Silences, Stories, Scripts: Transcultural Perspectives on Mothers and Daughters in Literature
31 March 2026
Online conference, jointly organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL), Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW), Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS).
The conference reflects on mother-daughter relationships across literary history, with particular attention to transcultural, comparative, and cross-period perspectives. Spanning the medieval to the contemporary, the event asks how maternal and filial female bonds are imagined as forms of kinship, authority, and belonging, and how those bonds register in generic and aesthetic terms.
Adrienne Rich described ‘the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter’ as ‘the essential female tragedy.’ Rather than treating this loss as timeless, the conference approaches it as historically and culturally situated. Medieval and early modern texts often render maternal figures marginal, symbolic, or silent; modern and contemporary writing, particularly in immigrant and diasporic contexts, often stages the mother-daughter bond as a pressured relation, marked by conflicting expectations and uneven forms of inheritance. A comparative frame makes it possible to trace the evolution of daughterhood, maternal authority, and intergenerational attachment through shifting regimes of gender, labour, lineage, and social legitimacy.
The conference is especially interested in the conceptual triad named in its title – silence, story, script – as a way of reading mother-daughter relations.
The conference is organised by Stephanie Ng (Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Languages Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London), Isabella Clarke (University of Oxford) and Lucia Boldrini (CCL).
The conference is free to attend.
Submission details
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, along with a short biographical note (100 words), to silencesstoriesscripts@gmail.com by 31 March 2026.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 April 2026
For any inquiries, please contact the organisers at silencesstoriesscripts@gmail.com.