Invitation to a seminar on Women’s History, Women’s Writing, and Women’s Archives
The seminar will be conducted by Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik will be a guest researcher at the Department of Gender Studies in the week of May 2-6, 2016. Dr. Mrozik writes among other things about the place of prominent communist women such as Wanda Wasilewska in Polish national history, memory, and public discourse before and after 1989. Some of her recent publications include “'Women’s Archives as Literary Larders: Identity Politics in Women’s (Auto)biographies,” in: Polish Literature in Transformation, eds. U. Phillips, K. A. Grimstad, and K. Van Heuckelom (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013), 139-154; and “Komunistki i duch transgresji. ‘Przypadek’ Wandy Wasilewskiej” [Communist Women and the Spirit of Transgression. The "Case" of Wanda Wasilewska], Teksty Drugie no. 3 (2013): 11-35.
Dr. Mrozik is also a member of a research team working on Archiwum Kobiet: Piszące / Archives of Women: Writing, a project at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The project’s aim is to create a database and launch a digital archive of unpublished manuscripts written by women who lived in the territories of historic Poland from the sixteenth century to the present. The database will include manuscripts tracked down on the basis of research in various archives in contemporary Poland and other European countries, with a particular emphasis on the areas associated with Polish culture through their status as its former territories (parts of Lithuania, the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia).
In the seminar on May 3, Dr. Mrozik will discuss the theory and methods informing the “Archives of Women: Writing” project and present some of the project’s initial results. Anna Borgos and Dorottya Redai will briefly present the Lesbian Herstory Archives Hungary. We hope there will be a discussion of other women’s archives in the region and in other parts of the world as well, and also that participants will discuss the role of women’s archives in their own work.
Gender Studies and History faculty and MA and PhD students are welcome to participate.
If you are interested in participating in the seminar, please contact Francisca de Haan (dehaanf@ceu.edu). We appreciate it if you send a short description of your own MA or PhD project and/or of the archive you would briefly like to present. Deadline April 29.