New Configurations of Contemporary Women’s Writing
Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network 7th Biennial Conference
Monday 9th September 2019, The University of Hull
The last two years have seen a renewed vigour amongst women to testify to their experiences and protest their causes. Shouts of #metoo and #timesup have chimed with quieter revisionings of a female-identifying imaginary. These voices sound out in contemporary women’s writing just as the literature itself offers a language and a form with which to speak of the shifts – a back and forth between politics and women’s writing that is not new, but speaks of an enduring engagement with the current political mood.
New Configurations asks: How does contemporary women’s writing inhabit and convey the texture of our moment? How does it envisage the future? And, how does current formal innovation shape the future of women’s writing? Alongside this the conference seeks to consider how we might rethink the scope of our field, regarding questions of inclusivity and critical methodologies.
The 2019 PG CWWN Conference invites proposals from Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers for 15 minute papers, creative or creative-critical contributions. We also welcome proposals for panels or round-tables involving 3-4 people. We explicitly invite papers on texts by female-identifying, femme, transgender and non-binary authors as well as cis-gendered women writers.
Abstracts (250 words) and biographical notes (150 words) should be sent by 7th June 2019 to pgcwwn2019conference@gmail.com
Confirmed Keynote: Joanna Walsh (Seed, break.up, Vertigo, Hotel, Grow a Pair).
Conference Fee: £30 including lunch, dessert and refreshments
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Gender/Queerness/Reconfiguring binaries/Identity
- Posthuman/Transhuman
- Sexuality/Intimacy/Embodiment/Love
- Maternity/Childlessness/Conjugality/Kinship
- Utopia/Dystopia/Ecological/Post-Apocalyptic
- Place/Migration/Nationalism/Cosmopolitanism
- Disability/Mental Health/Trauma
- Care/Self-Care
- Pain/Disease/Gerontology
- Precarity/Vulnerability/Mortality
- Conflict/War/Genocide
- Protest/Feminism/Activism
- Memoir/Autofiction/Essay/Confessional
- Experimental Writing/Innovation/Genre