Annual Conference 2025
Wednesday 18th June – Friday 20th June 2025
Falmouth University, UK
Registration now open
Save money by becoming a member before you register. Memberships available from £5 to £45.
The Contemporary Women’s Writing Association’s 2025 conference will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of the role and impact of women’s writing. This conference is dedicated to the discussion of abroad range of women’s writing, including the popular and the literary; bestsellers and genres; poetry and prose; screen and script; writing for games and digital spaces; creative non-fiction; life-writing, biography, and memoir; and journalism and other forms of cultural production.
We will be thinking and talking about women’s voices and artistic practices; the changing landscape of and about women’s writing; forms and mediums; representing the past and writing the future; textual and sexual politics; resistance and re-imaginings; interventions and intersections; writing as activism; and all of this across a wide range of disciplines, time periods, and texts.
We hope you will join us for this exciting event, which will bring together scholars, researchers, students, and enthusiasts to share their research, insights, and perspectives in an open and inclusive atmosphere.
Become a member of the CWWA to receive discounted conference fees.
Falmouth University Staff and Students may attend for free but registration is required in advance here.
Conference Info
Conference Dinner
Thursday 19 June – Falmouth Hotel
There is an optional conference dinner on Thursday night which will cost £33.00 per person for 3 courses and there are limited spaces. Arrival from 7pm, meal served at 8pm.
Please register for the meal
Travel & Directions
The conference will be held on our Falmouth Campus (Falmouth University, Woodlane Campus, Woodlane, Falmouth TR11 4RH).
There is limited street parking, so be prepared to search for spots.
The dinner for participants who have pre-booked will be held at the Falmouth Hotel.
Directions to Falmouth Woodlane Campus and to the Falmouth Hotel
From The Moor to Woodlane Campus
- The Moor –TR11 3QA
On Google maps search ‘The Moor’ and choose either Stop A or B. - Woodlane Campus – TR11 4RH
On Google maps search ‘Falmouth University Woodlane’. - Walking: it’s less than a mile, and takes around 15 minutes. The walk is mostly uphill towards campus.
- Bus: The 60 and 67 buses (two of the little red buses) both stop near Woodlane Campus. The 60 stops at the top of Woodlane Campus. The 67 stops at Marlborough Road, then it’s a 5 minute walk. These buses leave from The Moor B, outside Wetherspoons.
From The Moor to Falmouth Hotel
- The Moor –TR11 3QA
- Falmouth Hotel – TR11 4NZ
- Walking: Falmouth Hotel is located near Castle Beach. To get to/from the hotel from/to Falmouth town centre and The Moor, you can walk—it’s about a mile, and takes around 25 minutes.
- Bus: The 67 bus runs to/from the Falmouth Hotel. The stop is Castle Hill Falmouth Hotel, and it’s a two minute walk from there.
From Falmouth Town train station to Woodlane Campus
- Falmouth Town Train Station – TR11 4AZ
- Woodlane Campus – TR11 4RH
- Walking: just under half a mile, and takes around 10 minutes.
- Bus: The 60 bus can be taken from the train station car park to the top of Woodlane Campus.
From Woodlane Campus to Falmouth Hotel
- Woodlane Campus – TR11 4RH
- Falmouth Hotel – TR11 4NZ
- Walking: just under 1 mile, around 20 minutes
- Bus: The 67 bus runs to/from the Falmouth Hotel from/to Fox Rosehill Gardens. You can get there through the gardens from the campus entrance just before the Fox building.
From Falmouth Docks train station to Falmouth Hotel
- Falmouth Hotel – TR11 4NZ
- Walking: It’s 0.2 miles, and takes around 4 minutes.
Accommodation
Falmouth and nearby Penryn have a wealth of hotels, guest houses, B&Bs and AirBnBs, particularly along Gyllyngvase Beach and Melvill Road. Here are a few hotel suggestions:
Local Taxis
The main taxi firms in this area are:
Donald’s Cars— 01326 313123
Abacus— 01326 212141
A2B— 01326 317898 (has an app— ‘A2B Taxis Truro’)
Dan’s Cars— 07733 884838
Keynote Speakers
Rebecca Lloyd
‘Born snoopers and cozy connections: women, cats and crime fiction’
Rebecca Lloyd is an independent researcher on Terry Pratchett, Gothic creatures, landscapes and humour, and crime. Publications include ‘Ghostly knowing laughter: Comic Gothic in the works of W.S. Gilbert’ in Ghosts and the Gothic, (eds.) Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella Parsons (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2025); ‘Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin’ in Women’s Writing, July 2022, Vol. 29 (2), co-author Ruth Heholt; ‘Dead Pets’ Society: Gothic Animal Bodies in the Films of Tim Burton’ (2021) in Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely, (eds.) Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly; ‘The Human Within and the Animal Without? Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents’ (2020) in Gothic Animals, (eds.) Ruth Heholt and Melissa Edmundson; ‘Gravy Soup: humouring conformity and counterfeiting in A Rogue’s Life’ in The Wilkie Collins Journal, 2017, Vol. 14; ‘Haunting the Grown-ups: The Borderlands of ParaNorman and Coraline’ (2016) in Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, (eds.) Ruth Heholt & Niamh Downing; ‘Anne Rice’ (2013), co-author Ruth Heholt for The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (eds. William Hughes, David Punter & Andrew Smith).
Lamya Sadiq
Performance Essay: ‘The Ghosts Will Not Give Up On Us: Reflections on Haunting’
Lamya Sadiq is interested in the ambivalences of the present; searching for ruptures, portals and hauntings that point to an otherwise and affirm revolutionary life. She was an associate for iniva’s fifth Research Network ‘Contested Sites’ and has presented work at University of Cambridge, UAL, Winchester School of Art, Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive and Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus in Stockholm.
Lamya works at MayDay Rooms Archive in London and is a wellbeing worker for women and young people. She is also a member of Red Therapy, an abolitionist collective attempting to think beyond existing psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems and practices. Lamya is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Meredith Miller
‘Melodrama and Feminine Reception: Genre and the Fear of Pleasure’
Meredith Miller is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at Cardiff University. She completed her PhD in English Literature at the Centre for Sexual Dissidence and Social Change at Sussex University. The PhD examined mass-market lesbian fiction of the postwar era. Meredith is the author numerous scholarly articles on gender, sexuality and popular culture. Her monograph Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction: Modernity, Will and Desire (Palgrave 2013) examines the aesthetic mediation of modernity through semi-distant female subjects in the fiction of male authors of the fin de siecle. Meredith is an experienced academic editor, currently working on a collection entitled Culture and the Reproductive Body: From Biopolitics to the Posthuman. She is also a widely published author of fiction, and was shortlisted for the Rhys Davis prize in 2022. Her fourth novel, Cold Grace, appeared from Honno Press in March 2025.