Research Network Seminar 3: Rewriting Women's Lives

Research Network Seminar 3: Rewriting Women's Lives

Wednesday 15 November, 2:00-3:30pm

On Zoom

Speakers: Dr Pragya Agarwal, Rebecca Donner

Both our speakers at this event are Visiting Scholars at OCLW.

Convenors: Dr Kate Kennedy, Dr Alice Little

Pragya Agarwal on writing women's lives

In this talk Dr. Pragya Agarwal will speak about writing women's lives from a  deeply intimate and personal to a more global universal perspective. Here she will refer to her recent books (M)otherhood and Hysterical published by Canongate in the UK, as well as her upcoming book which she is currently writing to be published by Vintage/Penguin Random House in the UK and Ecco/Harper Collins in the USA. Pragya will discuss her methodology grounded in intersectionality and inter-disciplinarity drawing on a combination of scientific experiments and data, historical archives, poetry, contemporary media, art and design, technology, and online forums. Pragya will also touch on the biases we bring to our writing, the way we can reflect on them, and use them to frame our narrative.
 

Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist and a visiting professor of social inequities and injustice at Loughborough University. Pragya is the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books, Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury, 2020), Wish We Knew What To Say: Talking With Children about Race (Dialogue Books, 2020), and (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman (Canongate, 2021). Her latest book, Hysterical: Exploding the myth of gendered emotions, a historical and scientific analysis of emotions, is one of Waterstones, Telegraph and i paper’s 'best non-fiction books of 2022'.

Rebecca Donner on Sophie Scholl 

Rebecca Donner's latest project is a deeply researched, stylistically innovative biography of Sophie Scholl, the twenty-one-year-old young woman at the center of the White Rose (Weiße Rose), a group of students at the University of Munich who were beheaded by guillotine after producing six leaflets that condemned Hitler and called for revolution. Drawing on letters, diary entries, drawings, Gestapo interrogation transcripts, the testimony of survivors, cultural artifacts and ephemera, Donner views Scholl’s short life through a kaleidoscopic lens, examining myriad political and cultural forces at play. The book is forthcoming from Random House in the U.S. and Canongate in the U.K.. In today’s presentation, Donner will discuss her methodology and highlight the salient questions she interrogates in her account of a critical figure in the history of twentieth-century resistance movements.  

Rebecca Donner is a 2023-2024 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and a 2023 Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Recent honors include a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship. Donner is the autor of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, a deeply researched fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, an American graduate student who became a leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during Hitler’s regime. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The Economist.

Please note: free event, open to members of our Research Network only, which you can join here.

Click here to register

The Zoom link will be sent out to all members of the Research Network closer to the event.