2005 Conference Details

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Gender and Generation
Contemporary Women Writers

University of Bath, UK
April 4-6, 2005



An international conference on Contemporary European Women Writers will be held at the University of Bath, UK, on 4-6 April 2005 under the overarching theme and title of 'Gender and Generation'.

There is evidence in the literature of some European countries that the explosion of women's writing in the 1970s and 1980s has stimulated the emergence of new generations of women writers in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is now time to test out this hypothesis and analyse whether it is applicable to other European countries too. The aim of this conference is to explore the legacy of earlier texts by European women and to draw comparisons and contrasts between different generations of writers.

In view of the reluctance of many female authors to be identified as 'women writers', we will also enquire whether contemporary European writers regard their gender as a burden, or as valuable and empowering. Is it a factor of primary importance for them, or does it exert only a limited influence on their writing?

Within the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages
at Bath there are particularly strong research interests in the literatures and cultures of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. However, we welcome contributions on contemporary women writers of any European country, including the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Belarus.

We welcome both nation-specific and comparative approaches to women's writing in Europe in the last 20 years, focusing particularly on contemporary writers and the changes that have occurred during the period in question. Areas of particular interest include:

Legacies, influences, and/or contrasts and conflicts between women writers of different generations
Feminist, non-feminist or post-feminist writing?
Women writers' response to social and political change
Mothers and daughters, mothers and sons
The treatment of certain themes by women writers: time, memory, sexuality, maternity, education and personal development, female friendship, relationships with men, children and family members, women's issues, illness, suffering and death, women and work, women and violence, women and war
The female body, women's psychology and spirituality
Race, ethnicity, immigration and emigration
Women's representations of men and the masculine
The relationship between literature and theory in specific countries
Genre and style in women's writing: autobiography, lyric poetry, prose genres, écriture féminine imagery, mythology

We will be inviting prominent women writers to the conference to discuss their own work and ideas. The well-known Italian writer Francesca Sanvitale has already confirmed her attendance.

We aim to produce a collection (or most probably several) collections of articles on the subject of women's writing in individual European countries and Europe as a whole.

Please send proposed paper titles and abstracts of about 150 words by 30 June 2004 to ceww-conference@bath.ac.uk. Conference committee: Adalgisa Giorgio, Rosalind Marsh, Julia Waters

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Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference

Saturday, March 19, 2005

University of the Arts

Philadelphia, PA


You are invited to submit a proposal for an individual paper or a
complete panel for the 28th Annual Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Slavic
Conference of the AAASS. The conference will be held at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia on March 19, 2005. Panels and
papers are welcome on any appropriately scholarly aspect of Slavic
and East European Studies. Professor Mikhail Sergeev is president of
this year's conference.

Proposals should include the paper's title, a very brief abstract,
and requests (if any) for technical support. Send proposals by
December 10 to and/or follow up by sending them in hard copy to:

Dr. Mary Theis
MASC Executive Secretary
Department of Modern Language Studies
Kutztown University, PO Box 730
Kutztown, PA 19530

Please include both your e-mail and your surface address.

Graduate student participation in the conference is especially
encouraged. The MASC makes an annual juried award of $200 for the
best graduate paper (judged on the written version rather than the
one presented orally at the MASC). The winning paper is then entered
in the national AAASS graduate competition.

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