[Call for Papers] Feminist life writing today: A masterclass with Leigh Gilmore

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Registration for this masterclass will open on May 1st via this link

Date: Wednesday June 25th | Time: 13:30-17:30 | Location: University of Amsterdam, PC Hoofthuis – room 301 | Call for Papers open to: early-career researchers | Event open to: all!

NB: ReMA students are also welcome to sign up and can obtain 1 EC from attending the event and submitting the assignments described below

Organized by:            
Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL)
Open University The Netherlands (OU)
Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG)

The program will feature:

  • A keynote lecture by Professor Leigh Gilmore, entitled “Lessons in Ethical Witness: Narrative Activism and the Gender of Testimony in the #MeToo Movement”
  • A panel with three early-career researchers presenting a paper or work-in-progress
  • A panel discussion between all four speakers moderated by Professor Sarah Bracke

Call for papers:

Early-career researchers specializing in feminist life writing are invited to submit a proposal for a 15-minute presentation to be delivered in one of the three available panel slots. 250-word abstracts and a short bio should be submitted to osl@rug.nl by Friday May 23rd 2025 end of day. Ideally, presentations explore feminist life writing practices today such as (but not limited to):

  • life writing in response to sexual misconduct
  • life writing addressing structural inequalities
  • intersectional feminist life writing
  • writing experiences of/between/beyond girlhood, motherhood, and aging
  • formal experiments in feminist life writing

The event:

In her career as a scholar of life writing and feminist theory, Professor Leigh Gilmore has made a signification contribution to research at the intersection of these two fields. In recent years, her work has focused particularly on women’s testimonial practices regarding sexual abuse. In her latest book, The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (2024), Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism, analyzing the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism.

Already in Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About their Lives (2017), she examined why women are so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences, as well as how new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt. And in Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (2019), written in collaboration with Elizabeth Marshall, she has laid bare how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony.

Gilmore’s recent work, in short, charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. As part of her visit to the Netherlands, OSL, in collaboration with Open University and the Netherlands Research School for Gender Studies, will host Professor Leigh Gilmore for a masterclass in the afternoon of June 25th.

 

Abstract keynote Professor Leigh Gilmore:
This lecture considers why it matters that life narrative was the signature form of the #MeToo movement. When testimonial storytelling collectivized credibility for all survivors of sexual abuse, the structural deficit of gendered doubt was disrupted. The conditions of ethical witness emerged from this rebalancing of credibility. Once constituted, how durable are these conditions? This lecture considers the extrajudicial and literary trajectory of gendered testimony in the #MeToo movement and how survivors might continue to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response.
Bio Professor Leigh Gilmore:
Leigh Gilmore is a feminist literary critic with expertise in life writing, trauma, and law.  She is the author of several books, most recently, The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia University Press, 2023); Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (Columbia University Press, 2017), a 2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Traditional of Life Writing (Fordham University Press, 2019), coauthored with Elizabeth Marshall. Her pathbreaking book on trauma, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell University Press, 2001) was reissued in 2023 with a new preface. Her research appears in numerous scholarly journals, including differences, Feminist Studies, Signs, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Biography, and Profession, and in edited collections. She has held visiting positions at The University of California — Berkeley, Harvard Divinity School, Brown University, Wellesley College, Northeastern University, and University of California — Santa Cruz. She is Academy Professor Emerita of English at Ohio State University, where she is a core member of Project Narrative. She is a sought after commentator on the #MeToo movement and her public facing scholarship appears in Public Books and WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

 

Student assignment:

Students can obtain 1EC by submitting a question for the keynote speaker by June 20th end of day to osl@rug.nl (based on a recommended reading to be circulated in advance), as well as submitting a reflection on the event (approximately 800 words) by July 11th, end of day.

 

All are invited to join the event!