Feminist Representations: Violence against Women, Asylum, Voice and Testimony. British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant, 2018-2021
Funded by the British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust, the project aims to explore the contributions the arts and humanities may make to address institutional failures in the area of sexual violence against women and girls, with a specific focus on asylum, translation, voice and testimony. Two interdisciplinary workshops bring together academics, practitioners, politicians, campaigners and writers. The objective is to open up avenues of expression for women when relaying their testimonies and the impact of violence, and to provide feminist representation that moves beyond the parameters of legal expression. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, participants examined case studies of asylum seekers’ testimonies as a means to reveal the issues of translation women meet when voicing their narratives. The project sheds light on specific issues women seeking asylum who have experienced sexual violence encounter when telling their stories. These findings inform academics, policy makers, and writers who address these issues in issues in scholarly and creative works. The project is led by Dr Georgina Colby (University of Westminster) in collaboration with Professor Jane Freedman (Université Paris 8) and Debora Singer MBE (Asylum Aid). A collection of essays and a book of activist writings related to this project are currently in progress. More information, papers, and recordings are available on the Feminist Representations website here.
The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible. Arts Council Grant for the Arts, 2015.
Professor Leigh Wilson (PI) and Dr Georgina Colby (CI) started the Contemporary Small Press project in 2015 with the aim of acting as a forum, champion and support for the burgeoning number of small literary presses in the UK. At the time, the small presses we met were telling us about their frustration at not getting the coverage, resources and readers that they knew they and their writers deserved, and we set out to do as much as we could to change this.
We ran a series of Arts Council-funded events around the country in city libraries, bringing together local presses, readers and writers; we hosted a number of readings and events for small presses such as Linen Press, Patrician Press and CB Editions. We hosted the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2017 and 2018, and have supported the Republic of Consciousness Small Press podcast through 2018/19. We ran our first small press book fair in 2015, and are delighted to be running our second, co-organised with Dostoyevsky Wannabe, on 19 October 2019. Our original website began our directory of small presses, and ran many reviews, encouraging readers to buy direct from small presses where possible. You can find more information on our website here.
S A L O N – LONDON: Reading and Responding to the Present Through Womxn’s Experimental Writing, 2017-present
Taking inspiration from modernist salons and avant-garde little magazines, SALON is a real and a virtual space for experimental women writers, performance artists, and theorists to come together and share their work, ideas, and activism. The present socio-political climate demands that writers, artists, and academics create a community and foster dialogues that address the capacity of new writing to address current issues. S A L O N – LONDON has hosted many events across the capital since 2017, including evenings and performances with Carla Harryman and Redell Olsen, Sophie Seita and Amy Tobin, Erín Moure and So Mayer, Laynie Browne and Andrea Brady, Redell Olsen and Carolyn Pedwell. More information including details of forthcoming events can be found on the website here.
Death and the Contemporary. Arts Council Grant for the Arts, 2012.
Death and the Contemporary: a literature – visual arts collaboration between Dr. Georgina Colby (University of Westminster) and artist and writer Anthony Luvera.
The complex and perpetually shifting cultural terrain of the twenty-first century requires are-examination of the political, anthropological and philosophical issues surrounding death. Questions of memorialization, mourning, voyeurism, ethics, subjectivity, agency, identity and aesthetics shape panel discussions surrounding death by key figures across the disciplines of literature, visual arts, and philosophy in a series of four site specific events held in London. The authors of the project seek to further an understanding of the ways in which the epistemological issues surrounding death in the contemporary period impact its representation in literature, the visual arts, and philosophy. A critical pathway of the project is to propose new directions in which we might renegotiate ways of understanding death that build on, yet move beyond, the fields of cultural memory and trauma studies.
Death in contemporary culture is addressed through the prism of four key areas of enquiry: space, trauma, rites and the body, and aesthetics and representation. Visual and literary representations of death are often contingent on their acceptability or marginalization within the cultural domain, as are artistic and academic discursive practices within the field. Death and the Contemporary seeks to interrogate the acknowledged aesthetic boundaries that exist but also seeks to unveil limitations on aesthetic representations of death in contemporary culture that perhaps have not as yet been fully recognized. ‘Death and the Contemporary’ is a series of site-specific events that took place across the capital in 2012-2013. Panel discussions with keynote philosophers, writers, visual artists, and theorists provided an exciting interdisciplinary forum in which to consider issues surrounding the representation of death in contemporary culture. Audience members will have the opportunity to engage and contribute to these stimulating conversations with leading figures across the disciplines. Details of the events can be found here.
Print Screen: Writing and the Moving Image. University of Westminster Research Funding, 2013.
A series of interdisciplinary events that took place across London exploring the relation between writing and the moving image. The events took place at the ICA, the Photographers’ Gallery, and the Old Cinema at the University of Westminster.
Georgina Colby 