle van Zuylen
• Elektronska zbirka Pisma / Letters

Outreach

• Women Writers Route, a Council of Europe Cultural Route