World Literature and Epigenetics: Women Narrating Transgenerational Trauma

World Literature and Epigenetics: Women Narrating Transgenerational Trauma is the first workshop to bring together creative writers and scholars from the fields of epigenetics, anthropology, psychology, bioscience, law and literature to explore how trauma is lived, narrated, and transmitted across generations.

From this interdisciplinary perspective, the event examines how emerging research in psychology, anthropology and epigenetics—showing how lived experience can alter gene expression and be inherited—resonates with long-standing literary narratives of intergenerational trauma, particularly those centred on women and maternal transmission. The workshop will explore the contribution storytelling makes to the understanding of female-focalised trauma, including its relational, psychosocial and often multilingual/translingual context as trauma crosses borders.

The aim is to forge a productive dialogue between literary narratives of trauma and the latest findings in epigenetics, anthropology, bioscience, psychology and law that ultimately provides new insights into the transgenerational transmission and lived experience of trauma.

Generously sponsored by the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Society (ILCS, London), The Society of Italian Studies, the Affective Experiences Lab and the Research Group on Violence, Trauma and Memory based at Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities, the workshop will feature creative facilitation of interdisciplinary dialogue, papers from invited scholars working across the humanities, anthropology and psychology, and a conversation with and reading by award-winning Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego.

Confirmed speakers include Prof Nadja Reissland (Durham, Psychology); Dr Ilke Turkmeneg, (Newcastle, Law/Bioscience); Dr Sana Saboowala (Oregon State, Anthropology; Epigenetics); Professor Clare Hanson (Southampton, English); Dr Hannie Lawlor (Hispanic Studies, Oxford); Professor Tiziana de Rogatis (Università per Stranieri di Siena, Comparative Literature) and Igiaba Scego, Somali Italian writer whose works focus on inherited, postcolonial trauma.

Please note that this event is free to attend.

If you have any access requirements, please email [email protected].

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Host or Publisher Institute for Medical Humanities