Silences, récits, scénarios : perspectives transculturelles sur les mères et les filles dans la littérature (Londres, en ligne)
Silences, Stories, Scripts: Transcultural Perspectives on Mothers and Daughters in Literature – Programme
24-25 June 2026
Programme
(All times are British Summer Time [UTC+1])
The conference is organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, at the Institute for Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Day One, Wednesday 24 June 2026
8.30 – 8.40: Welcome and opening remarks
8.40 – 10.10: Panel 1: (Thwarted) Evolution of and Generational Rifts in the Mother–Daughter Relationship 1
- Sushree Routray: Motherlines Across Three Generations: Matrophobia and Matroreform in Indian American Mother Daughter Narratives
- Ana Tsereteli: Unspoken Bonds: The Silence Between Clarissa and Elizabeth in Virginia Woolf’s Novel Mrs. Dalloway
- Nessrine Naccach: “Tears spring from the same depths”: Recreating Individual Experiences to Heal Collective Memory in Le livre des Reines (The Book of queens) by Joumana Haddad
10.10 – 10.20: Short break
10.20 – 11.50: Panel 2: (Thwarted) Evolution of and Generational Rifts in the Mother–Daughter Relationship 2
- Katherine Calvert: “New Women”, Absent Mothers, and Intergenerational Tensions in Weimar-Era Popular Fiction
- Veselina Dzhumbeva: Mothers & Daughters: A Century of Change
- Konstantin Helm: “Silence May Not Love You, But I Do”: Urban Renewal and Filial Belonging in Twilight City (1989)
11.50 – 12.10: Break
12.10 – 13.10: Panel 3: De-idealizing the Mother 1
- Kate Averis: Matters of Life and Death: Ambivalent Kinships in Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena sabe (2007)
- Tara Jittalan: Punitive, Protective, Haunted: Catherine Lim’s Dissenting Mother-Daughter Relationships
13.10 – 13.40: Lunch Break
13.40 – 14.40: Panel 4: De-idealizing the Mother 2
- Cristina Carnemolla: She-Wolves and “Possessed” Women: Criminalizing Southern Motherhood in Post-Unification Italy
- Rebecca Walker: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry”: Shame and the Mother-Daughter Bond in Jane Austen and Elena Ferrante
14.40 – 15.00: Break
15.00 – 16.00: Panel 5: Pre-Modern Mothers and Daughters 1
- Christiane Müller-Lüneschloß: For the Silent Daughters: Letters by Veronica Franco (1580) and Isabella Andreini (1607)
- Lynsey Blandford: Early Modern Mothers and Daughters: Sexual Commodification in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Choise of Valentines
16.00 – 16.10: Short break
16.10 – 17.10: Keynote 1:
Kirsty Bolton: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval Romance
17.10 – 18.10: Panel 6: Pre-Modern Mothers and Daughters 2
- Cara Roberge: Epistemologies of Holiness: Unweaving Female Sanctity and Maternal Knowledge in Early Ecclesiastical Narratives
- Esther Rute: Constructing Illegitimacy: Motherhood Between Civil Law and Halakhic Authority in the Early Modern Sephardic Diaspora
18.10– 18.15: Closing remarks
Day Two, Thursday 25 June 2026
8.30-8.40: Welcome
8.40 – 10.10: Panel 7: Mothers Writing Their Relationship with Their Daughters
- Paula Guimarães: A Belated Staging and Theorising of Motherhood through the Sonnet Sequence: Augusta Webster’s Analysis of Transience in the Mother-Daughter Relationship
- Daria Nepochatova: Mother–Daughter Relations in Literature and in Life in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Pershyi vinok
- Gabriela Koestinger: Vulnerable Subjects: Joan Didion’s Notes to John (2025) and the Ethics of Posthumous Publication
10.10 – 10.30: Break
10.30 – 12.00: Panel 8: Counternarratives to Colonial and Patriarchal Violence 1
- Trần Ngọc Hiếu & Vũ Thị Kiều Chinh: Queer Parenting in Small Talk (Huang Hui-chen, 2016) and Lô tô (Huỳnh Tuấn Anh, 2017)
- Adriana Martins: On Mothers and Daughters and Their Performative Gestures of Postmemory in Conceição Evaristo
- Gillian Li: The Maternal Colony: Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma in Beloved and Everything I Never Told You
12.00 – 12.45: Lunch break
12.45 – 13.45: Panel 9: Counternarratives to Colonial and Patriarchal Violence 2
- Tegan Zimmerman: History’s Daughter: Matria in Julia Alvarez’s In the Name of Salome (2000) and The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024)
- Monika Šavelová: Across Silences and Stories: Transcultural Dynamics of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in a Slovak-Vietnamese Narrative (Kvet Nguyen’s Everything That Connects Us)
13.45-14.05: Break
14.05-15.05: Keynote 2:
Eglė Kačkutė: Listening to the Silence of the Mother Tongue(s)
15.05-15.15: Short break
15.15-16.15: Panel 10: Daughters Writing Their Relationship with Their Mothers 1
- Habib Zanzana: The Anatomy of Incommensurability: Mapping the Maternal Wound in Fawzia Zouari’s Le corps de ma mère
- Veronica Frigeni: Outlaw Mothers, Daughterly Scripts: Writing the New Feminist Family Narrative in Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Dove non mi hai portata (2022)
16.15-16.25: Short break
16.25-17.25: Panel 11: Daughters Writing Their Relationship with Their Mothers 2
- Matilda Nevin: “Undutiful” Daughter Tongues: Linguistic Shift, Loss and Creative Transformation in Autofictional Texts by Jessica Au, Line Papin and Davina Quinlivan
- Anne Rüggemeier: Daughters Writing (and Drawing) Mothers in Relational Life Writing: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) and Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother (2007)
17.25-17.40: Concluding remarks