Muslim Women's Popular Fiction

"When was the last time you heard a Muslim woman speak for herself without a filter? Or outside the white gaze? On her own terms? Or outside the narrative built around us by the media and governments?" (Mariam Khan, 'Introduction', It's Not About the Burqa, p. 1).

Focusing on writing by women deemed 'popular' rather than 'literary', the initiative engages with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick lit, comics, graphic novels, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, autobiography, memoir, and science fiction) from a range of established critical disciplinary perspectives and across languages. The project is interested in looking more closely at this writing alongside its production context through a focus on publishers and editors.

The project asks: * How does genre act as a 'filter' for Muslim women's writing?

* What opportunities do popular and genre fiction provide for challenging the dominant 'filters' on Muslim women's voices? * What contexts and pressures do popular fiction publishing and production models provide? * How are Muslim women authors engaging with and transforming established narrative and genre forms?

These areas of expertise have not been brought together substantially before - this is an opportunity to gather disparate expertise and bring together a global network of scholars to discuss and produce focused work on this topic. By bringing together experts on popular fiction, publishing and genre, with established researchers of Muslim women's writing, this networking project aims to produce new and much-needed collaborative interventions and establish a critical platform for future research.

In the first year, the steering committee will develop 5 local 'nodes', each highlighting an area of particular expertise. Through in-person or online events, each node will focus on developing scholarly networks more locally, creating local community impact, and work as platforms for facilitating a dialogue between local and diasporic scholars of popular genre.

1. Translation - led by Dr Peter Cherry

A workshop on translation of Turkish and Arabic popular fiction with translators, representatives from publishers; a discussion on Turkish soap operas' popularity within Turkey and abroad with invited academics, journalists and actors; collaboration with students taking modules on world literature, migration in contemporary world fiction and translation studies.

2. Education - led by Dr Amy Burge

A workshop with local educational partners, National Literacy Trust, policymakers; collaboration with students on third-year module Muslim Women's Popular Fiction. 3. Literature and Decoloniality - led by Dr Aroosa Kanwal

A workshop and online discussion with translators, researchers, educators and students on indigenous literary traditions and contemporary Muslim women's Anglophone genre writing. 4. Text and Image - led by Dr Esra Santesso

A workshop with graphic novelists and cartoonists (potentially Ozge Samanci, Huda Fahmy, Deena Mohamed, Leila Abdelrazaq), comics scholars, on popular visual genres and Islamic feminism. 5. Mobilities - led by Dr Lucinda Newns

A workshop with academics and authors about how works of popular and genre fiction have travelled across borders and enabled migrant, indigenous, minority ethnic and decolonial perspectives to emerge in the global literary marketplace.

In the second year, the network will host an international conference to bring together researchers from local nodes and elsewhere, encouraging collaboration across languages, disciplines and genres. The conference programme will include scheduled time for researchers to meet previously identified research partners and structured space and workshops in which network members can plan for future collaboration (for example, the preparation of co-authored articles for the edited book, or planning for future funding bids).