Panel III - Women, Community and Prison - 8th May 2008

 

Speaker:

Professor Barbara Harlow, Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin

Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin and has also taught at the American University in Cairo (1977-83 and again in 2006-7 as Visiting Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature), University College Galway (1992), University of Minnesota Twin Cities (1994), University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and University of Natal in Durban (2002). She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire: Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11, The Scramble for Africa (2003). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of the South African activist, Ruth First. Her teaching and research interests include “imperialism and orientalism” and “literature and human rights/social justice.”

 

 

Panel II - Mothering and the Community - 23rd January 2008

 

Chair: Prof. Nickie Charles, Director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender

 

Speakers:

 

Maureen Freely, Department of English, University of Warwick

Maureen Freely was born in Neptune, New Jersey but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has made her home in England since 1984. She is the author of three works of nonfiction - Pandora’s Clock (1993), What About Us? (1995,) and The Parent Trap (2000), and six novels: Mother’s Helper (1979), The Life of the Party (1985), The Stork Club (1992) Under the Vulcania (1994), The Other Rebecca (1996) and Enlightenment (2007 in the UK and 2008 in the US), which (like The Life of the Party) is set in Istanbul. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. For the past ten years she has been the deputy director of the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. She is perhaps best known for her translations of Snow (2003), Istanbul: Memories and the City (2004), The Black Book (2006) and Other Colours (2007), by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and for her campaigning journalism after Pamuk and an estimated 80 other writers were prosecuted (and in the case of Hrant Dink, assassinated) for insulting Turkishness, state institutions, or the memory of Ataturk.

Heather Elliott, Open University

Heather Elliott is a research fellow at the Open University, currently working on a 3 year research project on maternal subjectivity with Professors Wendy Hollway and Ann Phoenix. As well as research on ‘young’ mothers, she has undertaken work on poverty and health and on how research evidence informs health policy, at the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre. She has an enduring interest in the unsaid and unsayable in research narratives. Using psychosocial, biographical and diary-based methods, her work has aimed to draw out what is embodied, left out and taken for granted in accounts.

Laura Griffith, Warwick Medical School

Laura joined the University of Warwick in September 2005 to work with the National Centre for Research in Ethnicity and Mental Health. Her role is to coordinate and manage a research project which aims to elucidate the mechanisms and processes that underlie ethnic variation in experiences of psychiatric treatment.

 

Panel I - Immigrant Women in Britain - 17th October 2007

 

Chair: Dr. Rashmi Varma, Department of English, University of Warwick

 

Speakers:

 

Dr. Cecily Jones, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Dr. Cecily Jones is a Senior Lecture in the Department of Sociology, and also Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies here at Warwick. Her research interests largely address social relations in the plantation societies of the Americas. Her most recent research examines the material realities of enslaved children in the British colonial world. She is also interested in issues around equality and diversity in higher education, on diasporic Black communities.

 

Clara Connolly, Immigration Lawyer working with refugees in London

Clara Connolly is an immigration lawyer working with refugees and asylum seekers in London. She was a member of the Editorial Board of Feminist Review from 1979 to 1995. She has published articles, including on the question of Irish nationalism and religion before 1995. She is a founder member of Women against Fundamentalism (1989). She was also the founder member of a campaign which got Roisin Mc Aliskey - daughter of Bernadette Mc Aliskey (formerly Devlin) out of Holloway prison in 1997.

 

Ravi Randhawa, Author, Member of the Royal Literary Fund and Fellow at Queen Mary University, London

Ravinder Randhawa was born in India and grew up in Warwickshire. She founded the Asian Women Writers Collective, which published two major collections: Right of Way, and Flaming Spirit. She is a member of PEN International and RLF Fellow at Queen Mary's College, University of London. She's the author of the acclaimed novels: A Wicked Old Woman, Hari-jan and the highly praised The Coral Strand (2001). She is currently working on her next novel Electric Blood.