Expression of interest (EoI) - Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action - Institute of Women’s Studies (University of Valencia)

We are a group of historians based at the Early Modern and Modern History Department and the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Valencia, with an expertise in cultural history and interdisciplinary interests which span across other fields of history

(social, political intellectual; art history and the history of science) and other disciplines such as literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Our main concern is to explore the complexities and paradoxes of modernity during the Enlightenment and liberalism, and to understand historically how moral norms and social imaginaries are appropriation and negotiated by groups and individuals, male and female, at the threshold of modernity, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century.

We keep fruitful relationships with Spanish and international researchers and groups at the cutting edge of research. In the past, we have worked in close collaboration with historians from the Universities of Cádiz, UNED, Palermo and Nacional Autónoma de México (https://generoysubjetividades.wordpress.com/) and we have a long background of projects in common such as Women and modernity (2005-2007), The civilization of manners and the discipline of behaviour as a historical process (2009-11), The civilizing process and the question of the individual (2012-14), Making the Self: Narratives and Representations of the Modern Subject (2015-18). We have convene the European Network for the History and Practice of Biography and have participated in international projects such as Feminism and the Enlightenment (1650-1850) (Leverhulme Trust, 1998-2001), EDULUM. Éducatrices et Lumières (ANR, 2015-17), Cost Action Women Writers in History (2009-13), and Pathologies of solitude, 18^th to 21^st century (Wellcome Trust, 2018-2021). We have recently embarked on a new project, CIRGEN: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies (Horizon2020, ERC-2017-Advanced Grant-787015), running from 1 january 2019 to 31 december 2023.

We welcome in our team researchers wishing to apply for a Marie Slodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, with research projects that connect with, or complement our own.

· Project description:

CIRGEN projects offers, for the first time in the field, a truly transnational and transatlantic approach on the role played by women as actors and by gender as a cultural category in the Enlightenment and its legacy to the modern world, knitting together cultural, intellectual, gender and postcolonial history, literary, philosophical and visual studies. It looks at the cultural transfer of gender notions in global perspective around five axes: translation, networks and sociability, travel, reading, and sensibility, to be explored through textual and iconographic analysis and archival research. Adopting the vantage point of Spain and its empire will allow to question approaches based either on the “national context” or the centre-periphery dichotomy, to reassess the role of the Catholic Enlightenment in the making of modernity and to highlight the mediating roles played by local actors, male and female, in processes of sociocultural change.

CIRGEN’s specific objectives are: to challenge dichotomous visions of Enlightenment discourses of gender by stressing their plural contribution to modernity; to decenter customary radial perspectives by stressing multilateral dialogues both within Europe and beyond; to better understand the role played by gender in the cultural geography of Enlightenment, particularly in the construction of the South/North symbolic divide; to produce empirically grounded evidence of the practical and iconic role of women in the making of modern reading publics; to foster innovative scholarship on the gendering of emotions in defining national identities and moral standards of civilization.

More information about who we are and what we do, in our website (https://cirgen.eu/)