I Seminar on Gender and Literature

Name: I Seminar on Gender and Literature
Start: 2026-07-09T09:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-07-10T18:00:00+02:00
Location: Edificio Redeiras, Praza do Berbés

The "New Relational Challenges in Contemporary Literature and Culture" seminar aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on how contemporary literature and culture imagine new relational possibilities and respond to the ethical, political, and affective challenges of our time.

Time & Location

09 Jul 2026, 09:00 – 10 Jul 2026, 18:00

Edificio Redeiras, Praza do Berbés, Rúa da Ribeira do Berbés, 11, 36202 Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain

About the event

I Seminar on Gender and Literature: "New Relational Challenges in Contemporary Literature and Culture"

Edificio Redeiras y Edificio Cambón, Universidade de Vigo (UVigo)

July 9-10, 2026

Submissions deadline: 15th April 2026, via this registration form.

The seminar "New Relational Challenges in Contemporary Literature and Culture" is an event co‑organized by Pandora Literary Gender Studies and the Project “Communitas/Immunitas: Relational Ontologies in Atlantic Anglophone Cultures of the 21st Century” (Proyecto de Generación de Conocimiento PID2022-136904NB-100, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, UE).

The seminar aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on how contemporary literature and culture imagine new relational possibilities and respond to the ethical, political, and affective challenges of our time. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Posthumanism, more-than-human, and hybrid relationalities
Gender, identity, and the reconfiguration of the subject
Affects, emotions, and embodied experiences
Community, solidarity, and alternative forms of social bonding
New forms of maternity, parenthood, and reproductive narratives
Care, vulnerability, and dependency in contemporary culture
Kinship beyond the nuclear family
Feminist and queer futures
Literary and cultural responses to ecological and technological change

Seminar program

Plenary session: “Threads of Exploitation: Fashion, Ecology and Female Subalternity in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”, by guest speaker, Noemí Pereira-Ares (USC).
Roundtable discussion: "Gender and Identity: New Forms of Subjectivity", with young women experts in the field of English Studies, Lara Tortosa-Signes (UV), María Torres-Romero (UMA), Sara Tabuyo-Santaclara (UIB).
A guided tour of the host city.
Publication of selected papers in a special issue of an academic journal.

Registration Fees

General fee: 45 €

Pandora members and students: 30 €

In-person attendee: 20 €

Online attendee: 20 €

Submission deadline

15th April 2026, via this registration form.

Conference venue address

Edificio Redeiras (praza do Berbés, 11), Edificio Cambón (entrada rúa Oliva, 3).

Seminar coordinators

Claudia Martori Ribalta, Iago Rodríguez Diéguez.

Thank you. We will be in touch after the deadline to let you know if your submission has been accepted.

Stay connected, stay empowered

@pandoraliterarygenderstudies

pandoryliterarygenderstudies@gmail.com

Share this event

Seminar Guest Speakers

Plenary session:

“Threads of Exploitation: Fashion, Ecology and Female Subalternity in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”

by Noemí Pereira-Ares (USC)

Noemí Pereira-Ares_edited_edited_edited.

Noemí Pereira-Ares is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research lines include contemporary literature(s) on migration; postcolonial, transcultural and diaspora studies; and the study of fashion and dress in literature. In line with these interests, she has published articles in various international scholarly journals such as The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature or Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. She is the author of Fashion, Dress and Identity in the Narratives of the South Asian Diaspora: From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and she has co-edited, amongst others, the volume Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction (Brill, 2021), as well as the special issues ‘Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English’ (JSSE, 2019) and ‘Border Politics and Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature’ (Humanities, 2024). In addition to participating in other research projects, she currently co-supervises the Research Project “Eco-Refugees: Borders and (Non-)Human Mobility in Literature in English” (PID2024-157339NB-I00).

Roundtable discussion:

"Gender and Identity: New Forms of Subjectivity"

with Lara Tortosa-Signes (UV), María Torres-Romero (UMA), Sara Tabuyo-Santaclara (UIB)

Lara Tortosa-Signes is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of València. Her dissertation examines African feminisms and identity formation in contemporary literary production. Lara is a language teacher and writer who collaborates with the research group LENA and who has co-founded the association AIELL for early career researchers. Her research interests lie in decolonial and gender studies. She focuses on Indigenous narratives, memoirs, and historical fiction authored by women and gender non-conforming writers to explore their contributions to African feminist thought. Her work engages with storytelling as a mode of knowledge production and feminist praxis. Her latest academic publications are the article "Intersex Bodies, Literary Representation and Cultural Intersectionality: Gender Bounding Violence in An Ordinary Wonder (2021)", published in English Studies in Africa, and the book chapter "Escritoras Africanas: de las sombras al epicentro de la(s) literatura(s) africana(s)" in Cooperação, Esperança e Outras Formas de Resistença na Literatura Africana (2025).

María Torres-Romero is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English, French and German at the University of Málaga. She completed her PhD at the same institution entitled Narrating Human and Nonhuman Ecologies: Cognitive and Affective Assemblages in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. María is part of the Research Project “Re-Orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture” (PID2022-137881NB-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI and by ERDF/EU, and has been an active member since 2021 of the research group LITCAE, both led by Professor Rosario Arias. Her main lines of research centre on speculative fiction written in English, posthumanism, relationality, and contemporary explorations of the nonhuman. She has contributed to both national and international academic journals, including publications such as “Encountering the Machine: Towards a Posthumanist Ethics and Relational Moral Paradigm in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me” (2024).

Sara Tabuyo-Santaclara is Assistant Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. She is a member of the research group LITANGLO and collaborates with the research group BiFeGa. She is currently part of the Research Project “Communitas/Immunitas: relational ontologies in Atlantic anglophone cultures of the 21st century” (PID2022-136904NB-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI and by ERDF/EU. Sara completed her PhD at the University of Vigo where she studied representations of girlhood in The Handmaid’s Tale media franchise. Her main research interests are girlhood, gender and feminist theories, as well as post/decolonial theories and utopian/dystopian fiction. Her recent publications include the book chapter “Serena Joy as an Anti-Feminist Ally: Tradwives and Rising Misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale Series” (2025). She has recently co-edited the Special Issue Visibilizing Intersectional Girlhood(s) in Contemporary Anglophone Cultural Manifestations for the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (2026).