MERLIT researchers Prof. dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker , Maxime Honinx, Josephine Ofei and Maria Pace Aquilina will be participating in the VAL Symposium: Gender Anxieties? - (Re-)Assessments from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective.
This year's symposium takes place on Friday 28 November 2025 and will be examining, amongst other matters, '...What role have literary and cultural studies played, and do they continue to play, in social, political and cultural debates around gender? How do recent developments impact the study of women's writing, and queer, trans and masculinity studies, and how does literature react to those? To what extent do historical narratives of gender experience inform contemporary gender concepts, and how do these concepts, in turn, shape our (re)interpretation of earlier literary texts? To what extent do dominant gender theories in literary and cultural studies remain rooted in Western or Anglophone academic traditions, and what alternative frameworks might help bridge this gap (e.g. Mwangi 2009; Sullivan 2021)? What are the limits and/or possibilities of translation in understanding gendered, queer and trans experiences and how can we foreground a decolonial praxis in our considerations of these issues (Upadhyay and Bakshi 2020)? In what ways are neoliberalism, literature and representations of gender intimately entangled (Demeyer and Vitse 2024)? ...'
Prof. dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker and Maxime Honinx are on the VAL symposium organisational committee. Josephine Ofei and Maria Pace Aquilina will be presenting papers as part of the parallel panels: Metafiction and Gendered Authorship and Women's Agency and Knowledge in Early Modern Times, respectively.
For more information about the Val Symposium 2025, click here.
To register, please follow the link.
You can download the conference programme here.
