Events

Although women have always walked and written about their manifold experiences as pedestrians, they were largely neglected in the historiography of walking of the twentieth century. As Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner noted in 2012, it had been common practice in cultural and literary histories of walking to present women “as an ‘exception’ to an unstated norm, represented by a single chapter in a book or even a footnote” (225). Following the publication of Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the Streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2016), research on walking women has expanded and diversified significantly in recent years. Kerri Andrews’s Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (2020), Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking (2023), and Annabel Abbs’s Windswept: Why Women Walk (2022), for example, focus exclusively on the writings and representations of women walkers. Critics have begun to develop new approaches to reading, documenting, and theorising women’s pedestrian mobilities, employing practice-based approaches (e.g. Heddon and Myers 2020) and taking into account archival material (e.g. Bredar 2022) and perspectives from material ecocriticism (e.g. Hamilton 2018). Rather than examining representations of women’s walking according to masculine paradigms like Romantic wandering, flânerie, or psychogeography, critics now increasingly examine woman walkers on their own terms.

This conference brings together scholars from the humanities who are working on roles and representations of walking women in Anglophone literatures and cultures from the early modern period to the immediate present. The aim of the conference is to assess current trends in scholarship on walking women, to identify its blind spots, and to develop new perspectives on women walkers by deliberately looking at forms, contexts, media, and periods that have received less or no attention so far.

The conference’s confirmed keynote speaker is Dr Kerri Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (2020) and editor of Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking (2023).

We can welcome a moderate number of guests at our conference. If you want to attend the talks on Friday and Saturday as a guest, please contact the conference organiser, Prof Sandra Dinter (sandra.dinter@uni-hamburg.de), by 28 February 2025. Due to the generous funding from our sponsors, attendance is free of charge.

The conference is an in-person event. Virtual attendance will, unfortunately, not be possible.

• Walking Women Conference

Programm als PDF