Team – WINK – Women's Invisible Ink

Carme Font Paz is Director of the ERC-StG project WINK, hosted at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she is tenured lecturer in the English Department.

My research explores the marginalization of women’s thought in the early modern period from a comparatist approach, engaging in theoretical aspects of early modern women’s intellectual history and socio-economic considerations on textual production. I seek to provide a model for qualitative analysis of neglected textualities by women with a methodology in practice that retrieves intellectual content, modifying androcentric and binary dynamics of representing valuable thinking that have perpetuated up to the present time. This research integrates social history, historiography, theoretical debates on the canon, history of ideas, cognitive literary theory, religion and mysticism in the Reformation, reception and textual analysis.

I have been postdoctoral researcher at UCLA and Harvard, and are often invited at international seminars and conferences. Two of my latest publications are the book Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017); and an edited volume, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). I am currently preparing a monograph on early modern women and social change (Brepols). See here for more information on my academic profile.

Helena is responsible for the Italian section of project WINK. She relies on a long experience as lecturer and researcher in Italian language and literature at UAB and other universities such as Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla (2002-2004) and Universitat de Barcelona (1998-2001). She has been visiting professor at Università di Messina (2014) and at Università di Palermo (2021).
Her research, published in international journals and volumes, concerns Italian early modern women writers and theoretical considerations on the literary canon and its alternative androcentric representation. She also studies sixteenth-century translations and editions of Italian works into Spanish.
Helena coordinates several WINK Labs and other outreach project activities, as well as international seminars on translation. She is co-director of the supplement «Volti del tradurre» of the international journal Enthymema and co-editor of two volumes in progress on early modern European women writers and on literary translation. She is an experienced literary translator, and since 2017 she acts as vice-chairwoman at the Sección Autónoma de Traductores de Libros de la Asociación Colegial de Escritores (ACE Traductores).

Maxim Rigaux is a Junior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University. He is also affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher to the ERC-StG project WINK, hosted at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Maxim obtained his Ph.D. at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2018 with a dissertation on the epics of Lepanto. He specializes in the cultural and literary histories of the early modern Iberian world. His main interests include the interactions between Latin and the vernacular languages, the relationships between text and image, as well as race and gender studies. Maxim is also a co-founder of the research group RELICS (Researchers of European Literary Identity, Cosmopolitanism and the Schools) and an editor of the open access journal JOLCEL (Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Schools).

Francesca Blanch-Serrat is a postdoctoral researcher in the English Department at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she also teaches. She earned her doctoral degree in 2021 with a thesis on Anna Seward’s assertions of literary authority and her self-presentation and critical reception in her later-life writings. Her current research primarily concerns women’s literary history and old age and ageing in the long eighteenth century, and her research frameworks intersect with Gender, Queer, and Age studies.

Paula Yurss Lasanta is postdoctoral researcher in the English Department at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she also teaches. She earned her doctoral degree in 2021 with a thesis on the political writings of Helen Maria Williams. Previously, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship in (2018-19) to teach at Haverford College (PA, USA). At present she is focusing her research on British women writers with ties to France, with particular emphasis on the last decades of the eighteenth century. Her areas of interest are feminism, women’s writing, the French Revolution, the eighteenth century and Romanticism.

Federica Privitera is predoctoral researcher in the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled “Autrici di letteratura cavalleresca (Italia-Spagna): Trasposizione di paradigmi androcentrici in motivi e personaggi della tradizione epica”, is supervised by Prof. Helena Aguilà Ruzola and Prof. Donatella Siviero. In 2020, she earned her Master’s Degree in Modern Languages: Literature and Translation at Università degli Studi di Messina. Her current research concerns epic poems about knights and chivalry written by Italian and Spanish women writers in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.