This past Thursday Nov 2, 2023, our department received the visit of professors Susana Bardavío Estebán (U of Burgos), Santiago Díaz Lage (UNED), María Xesús Lama (U of Barcelona) and Antonio Pedrós-Gascón (Colorado State U), who came to our campus to participate in a workshop on women writers and the representation of domestic violence in Spanish periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth century . The guests scholars participate in an international research group (GenViPreF) that collaborate in the preparation of databases, studies and editions of texts about gender and violence published in the Peninsular women’s press between the years 1848 to 1918 .
The workshop started after lunch in our doctoral seminar room with a fascinating conversation of Prof. Vialette and our Emeritus Professor Lou Charnon-Deutsch, author of Hold that Pose: Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical (2008) and other seminal publications on gender in Spanish literature of the 19th century. Prof. Charnon-Deutsch described the challenges of compiling data and doing archival research at the National Library in Madrid before the digital age and the impact that the digitalization of vast collections of periodicals in the last decade has had on our studies.
The second session was structured as a conference panel with three paper presentations in Spanish. Prof. Díaz Lage opened the table with a talk on a case of gender violence unusually alluded to in Ellas, one of the feminine periodicals, considering that these publications tended to avoid current events and politics. The second paper was presented by Prof. Bardavío on two novels published in El Correo de la Moda, and the particularities of the feminine Spanish role model compared to the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house.” Finally, Prof. Pedrós-Gascón presented on Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer’s figure as an intellectual and how most of her novels represented conservative images of women, in contrast to her essays and political activity.
This enriching event was organized by our colleague Prof. Aurelie Vialette –a member of the GenViPref project–, together with María Xesús Lama and Álex Alonso Nogueira (Brooklyn College). The details of the full workshop can be seen in the poster and program here.
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