About EAAS Women's Network
Purpose and Vision
The mission of the EAAS Women’s Network is to facilitate contact among EAAS members interested in subjects and issues dealing with women and gender. It seeks to enhance cooperation among European Americanists by establishing a network of scholars with common research interests. It also encourages collaboration on projects, and works towards organizing parallel lectures, workshops, panel discussions, roundtables, performances, exhibits, and keynote addresses at EAAS meetings, with the end goal of increasing the visibility of women and women’s and gender issues.
For any inquiries and proposals please
EAAS Women's network
History
The History of the Women's Network
For several years the Women’s Caucus met at EAAS events and, each time, a new crowd of people gathered, discussed—sometimes heatedly—issues related to women’s and gender studies, the political and economic situation of women’s and gender studies in the various EAAS member states, and how the Women’s Caucus could work. At most meetings, we easily agreed that networking and the mutual exchange of ideas would be a wonderful undertaking. However, we also disappointedly agreed that hardly anyone could spare the time to start either a members’ list or even a separate website. While the meetings were always full of enthusiasm and new ideas, the aftermaths of such gatherings proved disillusioning because every-day academic life made it difficult to maintain connections.
I recall our first official “meeting” (shoptalk) in Cyprus in 2006 with a pretty large number of people engaging in discussion, but I also recall another meeting in Dublin in 2010, where we were a last-minute addendum to the program, and the only room left was what one participant called a broom closet. But perhaps because of the narrowness of the room and the ensuing closeness we felt then, first stirrings emerged, and we at last started a list and received a promise from the EAAS webmaster to post anything we sent him. In Dublin, Justine Tally from the University of La Laguna in Spain and I were elected the first Steering Committee members, and we managed to contact the organizers of the 2012 Izmir conference (Meldan Tanrisal and Tanfer Emin Tunc) for a preferred slot on Monday morning. The Izmir meeting proved to be a turning point.
In Izmir, a relatively large number of people from Turkey and elsewhere gathered, among them Meldan Tanrisal, then Vice President of EAAS, and Tanfer Emin Tunc, Vice President of the American Studies Association of Turkey. Justine and I were happy to welcome them as members of an enlarged Steering Committee, and together we set up a new list on the EAAS website and invited/sponsored Lisa Hayes, who performed a one-woman show—“Finding the Light”—on behalf of the Women’s Caucus at the 2014 Hague conference. This conference made it clear to us that we needed to be in touch more than just biennially, so we reorganized the Steering Committee to include four members. In addition to Tanfer, we gained the new, vigorous, and enthusiastic voices of Annessa Ann Babic from New York, Ingrid Gessner from Germany, and Rubén Cenamor from Spain. It is because of their hard work that the Women’s Caucus, renamed the Women’s Network, was able to hold its first symposium in 2015 in Lublin, Poland on “The State of the Nation: American Women in the Twenty-First Century.” The Steering Committee hopes to host this platform for the discussion of women’s and gender issues biennially, in different locations throughout Europe, to alternate with the EAAS Conference.
Carmen Birkle
Professor and Chair of American Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg
EAAS women's network
Members
Steering Committee
Nina De Bettin Padolin is an assistant professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, Austria. Her current research examines representations of aging, disability, gender, and care in Indigenous North American literature and performance from the 19th century to the contemporary era. Bringing together literary and cultural analysis with approaches from Gender Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Disability Studies, and Critical Aging Studies, she investigates how colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, and gendered expectations shape dominant understandings of bodies, dependency, care, and later life. Her work is particularly interested in how Indigenous storytelling challenges these normative frameworks and articulates alternative forms of relationality, embodiment, and intergenerational care.
Trained in American Studies and Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Nina received her PhD from the American Studies Department at the University of Graz. Her dissertation examined the decolonial and ecocritical potential of contemporary Indigenous drama, theater, and performance with particular attention to planetarity, aesthetics, and Indigenous epistemologies. Her doctoral research received the Fulbright Prize and the Maria Schaumayr Prize. Nina’s further research interests include feminist and queer theory, Two-Spirit studies, environmental humanities, cultural gerontology, and narrative and performance theory. She has published on Indigenous drama, gender, environmental violence, and decolonial aesthetics.
Head of School for Humanities at York St John University in York, UK. Anne-Marie’s main research interest is in American women’s writing and material culture. She is especially interested in how women writers in the early Twentieth Century explored fashion, economics and labour in their writing. She was guest editor for Lectora, curating a special issue on literature, jewellery, and material culture in 2021. Anne-Marie has also published on a diverse range of topics including the film adaptations of Edith Wharton’s writing, the rise of the ‘femoir’ with American women comedians, and safe spaces in the speculative fiction of Colson Whitehead. She has co-edited three volumes about American literature, most recently Time, the City and the Literary Imagination, with Palgrave (2020), and is currently working on a project involving the representation of First Ladies in film, fiction, and culture. Anne-Marie is a former Fulbrighter and served for eight years as an elected member of the Fulbright Alumni Council, and co-directed the Fulbright 1-2-1 mentoring project for three years. She has extensive experience of teaching American literature and culture and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
E-mail: a.evans@yorksj.ac.uk
Abby Fagan is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. Her current book project is a decolonial feminist consideration of the social role of the university in US-American history and society. Trained as a literary scholar, Abby uses historical events, financial data, and a wide range of literature to explore how American universities participated in colonial expansion in key moments throughout American history. She received her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2019, where her dissertation, Bloated: Power and the Body in American Temperance Literature, won the university’s CGS/ProQuest Prize for the best dissertation defended that academic year. A revised version of this dissertation is currently under review for publication. Abby’s further research interests include Critical Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, feminist and queer critique, and American women’s writing, and she has also published on the political significance of narratives that thematize racial hereditary enslavement and settler colonialism in TV and film. Abby acted as co-speaker for the German Association for American Studies’ Diversity Roundtable from 2020 to 2023.
Anna Kurowicka is an Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She has published on asexuality in Sexualities, Teksty Drugie, Feminist Formations, and many edited collections. Her current research is focused on cultural representations of asexuality, connections between asexuality and queer theory, and asexuality and genderlessness in sf. She is currently working on a project on representations of asexuality in American popular culture funded by the National Science Center. She is a co-chair of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group and a member of the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the ASC. As part of an international research project “Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts,” she investigates how American queer theories are taught at Polish universities.
E-mail: a.kurowicka@uw.edu.pl
Annessa Ann Babic
Independent Scholar (United States)
2014-2019
Carmen Birkle
Philipps-University of Marburg (Germany)
2010–2014
Rubén Cenamor
Universidad de Barcelona (Spain)
2014–2018
Marie Dücker
University of Graz (Austria)
2021-2025
Ingrid Gessner
Vorarlberg University of Education, Feldkirch (Austria)
2014-2022
Izabella Kimak
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (Poland)
2019-2023
Susanne Leikam
Independent Scholar (Germany)
2016-2019
Marta J. Lysik
University of Wroclaw (Poland)
April-November 2019
Elisabetta Marino (Italy)
2019-2023
Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Germany)
2020-2024
Justine Tally
University of La Laguna (Spain)
2010–2014
Meldan Tanrisal
Hacettepe University (Turkey)
2012–2014
Tanfer Emin Tunç
Hacettepe University (Turkey)
2012-2019
Christen “ChrisAnn” Bryson
Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris (France)
EAAS WOMEN'S NETWORK
Contact
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