CFP: Radiant Maternity Conference (University of Exeter)

Deadline: November 29, 2021

Dr Muireann Maguire and Dr Eglė Kačkutė will co-convene a two-day online conference “Radiant Maternity”  in January 2022 to launch the Slavic and East European Maternal Studies Network. The conference will take place virtually on January 28th-29th, 2022.

We hope this event will encourage networking between scholars of Slavic and East European Studies and Maternal Studies academics, and we invite established Maternal Studies scholars to act as mentors and peer supporters to Slavic Studies specialists who are entering this field. Areas of specialization include but are not confined to literature (maternal fictions), various fields of cultural studies, history, and sociology. The Call for Papers is now open and will close on November 29th, 2021. Scholars in all aspects of Maternal Studies are invited to send expressions of interest and/or paper proposals of no more than 300 words to SEEMSmaternal@exeter.ac.uk by that date. For more information on appropriate topics, please see below. The language of the conference is English.

Distinguished historian Professor Natalia Pushkareva (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) will deliver the keynote lecture, “To Birth and To Bear: A History of Childbearing in Russia as a Subject of  Academic Research”.  Other speakers will be confirmed soon. To promote networking and knowledge exchange, established non-Slavist Maternal Studies researchers will chair each of the panels. In addition to aligning Slavic Studies scholars with peers and mentors in wider disciplinary fields, we hope to use this conference to identify research themes to be further refined (in collaboration between Slavist and non-Slavist scholars) at our one-day in-person Exeter symposium to be held on July 9th, 2022 and ultimately published as an Open Access edited volume.

Conference dates: January 28th-29th, 2022 (online)

Organizers: Dr Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University) egle.kackute-hagan@flf.vu.lt and Dr Muireann Maguire (University of Exeter) muireann.maguire@exeter.ac.uk

Conference contact email: SEEMSmaternal@exeter.ac.uk

Funded by ‘Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature,’ a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Networking Grant awarded to Dr Muireann Maguire at the University of Exeter, 2021-22