WINK’s research has developed through four main action points:
1. Providing a model for the intellectual recovery of early modern women’s writing that reconstructs genealogies of knowledge across languages and genres, and reshapes literary historiography to attain epistemic balance. Our monograph Early Modern Women and Social Change (2025), along with the establishment of the new book series Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates, and Genealogies of Knowledge, reflects an emphasis on textual and intellectual recovery that moves beyond a focus on authorship.
2. Designing the WINK database, which compiles over 200 sources as a pilot—not as a static repository, but as an active platform built to extract and visualize genealogies. This represents a significant challenge in terms of presenting source information while foregrounding the intellectual contributions of the authors.
3. Rethinking ontologies and systems of knowledge organization related to early modern women’s cultural production, through concepts such as textual misogyny, androcentric cognition, intellectual value, and epistemic balance. Our special issue Early Modern Textual Misogynies examines the cultural dynamics underlying these processes and the specific ways they shaped women’s writing.
4. Unveiling previously overlooked silos and corpora of women’s textual production that had been deemed irrelevant due to genre or topic. These include, for example, the extensive and informal body of women's religious writings that engaged with science and cosmology, or texts associated with emerging forms of domesticity. We have explored how these hybrid textual forms and genres constitute valuable cultural knowledge, as examined in our monograph Genre Hybridity and Women's Writing in Eighteenth-Century Europe.
The project is strong and distinctive in its qualitative, conceptual, and close-reading analysis of sources. This is reflected in outcomes that have exceeded our initial expectations: four monographs, one special issue, and over thirty articles and book chapters. Dissemination has been effective, both through WINK Labs as hubs for dialogue within the broader research community (including visiting scholars, pre- and postdoctoral researchers) and through invited seminars abroad (primarily within international partnerships).
Two major conferences—held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Edinburgh—have concentrated efforts on broader thematic inquiries (Domesticity, Missing Matter), complemented by high-profile roundtables (e.g. Renaissance Society of America, Chicago 2024), exhibits (Palermo), public engagement talks (e.g. at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona), and both international (BBC) and local media outreach. Our research has inspired other scholars and projects to apply WINK’s trans-genre methodology to distinct datasets across various fields, including philosophy, literature, history, and religion.
