How do literature, film, memoir, and visual culture represent women’s experiences of war, genocide, fascism, resistance, and their aftermaths? While scholarship has long focused on women as victims of conflict, recent work has increasingly examined women as political actors, cultural agents, resisters, collaborators, perpetrators, witnesses, and memory-makers. Across national traditions and historical contexts, representations of women in wartime challenge conventional narratives of innocence, complicity, heroism, and survival.

This seminar explores the literary and cinematic representation of women before, during, and after war. We are particularly interested in how texts construct gendered identities within systems of political violence and how cultural narratives shape collective memory of conflict. The seminar welcomes comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to war, genocide, fascism, colonial violence, occupation, resistance movements, and postwar reconstruction.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Women under fascist and authoritarian regimes

• Female perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders

• Women in resistance movements

• Holocaust, genocide, and atrocity narratives

• Comfort women and histories of sexual violence

• Gendered experiences of occupation and displacement

• Motherhood, family, and wartime ideology

• Girls and adolescence during conflict

• Women's memoirs, testimony, and life writing

• Adaptations between literature and film

• Visual culture, propaganda, and representations of femininity

• Postmemory, trauma, and intergenerational transmission

• Comparative studies of war and cultural memory

• Feminist approaches to conflict and remembrance

Contributions may engage literary texts, film, television, memoir, testimony, visual culture, digital media, or interdisciplinary methodologies. We particularly encourage comparative work crossing linguistic, national, historical, or media boundaries.

This seminar aims to create sustained conversations about the diverse and often contradictory ways women are represented within histories of violence and their cultural afterlives.