CLIC is proud to announce that Dr. Christina Bezari has been awarded an ERC starting grant for her project MEDWON, which will start at CLIC in January. The full title of the project is 'Mediterranean Shores and Women’s Networks: Translation, Print Culture and Decolonial Thought in Southern Europe and the Maghreb (1912–1995)'.
Abstract
Recent studies have theorized the Mediterranean as a privileged site for the study of geopolitical encounters and literary networks in the twentieth century. Despite these advances, Southern Europe and the Maghreb have often been studied in isolation and have occupied a “peripheral” position with regard to the more “dominant” literary centers. This project breaks new ground by challenging traditional Eurocentric narratives and providing a comparative study of women’s literary and journalistic production across Southern Europe and the Maghreb. Long regarded as “marginal actors” in the public sphere, women’s participation in the press and in networks of intellectual exchange has been obscured due to a long history of censorship, colonial domination and dictatorial rule on both sides of the Mediterranean. A key objective of this project is to shed light on Southern European and Maghrebi women’s participation in transnational anti-colonial and anti-fascist networks by analyzing their contributions as writers, journalists and translators. Buried for a long time in magazines, archives and repositories, these contributions have been neglected by modern scholarship and their role in the public debate has been cast into oblivion. In response to this oversight, the members of this project will conduct research in public libraries, private archives and periodical collections across Southern Europe and the Maghreb in order to create the first trans-Mediterranean corpus of female-authored texts in multiple languages (Greek, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese). This research will be complemented by digital mapping techniques, leading to the creation of an open-access digital repository. This platform will allow users to search, access and visualize previously scattered or undigitized material, thereby highlighting women’s crucial role in the literary and political networks of the twentieth-century Mediterranean.
