The current edition of our newsletter includes a review of Margaret Atwood’s latest book, details of relevant forthcoming conferences, reports on two recent conferences and much more.

If you would like to be kept updated about the PG CWWN and its events, please join our mailing list.

All decisions have now been communicated and we are pleased to announce that the winner of the PG CWWN/CWWA Postgraduate Bursary is Renata Dalmaso, a PhD student at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. She will present a paper entitled ‘Queering the Gendered Body: Performances of Masculinity and Femininity in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir Fun Home’.

‘Queer Sisterhoods’ in Contemporary Women’s Writing
A half-day symposium at Queen’s University Belfast.
29th February 2012.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Tina O’Toole

Emma Donoghue’s recent work Inseparable: Desire between Women in Literature seeks to trace the portrayal of female desire from medieval times. Passion has been marked by ‘excess, infraction, deviance. From the very beginnings of literature, women who desire other women tend to rampage across the boundaries of the acceptable’. This half-day symposium seeks to investigate how women interact with other women in contemporary literature. To what extent do friendships between women remain transgressive? How have depictions of female passion changed? How is identity mediated by sexuality?

Topics may include but are by no means limited to:
· Literary relationships between women
· Constructions of femininity
· Censorship and publication
· Transgender and identity politics
· Popular culture and queer theory
· Friendship and desire
· Local and national aspects of sexuality

Abstracts should be sent to women@pgcwwn.org by 10th February 2012.

Full CFP

The bursaries are funded jointly by the CWWA and PGCWWN and will be awarded to one postgraduate student and one early career researcher (not in full-time employment). Applicants are required to be a member of the CWWA and are requested to submit the following information by 30th December 2011:

• An extended abstract of the proposed paper (1000 words)
• A personal statement detailing applicant’s relevant experience and research interests and the reasons for conference attendance (500 words)
• An up-to-date C.V.

The competition will be judged by the Executive Committee of the CWWA and the Steering Group of the PGCWWN. The outcome of the competition will be announced by 30th January 2012. The successful candidate for the postgraduate bursaries will be expected to produce a conference report for the PGCWWN website/newsletter.

Applications and/or further enquiries should be submitted via email to Dr Susan Watkins (S.Watkins@leedsmet.ac.uk) and Dr Helen Davies (H.C.Davies@leedsmet.ac.uk).

We will be in touch in due course with details regarding the planned conference proceedings – please do bear with us while we agree on a strategy and appropriate deadlines. Some photographs from the event can be found on this website.

It was a pleasure to meet you all and we hope to see you at the next PG CWWN event!

This issue of our newsletter includes Dr Helen Davies on the trials of being an early career researcher, book reviews of poetry and drama, reports from recent conferences, comment from Dr Susan Watkins, Chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, and much more.

If you would like to be kept updated about the PG CWWN and its events, please join our mailing list.

We look forward to welcoming delegates to the University of Hull on the 8th September for our two day biennial conference. As well as our two keynote speakers, Professor Ann Heilmann and Gwyneth Lewis, the conference will feature 37 papers by postgraduate and early career researchers in contemporary women’s writing.

To find out more about the papers scheduled, read titles and full abstracts, download the conference programme.

Alternatively, click below to read the paper titles.

1A: Mapping Textual Spaces
Rebecca Pohl, University of Manchester: ‘Sexing the Labyrinth: Space and Sexuality in Sarah Waters’ Affinity’
Nissa Parmar, Oxford Brookes University: ‘The Spider and the Web in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry’
James Bailey, University of Sheffield: ‘Life and Death in the Tense Present: Time and Deduction in Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat’’

1B: Theorising Time & Space
Solomon Omatsola Azumurana, University of Lagos: ‘Male-Oriented Psychoanalytic Theories and the Nigerian Feminist Aesthetics: Creating Transgressive Space in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Children of the Eagle and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow’
Lucy Barnett, University of York: ‘Historiographic Metafictions and Regeneration: Rewriting the Scripts of Space, the Feminine, and the Other’
Emilia Borowska, Royal Holloway: ‘Beneath the Paving Stones: Kathy Acker and the Situationists’

2A: The Subject in Time & History
Allison Neal, University of Hull: ‘Venus Rising in the Afterlife: Saartjie Baartman as Historical Commodity’
Rebecca Crowley, Leeds Metropolitan University: ‘Faces in the Water (1961): Bonds between Women as a Reappropriation of Intertexts?’
Ursula Hurley, University of Salford: ‘Finding the Heartwood: Readings from an Experimental Novel’

2B: Gendering Ecological Space
Rachel Sykes, University of Nottingham: ‘‚To surrender the idea of wilderness‛: The Transient Landscape of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’
Sarah Shaw, Northumbria University: ‘Space, Time and Metaphor in ‚Deep Blue‛’ Emma Smith, University of Derby: ‘Awakening Psychological Spaces by Negotiating Desert Places: An Exploration of the Psychogeographical Representations of
Environmental Space in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks’

2C: Traumatic Times & Violent Spaces
Nirmala Iswari, National University of Singapore: ‘Broken Verses: The Gendered National Space’
Cristina Gamberi, University of Bologna (Italy): ‘A Voyage into the Unguessable Country of Marriage: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber’
Veronika Schuchter, University of Innsbruck: ‘‚You cannot imagine how much I long to have a house, a room or two, a cave of my own?‛: Rooms in the Contemporary Works of Jean Rhys’

3A: Domestic Landscapes
Lindsay Reeve, Simon Fraser University (Canada): ‘Strange Fruit and Estranged Bodies: The Politics of Time & Space in Salt Fish Girl’
Emma Young, University of Leicester: ‘Time & Space in the Works of Emma Donoghue’ Lucinda Newns, London Metropolitan University: ‘The Private and the Postcolonial: A
New Reading of Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen’

3B: Bodily Spaces
Fariha Chaudhary, University of Huddersfield: ‘Hiding and Seeking Identity: ‚Female Body‛ and ‚Space‛ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s ‚The Pakistani Bride‛
Emily Blewitt, Cardiff University: ‘‚A look within‛: The Ultrasound Scan in Contemporary Women’s Poetry’
Mair Rees, Cardiff University: ‘The Womb & the Word: The Female Body as Cultural Space in Welsh-Language Fiction by Women’

4A: Poetic and Dramatic Times & Spaces
Sebastian Owen, University of York: ‘Jorie Graham‘s Overlord’
Alex Pryce, University of Oxford: ‘‚Where Is She?‛: Binaries, Anthologies and Northern
Irish Poetry’
Vanessa Dodd, University of Wales, Newport: ‘Time and the Dramatic Narrative’

4B: Spaces of War & Violence
Gohar Karim Khan, University of Warwick: ‘The Hideous Beauty of Bird-Shaped Burns: Transnational Allegory and feminist Rhetoric in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows’
Angela Thurstance, University of Leicester: ‘Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Tragedy’ Alexa Athelstan, Leeds University: ‘Clandestine Desires: Queer Time & Space in Sarah
Waters’ The Night Watch (2006)’

4C: Global Spaces
Jahnavi Misra, Durham University: ‘Cosmopolitanisms and Internationalisms in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows’
Libe Garcia Zarranz, University of Alberta: ‘‚Whose City Is It?‛: Mapping the Intersections of Gender and Race in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For’
Christine Vogt-William, University of Frankfurt: ‘Twins and Space in Black British and American Women’s Fiction’

5A: Regional & Urban Imaginaries
Emily Dickinson, Loughborough University: ‘‚Trash always rises‛: Regionalism and Violence in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina’
Arina Cirstea, University of Warwick: ‘Mapping Space and Time in Michèle Roberts’ London Novels’
Sumana Ray, University of Warwick: ‘‚Imagining the Midlands‛: Literary Expressions of 5
Regional Women’

5B: Historicizing Time & Space
Sarah Walton, University of Hull: ‘Calculating the Distance Between Us and the Women of Ancient Rome’
Claire O’Callaghan, University of Leicester: ‘War Time as Queer Time in Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch’
Leanne Bibby, Leeds Metropolitan University: ‘Narrating Pasts, Creating Futures? Historical Narrative and Female Subjectivity in A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book’
Barbara Henderson, Newcastle University: ‘Children’s Time Travel Fiction’

Catherine McGurren is based at Queen’s University, Belfast and is completing a thesis on the subaltern figure of the Fallen Woman in contemporary Irish fiction. She has extensive experience in running grassroots events with Belfast Feminist Network and is the editor of Postgraduate Voice magazine at Queen’s.

Cecily R. Davey is researching the novels of Hélène Cixous at the University of St. Andrew’s. To PG CWWN she brings her experience of organizing a two day symposium on ‘Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century’, and co-ordinating the St. Andrew’s English Postgraduate Forum and Feminist Society.

Cecily and Catherine officially join the steering group following our forthcoming ‘Time & Space in Contemporary Women’s Writing’ conference. At that time, long serving members Nadine Muller and Theresa Jamieson will stand down.

Commiserations to the other applicants for steering group positions. We hope we can involve you all with our future activities in other ways.

The current edition of our newsletter includes an introduction to Gwyneth Lewis, a keynote speaker at our third biennial conference, ‘Time & Space in Contemporary Women’s Writing’, which will be held at the University of Hull on 8th and 9th September 2011, a series of book reviews, a report on World Book Night, a comment from Dr Susan Watkins, Chair of the CWWA (Contemporary Women’s Writing Association), and much more.

If you would like to be kept updated about the PG CWWN and its events, please join our mailing list.