Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction AHRC Research Network International Conference
Birmingham and Midland Institute, Birmingham, UK, 5-9 September 2023
Free to attend for all speakers and attendees.
Lunch is included for in-person attendees.
The conference will be child-friendly, with play spaces available. A prayer room will be available.
The conference will be fully hybrid.
Register for the conference – online only (in-person registration is now closed): https://forms.gle/fVyWLn8YNZYuJAjL8
Registration will close for all modes at midday on Monday 4 September.
Keynote speakers
Professor Claire Chambers
Dr Rehana Ahmed
In the twenty-first century, readers, publishers, and booksellers have noted a surge in popularity of genre works written by Muslim women, particularly in the Anglosphere. From the detective novels of Ausma Zehanat Khan to G. Willow Wilson’s fantasy fiction, Ayisha Malik’s romantic fiction to graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi – Muslim women authors are embracing popular fiction forms and genres.
This free, hybrid conference explores Muslim women’s popular and genre fiction and film across all languages, forms and periods. It brings together researchers from across the world to examine the global turn in popular fiction, and the concurrent ‘popular turn’ in Muslim women’s writing and film-making. Focusing on writing by women deemed ‘popular’ rather than ‘literary’, speakers will engage with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick lit, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, life writing, and science fiction) from a range of critical disciplinary perspectives.
A key aim of the conference is to encourage collaboration between researchers working in similar areas but across languages, disciplines and genres. The conference programme includes time for researchers to meet previously identified and new research partners during structured sessions in which network members can plan for future collaboration. We intend to publish collaborative outputs resulting from the conference in an edited book, Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction, intended for publication in Manchester University Press’ Multicultural Textualities series.
Please direct all queries to a.burge@bham.ac.uk.