Friday 11 July 2025
Room 349, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU
Abstracts and Biographies
Enchanted and Disenchanted Myths and Tales (9.45-11.15)
Giulia Samadhi Gumina, “Re-enchanting the Narration: Marina Warner’s ‘Mélusine, A Mermaid Tale’”
Narration can be understood as enchantment. When considering both its non-fictional (fake news, illusory advertisements, political propaganda…) and fictional form it can be weaponised to mystify, to deceive, but it can also act as a means of resistance, as a form of agency. In particular, metamorphoses of narrations can allow for the transformation of imagery, providing – by extension – a concrete effect on reality.
With a particular focus on Marina Warner’s short story “Mélusine: A Mermaid Tale”, the present study aims to cast light on the way the classic fairy tale of The Little Mermaid (1837) has been re-written by the author, with a deep feminist restructuring which overturns both Andersen’s original text and Disney’s “commodified” version.
By focusing on Circe, Medusa, Morgan and Mélusine, the author symbolically draws a problematised female “lineage” which, from the Classical World, crosses the Middle Ages to reach the contemporary era. Against this backdrop, the restoration of (female) agency originates from the reacquired control of narration, as is eloquently emphasised by the switch to the first person (“I am Morgan, Morgan Le Fay”).
In addition, this short-story can clearly be viewed in the wake of an existing tradition of feminist re-writings of fairy tales, as its sharply ironic orchestration also contributes to suggesting. Warner utilises what the above-mentioned female figures commonly represent and evoke to “deconsecrate” the mythologised – and polarised – identity patterns traditionally encaging them. The deriving pleasure of their iridescent lives is thus reconfigured through a mesmerizing metamorphosis, generating a new story and therefore demonstrating that creative writing can be essential for a radical and empowering “re-enchantment”.
In conclusion, if on one side of the spectrum narration can act as a “veil of Maya”, on the other, when narrative tools are manipulated by writers like Warner, (artistic) texts can restore the enchanting and multifaceted complexity of reality, while contextually creating new paths for political, cultural and social transformations
Giulia Samadhi Gumina is currently an MA student in Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Palermo, where she also took a BA with honours (July 2023) and where she is working as a peer-tutor in English Language and Culture. Giulia studied at Birkbeck College, London on an Erasmus scholarship from October 2023 to April 2024, focusing on Contemporary English Literature, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, with a particular interest in Gender and Post-Colonial perspectives.
Nadia Koukaroudi, “Untangling “Rapunzel”: Mothers, Daughters and the Threads of Female Narration”
According to Marina Warner, the tale of Rapunzel “still remains a tense and violent story that touches on some very deep and troubling experiences” (“After ‘Rapunzel.’” Marvels & Tales 24.2, 2010, 329-335: 331), especially in relation to motherhood. In a time where the concepts of family and motherhood are redefined, the story of a long-haired girl and her relationship with her birth and adoptive mothers remains relevant. Through closely reading the Grimm Brothers’ “Rapunzel” (1812) along with Anne Bishop’s “Rapunzel”, (1997) Marina Warner’s “The Difference In The Dose” (2010), and Deirdre Sullivan’s “Come Live Here and Be Loved” (2018), and informed by contemporary queer theory, I trace and analyse the complex bonds connecting and affecting mothers and daughter across time and space. My reading first focuses on the concept of “cravings” during pregnancy and their connections with the natural and the unnatural. The figure of the birth mother is presented to parallel that of the adoptive mother, who is presented as some sort of a sorceress in the different versions of the tale. As my reading will show, storytelling is a thread connecting the three women to past, present, and each other, while also influencing their future. Rapunzel is thus interpreted as a product of both women, who exists separately from them, but has also incorporated them. Rapunzel thus becomes a tale that transcends the mother-daughter relationship and becomes one about female narrations and the experience of womanhood that is unbound by normative time and space.
Nadia Koukaroudi is a fourth-year PhD researcher in the fields of Fairy Tale, Gender and Queer studies at the University of Maynooth, Ireland. She received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. The title of her PhD is “And She Lived Queerly Ever After; Queering Contemporary Anglophone Retellings”, exploring the connection between post-1990s retellings of well-known fairy tales and the concepts of queer temporalities and queer kinship. Her current interests include: Fairy Tales, retellings, and Queer Theories, especially regarding queer portrayals, queer time, and queer kinship forms.
Karen Seago, “Disenchanting ‘Sleeping Beauty’: Gaiman and Riddle’s The Sleeper and the Spindle”
Gaiman/Riddle’s iconotext The Sleeper and the Spindle takes the formal building blocks of fairy tales and subverts them to create a realistic tale built on magic but without the “enchantments” of the fairy tale as we know it. Using intertextual alllusions and a mash-up of the wonder tale with realism and realistic characterisations, motivations, behaviour and features which undercut the glamouring of the wonder tale, The Sleeper and the Spindle uses – and subverts – every single motif and character, the narrative structure and development of “Sleeping Beauty” and – to some extent of “Snow White” – but transposes them into a world where magic sits within the real and is subject to some of its laws.
Fairy tales, and in particular “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow White”, have long been criticised for their rigid gender politics, the foregrounding of female passivity, endurance and suffering as building blocks for a “happy end” and rejected as “training manual” for patriarchy. In this paper, I will show how Gaiman and Riddle’s version disenchants the tale of the “damaging” scripts of femininity and masculinity and offers an inventive reworking of its constituent features to disassemble them in terms of the male/female stereotypical gender coding of victim, hero, perpetrator – the role of beauty, age, innocence. It moves away from the focus on victim and rescuer to include and interrogate the identity of traditionally peripheral characters – the folk, dwarves, bystanders, previous victims as important contributors to the resolution.
Enchantment is at the very core of The Sleeper: it is shown to be a great danger to identity, but Gaiman and Riddle’s version disenchants role expectations and central motifs of “Sleeping Beauty”, empowering the queen to reject her wedding and continue on adventures with her dwarves.
Karen Seago taught Translation Studies at City University, from which she has now retired. Her research interests are in genre translation and comparative literary studies focusing on fairy tales, crime fiction and fantasy with publications on feminist and literary revisions of fairy tales, proto-feminist translations of fairy tales and on the reception / translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in England. She has also published widely on genre-specific translation challenges in crime fiction, crime fiction as world literature (English-Chinese iterations), feminist appropriations of the hard-boiled novel and the translation of violence in crime fiction. Her current research is in fantasy literature investigating the young fantasy heroine and in Chinese gong an (crime fiction) and its relationship with Western crime fiction.
Spirits, Divinities and Bodies (11.40-12.40)
Anna Della Subin, “Marina Warner on the Soul”
Across her work, Marina Warner has posed profound and irreverent questions about the nature of the human soul and its relationship to enchantment. From Phantasmagoria, where the soul may emerge as ectoplasm—”a kind of primordial paste” that is larval, from the Latin larvare, “to enchant”—to the alchemy of Stranger Magic, where a shaman constructs a soul for a newborn boy out of seventy types of flowers, to read Warner is to continuously meet anew this part of ourselves that is innately fantastical, otherworldly, and yet also what makes us human. In her scholarship, criticism, and more personal texts such as Inventory of a Life Mislaid, where talismanic shabtis guard her ancestors’ afterlives, Warner confronts ideas of the eternality of the soul with a characteristic sense of lightness and play. Does some spirit within ourselves live on after our deaths, and on the flipside, does it exist before our births? To inquire into the soul is also to come up against some of the most pressing political issues of the present day, such as when life begins and who has the authority to decide. What can we learn about ourselves from the metapersons—jinn, deities, angels, and revenants—that clamour to speak in Warner’s work, and how do they lead us to imagine alternative futures?
Anna Della Subin is the author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (Granta, 2022), which was shortlisted for PEN’s 2023 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Her essays, often at the intersection of religion, politics, and myth, have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The TLS, and The Nation, among many other publications. She lives in New York.
Esther Waldron, “’The mother of all things’: on the feminine divine, and a hymn to joy and life”
Marina Warner is rightly celebrated for her deconstruction of one of the ultimate female figures of all time: the Virgin Mary. Today, the mother of God continues to stand “Alone Of All Her Sex”, but what of her predecessors? What do symbolic images from the ancient mother goddess to the Black Madonna suggest or convey about our past and present? Might they represent a lost way of being that could, ultimately, re-enchant our world?
Esther Waldron studies Literature at The University of Oxford through its Department for Continuing Education. Esther is a former director of Alternatives (the centre for contemporary spirituality at St James’s, Piccadilly), was twice a board member of the Depth Psychology Alliance and led the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Mythological RoundTable Group of London. Her interests are in myths, fairy tales, the female psyche and the feminine divine.
Keynote Lecture (13.40-14.40)
Philip Terry, “Marina Warner: An A-Z”
In the tradition of writer Kevin Jackson, Philip Terry will present an A-Z of Marina Warner’s oeuvre…
Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in 2022. His version of Dante’s Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024.
Watery Ways and Travelling Tales (14.40-15.50)
Clelia Bartoli and Valentina Castagna, “Like a thread held by many hands: Stories in Transit’s achievements in Palermo”
Our contribution aims to highlight the immense treasure of experiences and achievements that Marina Warner’s storytelling workshops for the Stories in Transit project have given to the city of Palermo through the power of enchantment.
Since its very beginning (2016), Stories in Transit has been intertwined with Marina Warner’s deep interest in orature, the “rebirth” of mythic enchantment in contemporary literature (“Myth and Faerie: re-writing and recoveries”, in Signs and Wonders, Chatto & Windus, 2004) and in the circulation of tales as well as her need to take a stand and work towards a fairer treatment and representation of migrants and refugees in Europe.
SiTworkshops have involved students and teachers of the CPIA Nelson Mandela of Palermo (a second-chance public school) whose students include thousands of adults and hundreds of unaccompanied teenagers coming from African and Asian countries. Many of these workshops happened to be held at times when most students had recently arrived in Palermo and had only had exchanges with representatives of institutions inquiring about the reasons of their journeys, forcing them to keep telling reliable personal stories in accordance with what established by law; a law designed by governments on the stronger side of the border.
The use of storytelling in its various expressions allows all the artists and students involved to get to know each other, to be nourished by words and stories in many languages and to unleash joyful creativity together. We’ll try and show how the use of storytelling games allows refugees and asylum seekers participating in the workshops to find relief from obtrusive requests of personal stories and build a shelter made by stories woven together. We shall focus on the way these activities reconnect “arrivants” (Warner and Castagna, “Stories in Transit/Storie in Transito: Storytelling and arrivants’ voices in Sicily”, in C. Gualtieri (ed.), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean. Shifting Cultures in 21st-century Italy and Beyond, Peter Lang, 2018) to their cultural identity and generate a new, richer, mestizo sense of belonging, allowing them to share the joy of rediscovering the power of enchantment they experienced within their families and communities when their grandparents told them stories of heroic magic cats and ghosts in the graveyards. The involvement of young arrivants in workshops held in public areas and local schools with little children restored them to the position of community makers through words and acts of enchantment.
Thus, these workshops created by Marina and her “nexuses” (as she calls the facilitators) serve to change the (self-)representation of the people involved. The migrants are no longer victimised and pressured by having to tell and re-tell their tragic story in order to get the residence permit, receive charitable help nor do they have to beg for mercy. In the workshops, the young refugees perform as authors, creators of fantastic stories, equal protagonists.
We do not believe it a mere coincidence if many of the students who took part in them went on to further their studies or at least made less subordinate choices.
Certainly, Marina’s direct involvement together with that of Conrad Shawcross and Response was crucial in the creation of the association Giocherenda in 2017. Giocherenda is a collective of young migrants that has built and designed cooperative and storytelling games – with the help of Marina and other writers and artists – to foster communities and sanctuaries of solidarity in schools, universities, associations and with groups of people from all over the world.
We hope to gather testimonies from teachers, former students, and facilitators and build a video thanking Marina for her unique way of bringing people together, valuing everyone – from a well-known poet to the timidest student – and building a lasting sense of community through the power of words.
Clelia Bartoli is Professor of Politcs of Migration and Human Rights and director of the master’s degree in “Migration, Rights, Integration” at the Law Department, University of Palermo. She has collaborated with Marina Warner on Stories in Transit since its inception, and has actively supported the constitution of Giocherenda, a collective of young migrants who invent and animate cooperative games based on storytelling. Among her books: Razzisti per legge. L’Italia che discrimina (2012); Legal clinics in Europe. For a commitment of higher education in social justice (2016); Inchiesta a Ballarò. Il diritto visto dal margine (2019); Chile Revolts: from the Uprisings Toward the Constitutional Process (2022).
Valentina Castagna is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Palermo. She was Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2016-2017. She is a member of the board of the Centre “Migrare”, University of Palermo. Since 2015 she has worked with Marina Warner on the international project Stories in Transit in the UK and Italy.
She has published books and articles in the field of Women’s Studies and contemporary fiction, and in particular on Michèle Roberts, Marina Warner and Eva Figes. She has also published the Italian edition of some stories by Marina Warner.
Yewande Okuleye, “Whispering Waters: Enchanting World(l)ds Through Fluid Words”
Building on Yewande Okuleye’s Early Career Research Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, this contribution invites the audience on a sensory journey through enchanted Wor(l)ds, where myth, memory, and water coalesce in layered, shifting realities that dissolve fixed boundaries between past and present, human and more-than-human. Drawing from Yorùbá cosmologies and fluid ontologies, Whispering Waters explores water as a symbol of transformation—nurturing yet tumultuous, holding ancestral memory while generating new meanings. By weaving spoken word, immersive soundscapes, and movement, the experience embodies enchantment as both a process and an epistemic space, echoing Marina Warner’s exploration of storytelling as cultural memory and ecological reflection.
Enchanted waters,
Flowing myth and memory,
Heal, disrupt, renew.
Methodologically, this work engages layered poetry, rhythmic soundscapes, and embodied movement, deeply inspired by Yorùbá conceptions of water as a conduit of balance, renewal, and spiritual interconnectedness. Warner’s discussion of metamorphosis in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds provides a conceptual lens through which to consider water’s shapeshifting nature, its capacity to dissolve boundaries, and its role as a medium of transformation. Like Warner’s understanding of fairy tales as dynamic, ever-evolving narratives, Whispering Waters positions water as a living archive, carrying past stories while generating new meanings in the present. In Phantasmagoria, Warner explores the unseen forces shaping human imagination; similarly, this work attends to the spectral and resonant qualities of water as both a presence and a memory, an entity that listens as much as it speaks.
By centring deep listening and sonic relationality as epistemic practices, Whispering Waters invites a reconsideration of enchantment—not as escapism, but as a way of reimagining our entanglement with myth, history, and the more-than-human world, revealing how sound, story, and water converge to shape the landscapes of memory and perception.
Dr Yewande Okuleye is a transdisciplinary academic, poet and writer. Her journey into her creative critical practice began as a chemist working alongside Dame Anita Roddick at The Body Shop, where she championed environmental sustainability, social justice, and fair trade. This foundation laid the groundwork for a career that blends science, spirituality, and cultural storytelling. Rooted in indigenous healing practices, Jungian psychology, and Reiki Sound, her work encourages individuals to reclaim their fragmented identities—splintered by race, gender, and other social categorizations—and embrace ambiguity, contradictions, disorientation and possibilities.
Magic Worlds, Enchanted Pictures (16.15-17.45)
Ana Raquel Fernandes, “Storytelling Beyond Words: The Enchantment of Myths and Stories in Art and Literature”
This paper explores the powerful dialogue between Marina Warner’s work on myths, fairy tales, and enchantment, and Paula Rego’s visual reimagining of these same themes through her art. Warner’s extensive engagement with folklore, legends, and the transformative power of storytelling has been foundational in her exploration of how enchantment can shape both personal and collective identities. In her writings, from From the Beast to the Blonde to Stranger Magic, Warner delves into how myths and fairy tales hold the power to enchant and to critique, offering alternative possibilities and unveiling the underlying forces of culture, gender, and power.
In parallel, Paula Rego’s artwork engages with similar mythic and folkloric traditions, reinterpreting well-known stories through the lens of contemporary social critique. Rego’s illustrations, etchings, and paintings transform traditional narratives, imbuing them with a potent mix of wonder and disquiet, as she revisits tales of innocence, gender, and power with a critical eye. Like Warner, Rego’s work challenges traditional interpretations and expands the possibilities of how myth and fairy tale can be experienced in the modern world. As Marina Warner notes, Rego’s use of print art as a medium of social critique and dream-like storytelling reveals how the visual realm engages with and reshapes literary traditions.
The presentation examines how both Warner and Rego employ the notion of enchantment in their respective fields, investigating how Warner’s texts and Rego’s images engage with the same stories and symbols to create new spaces for interpretation. Drawing on Warner’s writings on the magical and the uncanny, as well as Rego’s re-sketching of traditional tales, the paper will explore how these two artists challenge and transform our understanding of myth, story, and identity, revealing the enduring enchantment that these ancient narratives hold in the present day.
Ana Raquel Fernandes is full researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies and the PI of the RG4Other Literatures and Cultures in English. She is Assistant Professor at Universidade Europeia, Lisbon. Her main research interests broach contemporary British and Portuguese literature and culture, and women’s writing. She is a team member of the FCT-funded project Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic (PTDC/LLT-LES/0858/2021), and the EU project DECONSTRUCT: Digital Education and Campaign to Stand Up and Counter Holocaust Distortion and Misinformation (SEP-210949884), funded under the programme CERV-EQUAL.
Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (Goldsmiths), “Blodeuwedd: She’s neither owls nor flowers”
Blodeuwedd is a mythical goddess from the “fourth branch” of the oldest Welsh literary texts The Mabinogi. She was conjured by a magician from flowers (the flowers of oak, broom, and meadowsweet) but then, as punishment, turned into an owl.
Incarnating Blodeuwedd, through a solo performance, becomes the channel to bring to light, exorcise and heal wounds of domestic trauma, in acts of alchemical transformation. Statistics on domestic violence are meshed with my own poetic writing and printed on plates that refer to the pattern, by Christopher Dresser, made famous in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) (based on myth of Blodeuwedd).
The performance material draws upon my expertise in Butoh, which as a performance philosophy of the body, seeks for transformation and metamorphosis of the body, through acts of becoming something other. Many of my past solo works explore female archetypes through mythical and fairytale figures and revolve around questions relating to spirituality and sexuality.
A version of this performance can be found on https://www.rotie.co.uk/blodeuwedd. Formative Research writing on the work can be found on https://www.rotie.co.uk/blodeuweddresearch.
My performance and writing for Blodeuwedd also draws upon performance art history and looks back to the pioneering work of 1970s feminist artists, particularly those associated with so called “Goddess Spirituality” and “the potential of myth for feminist struggles and for the role of mythical imagery in the construction of both Individual and collective identities.” (Rebecchi, 2023). Women artists of this time created rituals, inspired by “goddess imagery” to address socio-political injustices, ecocide and gender violence.
My relation to Marina Warner’s writing dates to a performance in 2002 called Feral, based on inspiration From the Beast to the Blonde. Marina attended the performance and was very much appreciative of my work and her writing has influenced nearly all of my solo works.
Marie Gabrielle Rotie has, for 30 years, worked as an artist/choreographer and performer. In 2020 she choreographed The Northman directed by Robert Eggers. In 2021 she received commissions for site specific choreography Mujokan for Kew Gardens in London and a solo for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 2022 she worked as the movement choreographer for Netflix’s The Witcher series 3. In 2023 she worked with Robert Eggers on Nosferatu as movement choreographer mainly working with Lily Rose Depp. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths University of London. www.rotie.co.uk.
Padma Viswanathan (Arkansas), “Ensorcelled”
One characteristic of an enchanted castle is that it is much larger inside than it appears when you’re standing outside it, waiting to be let in. Its exterior might be quite modest, so you have no way of knowing that, within, chambers of wonders open one into the other in a labyrinth whose endpoint cannot be determined, maybe not even glimpsed. A good working hypothesis is that its dimensions are infinite.
I first met Marina Warner at her home, at her invitation. That January day, the house, tucked in the pocket of a Kentish Town cul-de-sac, was marked by a turquoise door and a winter garden, three early irises’ yellow tongues uncurled to lap at the meagre English sun. Warner’s work had long been a touchstone for me, a model for the liberatory ways of thinking and writing I was pursuing in my own work and in my teaching, where critical analysis and imagination supply keys for each other’s locks.
I write this now as a guest in her home. My room is the colour of a dusk horizon or a stone fruit—a giant peach. It is stacked beneath her famous aerie, depicted in photographs, and above the pomegranate-painted kitchen. Her study was once on the ground floor, “a bit like writing in a cave,” says the sorceress herself, but she turned the house upside down, once upon a time, as an accommodation to family life, and ideas flow through it now as though gravity-borne, down past Paula Rego Jane Eyres, past sea sponges, past ex-votos, past a set of Ilia’s teacups, each handle a swan billing the rim. Such objects, we have learned from her books, can be portals onto possible infinities, seen not just through her eyes but—as she would prefer—through our own.
Padma Viswanathan’s novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations in Granta, BRICK, and elsewhere. Full-length translations include São Bernardo, by Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand, by Djamila Ribeiro. Her most recent books are Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime and The Charterhouse of Padma, a novel. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas—Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.
Conversation with Marina Warner (17.45-18.40)
Clare Finburgh Delijani works at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written many books and articles on theatre from the French-speaking world and UK, including special issues of Théâtre/Public on postcolonial theatre (2023); Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage (2017); Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015, with Carl Lavery) and Jean Genet (2012, with David Bradby). She is editor of A New History of Theatre in France (2024) and is currently holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, during which she is writing on theatre that addresses France’s colonial past, and postcolonial present.
Natalie Katsou is a theatre and performance lecturer, a director and a writer. Her postdoctoral research at Goldsmiths investigates “Performing Asylum: Embodiment and the Law in the UK and in Greece” (Postdoctoral Bridging Award 2023).
Natalie had her MFA in Theatre Directing at East 15 Acting School (Minotis Scholarship by MIET), and her PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Theatre at the University of Athens. She teaches at Goldsmiths, London Metropolitan University, and Rose Bruford. She is the co-founder and artistic director of En Spoudi Theatre Company (Athens, 2006-09) and Operaview (London, 2014-17). She has published five poetry books and four theatre plays. www.nataliekatsou.com.
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