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A Feminist Geography of Women's Industrial Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

Project description

Locating poems in French about the Industrial Revolution by female writers

With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the IndustrySheWrote project aims to foreground women as potent storytellers. It delves into material from France in the 1800s to build up a digital archive of female poets’ accounts of living through an era of great transformations. In the interest of diversity, their responses to heavy industry’s toll on bodies, communities and environments deserve to be better known. With respect to gender mainstreaming across Europe and beyond, the recovery of those undervalued voices will help paint a more inclusive picture of the recent past.

Objective

"Where is women's poetry about France's Industrial Revolution? Rarely is attention given to the likes of Amable Tastu's 'La France et l'industrie' (1827) or Anaïs Ségalas's 'Le gaz et la lune' (1864) as a distinctive record of heavy industry's impact on female wellbeing, which is a bone of contention worldwide. My experimentation with feminist literary geography, extending from my in-depth knowledge of the environmental humanities, has the goal of providing a platform for the underrepresented 51% of nineteenth-century France's adult sex ratio. Given that the European Commission is addressing gender equality in the cultural sector (2021) and striving to end gender stereotypes (2023), now is the time for my reparative intervention from a position of allyship correlating to #HeForShe (2014) and #FeminizeYourCanon (2018). Inspired by Doreen Massey's 'Space, Place and Gender' (1994) and Caroline Criado Perez's 'Invisible Women' (2019), I aim to gather a diversity of female-authored poems that are representative of bodily, ecological, emotional, infrastructural, and linguistic circumstances. My textual method is in keeping with cultural analysis such as Marina Marengo's 'Geografia e letteratura' (2016) and Adrianna Paliyenko's 'Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801-1900' (2016). The project's priorities are: 1) locating what women wrote about industrial matters across decades to establish reference points for policymakers and non-specialists; 2) datafying the compilation of rediscovered poetry to generate an open-access machine-readable resource with critical annotations on topics ranging from class to ethnicity; 3) close reading of the corpus's content/form to reveal microscale features within macroscale trends. Ultimately, my innovative activities in Australia, Canada, France, and Italy shall build up an inclusive community of practice with a long-term focus on female creativity and scholarship, all in the spirit of Europe advancing as a 'Union of Equality'."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01

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Coordinator

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA
Net EU contribution
€ 309 153,72
Address
VIA ZAMBONI 33
40126 Bologna
Italy
Region
Nord-Est Emilia-Romagna Bologna
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
No data

Partners (4)