Gencas

26 January 2022: CRAM annual lecture: Patricia Owens (Oxford), ‘The history of women's international thought’ (5pm start)
organised by CRAM, co-hosted by GENCAS.

9 February 2022: GENCAS Research ‘Speed-date’/Quick Research Mixer GENCAS warmly invites colleagues from across all the Faculties – and at all academic levels – to come along to a research ‘speed-dating’ session on 9 February 2022 from 2-3.30. This is an opportunity to meet colleagues from other disciplines who work or teach on areas related to gender, sexuality, queer studies, or at the intersection of these and to create new, interdisciplinary connections that might lead to new collaborative projects.

The ‘speed-dating’ element is as follows: colleagues will be put into small breakout rooms and given the opportunity to introduce themselves and their work, before the Zoom bell rings and they meet someone else!

This will be the first of a series of events that mark the relaunch of GENCAS and aim to create new, intra-Faculty understandings and relationships to support work around gender at Swansea.

Everyone welcome! Please contact Dr Sarah Crook with any questions – s.r.e.crook@swansea.ac.uk or Dr Roberta Magnani r.magnani@abertawe.ac.uk.

Click here for Zoom access - meeting ID 919 5684 8897, passcode 873229.

4th May 2022: Research paper, with History Seminar series, Charlie Jeffries (Birkbeck) ‘'The Sex Wars on the American Campus in the late 20th Century'

Wednesday 12 October 2022, 2-3pm: Kevin Guyan joins us on Zoom to discuss his recent book, Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury)

Data has never mattered more. Our lives are increasingly shaped by it and how it is defined, collected and used. But who counts in the collection, analysis and application of data?

This important book is the first to look at queer data – defined as data relating to gender, sex, sexual orientation and trans identity/history. The author shows us how current data practices reflect an incomplete account of LGBTQ lives and helps us understand how data biases are used to delegitimise the everyday experiences of queer people.

Guyan demonstrates why it is important to understand, collect and analyse queer data, the benefits and challenges involved in doing so, and how we might better use queer data in our work. Arming us with the tools for action, this book shows how greater knowledge about queer identities is instrumental in informing decisions about resource allocation, changes to legislation, access to services, representation and visibility.

Executive Committee:

• Dr. Sarah Crook, Director, 

PhD Students:

Name:  Aimee Richards (English)

Title: ‘A Comparison of the Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Elizabeth Carter and Mary Wollstonecraft'

Supervisor: Professor Caroline Franklin

Name: Rose Neal (English)

Title: ‘E.D.E.N Southworth's Hidden Hand in Women's Education’  

Supervisor: Professor Caroline Franklin

Name: Kathy Maddocks (English):

Title: 'The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’  

Supervisor: Professor Caroline Franklin

Name: Kathryn Loveridge (English)

Title: ‘Gendering Christ’s Wounds’

Supervisor:  Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy

Name: Jed Chandler (English):

Title: ‘The Tradition of the Passing Man in Medieval Literature’

Supervisor: Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy

Name: Pam Morgan (English)

Title: ‘Edges and Boundaries in early English Hagiographies’

Supervisor: Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy

Name: Shan Morgain (Academi Hywel Teifi)

Title: ‘Rhiannon in Medieval Welsh Literature’

Supervisor: Professor Christine James

Name: Luz Tato Pazo (English)

Title:: ‘Postfeminism, Beauty Culture and Ugly Betty’

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Gamble

Name: Heidi Yeandle (English)

Title: ‘Angela Carter and Philosophy’

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Gamble

Name: Helen Snaith (English)

Title: ‘Angela Carter and Japan’

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Gamble

M.Phil Students:

Name: Zarinah Hamzah

 Title: 'Fluid Sexuality in the Writing of Jeanette Winterson'  

 Supervisor: Dr Brigid Haines/Dr Sarah Gamble

Name: Jennifer Watson

Title: 'Metaphor, Memory and the Weight of History in the Work of Herta Muller'  

Supervisor: Brigid Haines

As an interdisciplinary body, GENCAS members research across a wide variety of disciplines, from English Literature to Sociology and MFL to Medieval History. The MA in Gender and Culture is heavily informed by staff research, which means students have the opportunity to be taught by leading experts in their specialist fields.

A selection of publications by GENCAS staff is offered below.

• Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages

Authors: Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards

Description: Until recently, the figure of the medieval anchorite and the underlying ideological concepts that framed her day-to-day existence have escaped detailed examination, despite the anchorite’s importance to the study of medieval culture. This collection brings together leading scholars in the field of gender and anchoritic studies in order to examine anchoritic enclosure from a variety of different perspectives. In so doing, Anchorites, Wombs, and Tombs offers illuminating conclusions about how the phenomenon of anchoritism was affected by, and in turn, influenced contemporary notions of gender difference.

• Angela Carter: A Literary Life

Author: Sarah Gamble

Description: Angela Carter's life was an eventful and vagrant one, including travels to Japan, Russia, America and Australia, and early success in the sixties that did not last into the seventies. But by the time of her tragically early death in 1992, Carter had become recognised as one of the most successful and original British literary figures of the twentieth century and she has subsequently become one of the most studied authors in British universities. This book disentangles the cult of Angela Carter as 'the fairy godmother of magical realism' from her own claims to be a materialist and 'demythologiser' by placing her within the social, political and cultural context within which she worked. Drawing on Carter's own autobiographical articles, as well as her fiction, journalism, radio plays and TV programmes, this study examines Carter's engagement with national (particularly English) identity, class, politics and feminism, assessing the relationship between her life, her times and her art.

• The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists and Byronism

Author: Caroline Franklin

Description:The nineteenth century is sometimes seen as a lacuna between two literary periods. In terms of women’s writing, however, the era between the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the 1860s feminist movement produced a coherent body of major works, impelled by an ongoing dialogue between Enlightenment ‘feminism’ and late Romanticism. This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous critics’ segregation of the male Romantic writers from their female peers.

GENCAS has organised, attended and played host to many events pertaining to Gender and Culture in Society since its formation in 2003. Notable among these are:

• Protean Desires Symposium: Queering the Body, Transforming the Text

April 22^nd 2016, Singleton Abbey, University of Swansea

Keynote Speaker: Professor Stephen Guy-Bray (University of British Columbia)
‘The Location of Queerness

We are inviting proposals for 20-minute papers exploring Gender Fluidity and Queer Theory across disciplines and historical periods. We welcome proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers as well as established scholars. Papers on the theme of fluidity of identity – within textual self-performance, or in the transmission of ideas between periods and disciplines, for example – will be especially welcome.

• GENCAS research associate Professor Doctor Anne-Julia Zwierlein of the University of Regensburg visited Swansea University from 19-21 January 2015. ‌ 

A graduate of  the universities of Bonn, Oxford (Exeter College) and Münster (1991-1996), and an expert on Milton she completed her 'Habilitation' in 2007 on Victorian serialised novels. Prof. Zwierlein has been Dean of Research of the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the University of Regensburg since 2013. Professor Zwierlein is an expert on the bildungsroman and also on nineteenth-century sensation fiction and the body. She has published tow monographs, several edited  essay collections and journal articles. Most recently she was guest-editor of a special issue on Victorian Oral Cultures, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik,  63.1 (2015). On Tuesday 20 January,  she delivered a searching and thought-provoking  lecture to GENCAS members and students  on "'The subject escapes me': (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialised Sensation Fiction. Before the lecture, GENCAS sponsored a wine and nibbles reception for Professor Zwierlein. As well as pursuing her research on English Literature and culture, during her visit Dr Zwierlein met with GENCAS staff and students and COAH colleagues from the Politics, German and English Departments in order to discuss setting up a similar research centre at Regensburg, and a possible exchange with the GENCAS MA in Gender, Culture and Society.

• Revisiting The Sadeian Woman Conference, 11 April 2014

This international postgraduate event aimed to discuss the relevance of Angela Carter’s 1979 polemic The Sadeian Woman in today’s society by offering new readings of this text and examining how applicable it is to contemporary discussions of pornography and power.

• The Swansea-Siavonga Scholarship

GENCAS attended the launch of the Swansea-Siavonga Partnership Scholarship scheme on Feb 14th 2013 to support the project. Organised by the charity Discovery, this project awards scholarships to girls in Zambia to keep them in school and benefit their communities. This helps to end the cycle of illiteracy in one generation, as the knowledge the scheme helps them to acquire is passed on to children, bringing better wages and more opportunities to families.

• Jobs for the Girls: Entrepreneurship, Employment and Lateral Thinking - Wednesday January 30, 2013

An event for those feeling concerned, excited, pressured or confused about entering the jobs market upon leaving university, ‘Jobs for the Girls?’ was an employability event organised by GENCAS. Two former students of the College of Arts and Humanities from Veritas Solutions translation company and Stardust Boutique respectively gave a talk on the advantages, pleasures and difficulties of entrepreneurship and self-employment, having both set up their own highly successful businesses upon graduation.

• International Women's Day 2012: Swansea Women: Because They're Worth It!

On International Women's Day 2012, GENCAS hosted a poster exhibition of some of Swansea University's most successful women, from the early days of the university to the present.

• A major international conference in August 2003, which marked the launch of GENCAS. The subject was 'Historical Fictions: Women, History, Authorship', and the event, organised by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, boasted over 180 delegates from 24 countries. Keynote speeches were delivered by acclaimed critic and novelist Stevie Davies, Professor Patricia Duncker (University of East Anglia), Professor Jackie Bratton (Royal Holloway), and writer Jane Traies.
• A launch party for seven books by members of GENCAS on Wednesday 13th October 2004, including wine reception. This celebrated GENCAS' first anniversary and was attended by students, academics and representatives from Swansea Women's Centre. Professor Ann Heilmann remarked after the event that it was "particularly pleasing to see so many of our first intake of MA students present at the event".
  
  
• A trip to a workshop conference in Canada by Dr Heilmann. The purpose of this event, organized by Dr Maria DiCenzo (Wilfrid Laurier), and sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University in association with the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph, was to establish a major international research project on ‘Feminism and Print Culture, 1830-1940’.
  
  
•  July 2004's all-Wales research Symposium at Gregynog. Entitled 'Gender[in/g] the Subject', this allowed researchers from all over Wales to discuss and debate gender studies or topics related to gender from their research.
  
  
• A conference on widowhood entitled 'The Merry Widow: Rethinking Widowhood in History, Culture and Society', which took Place on the 7th-9th July 2007. This examined the position of the widow in various cultures and time periods, and challenged stereotypes and common perceptions of widowhood in the arts, media and other disciplines. Key note speakers were Veena Talwa Oldenburg, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Anneke Mulder-Bakker and the novelist Susie Boyt.
  
  
• A series of workshops on contemporary feminism, entitled 'Riding the Third Wave: Gender, Feminism and the New Millennium'.

GENCAS is a member of the Gender Wales Network (GWN) and in regular contact with other similar research centres both at home and abroad: for example, it has close ties with  Wales Women’s Archive;  Wales Women’s History Network; and Centre for Women's Writing and Literary Culture. The Centre also has links with the research group Women in German Studies (WIGS), of which Professor Brigid Haines is a founder member. 

Overseas links include the US-based Society for the Promotion of Medieval Feminist Scholarship, of which Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy is currently Vice President (and President from 2016-18); and the UK-based Gender and Medieval Studies Group.

Links:

• Orlando: Women’s writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present
• Contemporary Women's Writing Network (CWWN)
• Gender and Medieval Studies Group
• Society for the Promotion of Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)