In this talk Dr. Pragya Agarwal will speak about writing women’s lives from a deeply intimate and personal to a more global universal perspective. Here she will refer to her recent books (M)otherhood and Hysterical published by Canongate in the UK, as well as her upcoming book which she is currently writing to be published by Vintage/Penguin Random House in the UK and Ecco/Harper Collins in the USA. Pragya will discuss her methodology grounded in intersectionality and inter-disciplinarity drawing on a combination of scientific experiments and data, historical archives, poetry, contemporary media, art and design, technology, and online forums. Pragya will also touch on the biases we bring to our writing, the way we can reflect on them, and use them to frame our narrative.

Rebecca Donner’s latest project is a deeply researched, stylistically innovative biography of Sophie Scholl, the twenty-one-year-old young woman at the center of the White Rose (Weiße Rose), a group of students at the University of Munich who were beheaded by guillotine after producing six leaflets that condemned Hitler and called for revolution. Drawing on letters, diary entries, drawings, Gestapo interrogation transcripts, the testimony of survivors, cultural artifacts and ephemera, Donner views Scholl’s short life through a kaleidoscopic lens, examining myriad political and cultural forces at play. The book is forthcoming from Random House in the U.S. and Canongate in the U.K.. In today’s presentation, Donner will discuss her methodology and highlight the salient questions she interrogates in her account of a critical figure in the history of twentieth-century resistance movements.