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Project news: COST Action IS0901



The NEWW project has been instrumental in preparing a European-wide COST Action entitled :

Women Writers in History:
Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture.

The first meeting of the Management Committee, with members representing the fifteen European countries then involved, has been held in Brussels on 1 and 2 October 2009. This collaborative Action will last four years and will be financed by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). This is an excellent opportunity for the NEWW network, which seeks to renew literary historiography from a gender and a transnational perspective. The COST Action will allow the extension of the existing network and the preparation of a large scale research project in which European (and other) scholars (present and future NEWW members) will further collaborate – in the real and virtual world.

The aim of this COST Action of course corresponds to the NEWW objectives. It is: to lay the groundwork for a new history of European women’s participation in the literary field of the centuries before 1900. What was these women’s influence? Which active roles did they play as authors and readers in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. including their roles as transcribers, translators, mediators and educators? What happened to them when they fell into the hands of 19th-century canonizers? How is their disappearance from literary history to be explained?

The COST Action will further develop the database WomenWriters into a broad Research Infrastructure, allowing researchers to stock and manipulate data concerning the contemporary reception of women’s writing, and to apply different research models to these data.

Particular attention will be paid to women’s participation in transnational cultural dynamics and to the overlooked role of “smaller”, less internationally known literatures within the larger European context. This interdisciplinary research will lead to a new way of looking at Europe’s literary past – male and female –, which also implies a different perspective on Europe’s present.

  • Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary of this Action, based at Huygens Institute The Hague (NL):
  • Working Group leaders:
  • Universities currently represented in the Action’s Management Committee:
    • Universiteit Gent, Université de Liège (Belgium),
    • University of Southern Denmark,
    • University of Turku (Finland),
    • Université Nancy 2 (France),
    • Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Trier (Germany),
    • National University of Ireland Galway,
    • Bar Ilan University (Israël),
    • University of Utrecht, University of Groningen (Netherlands),
    • Volda University College, University of Oslo (Norway),
    • Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade Nuova de Lisboa (Portugal),
    • University of Bucarest, University of Cluj (Romania),
    • University of Belgrade (Serbia),
    • University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia),
    • Universidad Complutense Madrid, University of Valencia (Spain),
    • University of Bern, Université de Genève, Université de Lausanne (Switzerland),
    • University of Southampton, Oxford Brookes University (United Kingdom).

Colleagues researchers in other countries, not mentioned above, willing to collaborate, can take contact with Chair, Vice-Chair or Secretary mentioned above.

The first activity of the Action will be :
a Workshop, organized together with the NEWW network and Huizinga Institute Amsterdam, about:

Quantitative methods in cultural history.


SvD, October 2009



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