GIRL, INTERRUPTED
Testimonies, Silences and Self-Censorship
in European Women’s Life Writing
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, October 24-25, 2025
The Faculty of Letters, “Babeș-Bolyai” University
“Sextil Pușcariu” Institute, The Romanian Academy, Cluj Branch
Call for Papers
While Life Writing as an umbrella genre has been increasingly popular in both Eastern and Western Europe, it took longer for women’s personal narratives, including memoirs, diaries or correspondence, to get the same attention. The conference aims to stir the interest of specialists in Life Writing, Literature, Memory and Trauma Studies, Gender and Youth Studies in Eastern and Western Europe in order to fill in the gap, and focus on what is becoming a literary boom phenomenon, as in the last decade female life writing accounts have become increasingly present or even dominating on the life writing book market, as a natural and long-expected compensation of historically silenced voices. Moreso, in the case of female authors, this recovery is even more significant in terms of testimonies and legacies because we are dealing with a category that, both as political prisoners and as a “secondary people” or “secondary nation” (Morar-Vulcu 2007) and gender, were silenced and it took longer than in the case of male authors to make their voice (and sometimes trauma testimony) heard.
The second edition of our forthcoming conference focuses on the specific aspects of youth and childhood as idealised in contrast to the experience of adulthood under the totalitarian regimes in Europe or, in other cases, interrupted or affected by historical traumas such as Communism or the Holocaust. We are interested in women’s life writing accounts, and, similarly to the previous edition on what can be verbalised vs. what is being silenced, censored or self-censored in these narratives related to youth experience.