Centre for Translating Cultures Research Seminar - Dr Gregoria Manzin

Dr Gregoria Manzin is visiting the University of Exeter on Wednesday 4 November for a research seminar titled Topographies of Trauma: Women Writing Trauma and Survival in the Balkan Conflicts. It runs from 15:30 to 16:30 in Queen's Building, MR2, and if you can't make it in person, there's an option to join via MS Teams by emailing LCVS@exeter.ac.uk.

Manzin comes from La Trobe University in Melbourne, where she coordinates Italian Studies. Her research on contemporary literature focuses on women's writing and narratives of borders, memory and trauma. She wrote Torn Identities: Life Stories at the Border of Italian Literature in 2013 and co-edited Mentoring through the Centuries: On the Dynamics of Personal and Professional Growth in 2022. This talk draws on literary texts about the Yugoslavian civil wars of 1991–1999, and she argues that these narratives preserve forms of lived experience that historical archives and political accounts often miss.

The seminar is run by the Centre for Translating Cultures, based in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter and directed by Professor Katharine Murphy. The Centre works with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and takes 'Translating Cultures' in a broad sense, looking at migration, border-crossing, exile, diaspora, adaptation and intermediality from antiquity to the present day. Manzin's talk fits right into that—looking at how personal stories of survival from the Balkan conflicts can hold a kind of truth that official records leave out.

So, if you're interested in women's writing, memory, or the way literature picks up where the history books stop, it's one to have on your radar. It's on Wednesday 4 November, 15:30–16:30, in Queen's Building, MR2.