Project description
Women, water and ecological imagination in nineteenth-century fairy tales
Long before environmentalism emerged as a global movement, fairy tales were exploring the relationships between women, water and the more-than-human world. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WAVES project is investigating these entanglements in British and Italian fairy-tale narratives published between 1840 and 1910. Bringing together comparative literary studies, environmental humanities, gender studies and cultural history, it is the first transnational study of these traditions through combined ecocritical and gender-based perspectives. By analysing women-water relationships and recovering neglected fairy tales written by women, the project will develop a new framework of visionary eco-aquatic storytelling. The aim is to examine how these narratives anticipated contemporary debates on environmental ethics and human-water interdependence while destabilising gender norms and anthropocentric worldviews.
Objective
WAVES (Women’s Agency in Visionary Eco-Aquatic Storytelling) is an interdisciplinary research project that investigates women and water’s entanglements in British and Italian fairy tales (1840-1910). Situated at the crossroads of comparative literary studies, environmental humanities, gender studies and cultural history, WAVES is the first transnational study of these fairy-tale traditions through the dual lens of ecocriticism and gender studies. The project positions itself at the intersection of two mutually illuminating currents: the flourishing of fairy-tale narratives and the birth of ecological thinking in the 19th century. It aims to (1) pioneer ‘visionary eco-aquatic storytelling’ as a new critical framework that foregrounds 19th century fairy tales as key interventions in environmental ethics; (2) examine the functions of water as a material agent in British and Italian fairy tales, analysing how human and otherworldly characters negotiate identity and power by disrupting patriarchal and anthropocentric worldviews; (3) recover neglected women-authored fairy tales in this timeframe. The project will achieve these goals through archival research, comparative literary and historical analysis, and the development of a typology of water motifs in the corpus under scrutiny. By mobilising 19th century fairy tales as forward-looking forms of environmental consciousness, WAVES contributes to urgent European and global agendas, generating academic and public-facing outputs that support sustainable and gender-inclusive narratives. As the EU advances its Water Resilience Strategy, WAVES uncovers how 19th-century fairy tales anticipated today’s debates on human-water interdependence. With expertise in comparative literature, fairy-tale studies and 19th-century women’s writing, I am ideally placed to develop this project, which will enhance my interdisciplinary profile and prepare me for a cross-sectoral career in academia, cultural heritage and ecofeminist advocacy.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology gender studies
- humanities history and archaeology history
- humanities other humanities library sciences
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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30123 Venezia
Italy
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