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 1945 to find out whether and how female authors were read in the past. Evidence of readership, translations and commentary is being harvested and made searchable in a database, which serves as a collaborative research tool for the working group. In a previous iteration of this work, the group produced a virtual research environment (VRE) named New approaches to European Women’s Writing (NEWW), developed between 2014 and 2023 under the direction of Suzan van Dijk (Huygens Instotute, The Netherlands). A new database, named SHEWROTE (Studying Historical Early Women’s Reception: Oeuvres, Texts, Engagements) is currently under construction at Radboud University (The Netherlands). 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. In addition, the group also presents work in progress in webinars. The recordings of previous webinars are available on the Youtube channel Women Writers in History. Further activities consist in finding openings for outreach and for funded, future research projects.

Latest News

• The 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 webinars for the next five months:

Connecting Women Writers With Digital Tools: 2024 AGENDA

* Friday 26th January, 15h-16h CET

Darko Ilin and Ivana Zajc. Research Centre for Humanities, University of Nova Gorica Fakulteta za humanistiko / School of Humanities (Slovenia)
Presenting Pisma. Electronic Collection of Letters.

* Thursday, 22nd February, 15h-16h CET

Carmen Dutu. Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Cultural Studies Dept. Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Bucharest (Romania)
Mapping literary feminism with digital tools. A Romanian perspective from the “periphery” of Europe

* Thursday, 21st March, 15h-16h CET

Lisa Teichman. McGill University (Canada)
Visualizing German women writers’ translations in geographic space

* Thursday, 4th April, 15h-16h CEST

Carolina Rossi, University of Pisa (Italy), Mara Travella, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
“Before Ferrante”. Mapping translations of Italian women writers: How to do it with digital tools?

* Thursday, 23rd May, 15h-16h CEST

Laura Camino, University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
“Medieval Socioliterary Networks: Towards a Comparative Reconstruction of Women’s Cultural and Political Agency in Twelfth- and Thirteenth- Century Europe?”

* Thursday, 21st June (to be confirmed)

Network of European Women Writers. DARIAH Working Group,
“Advances in the new WWIH database: SHEWROTE”

Interested in participating and/or submitting a new webinar? Please email Katja Mihurko (University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia (katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si) or Amelia Sanz (amsanz@ucm.es) (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain).

Publications

The new volume of the Brill series Women Writers in History has been published in Open Access: Women Writing Intimate Spaces: The Long Nineteenth Century at the Fringes of Europe (eds Birgitta Lindh Estelle, Carmen Beatrice Duțu and Viola Parente-Čapková).

Board

• Prof. Alicia C. 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 – 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
• Dr. Jasmine Westerlund – Collaboration with literary cartography projects

Past Meetings and Workshops

WG Board Meeting and datasprint in Ljubljana, January 2024
WG Board Meeting in Nijmegen, December 2022
DARIAH Annual Event 2022: Athens, June 2022. Research panel.
DARIAH Annual Event Warsaw, May 2019: Women Writers in History Working Group Programme and Internal Meeting Minutes.
DARIAH Annual Event Paris 2018: Poster presentation.

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 is available in a PDF. The list will be updated in May 2024.

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

• 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
• 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