We are going to talk about creative criticism as feminist practice. We’ll introduce how our own scholarship on underexamined women writers/artists has necessitated genre inventiveness on our own part, but also how doing this work has made visible a tradition of women writers and scholars who have practiced what we now call creative/critical practice for a long time, using its formal possibilities to explore and subvert gender/genre norms. We will think about why this porousness between thinking and making is especially useful to women, and explore how teaching in this same mode allows students to better engage feminist literary criticism. We’ll also think about what it means for the students (and us) to make work in context of each other, in the classroom—an extension of our own daily collaborations and conversations with the artists we study—and reflect on what academic ‘work’ or outcomes can be. By privileging this kind of creative and collaborative scholarly work as ‘academic,’ we also engender changing attitudes towards what constitutes women’s art, feminist ‘craft’ and, ultimately, literary scholarship.
Natalie Ferris is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980 (OUP, 2022), and her critical work has appeared in Word & Image, Frieze, Tate Etc., and elsewhere. Her second book will establish a new genealogy for women’s writing by exploring wordless forms of writing and experiences of post-war exile and displacement. She is coediting a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Janet Malcolm (2025) and essay collections on women, modernism, and intelligence work (2026). She is co-coordinator of the Gender, Sexuality, Secrecy & Ignorance Project at UoB.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is an Associate Professor at the University of Bristol. Her monograph, Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022), won the Modern Language Matei Calinescu Prize; it focuses on the unpublished work of a writer who was often repressed by Cold War gender and political orthodoxies. The recovery of these “wasted” texts enlivens the understanding of twentieth-century ideologies of exclusion and their formation within literary and academic values, and the kinds of complex, feminist approaches necessary for dismantling them. She has published three editors of Rukeyser’s unpublished and out-of-print writing, and is currently working on a biography of Rukeyser for Bloomsbury USA; to work on this, she will join the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing as a visiting scholar in 2024-5.