This festschrift honours the work of Liz Stanley, whose scholarship has been highly influential in opening new paths in feminist research across the human sciences. Bringing together contributions from scholars shaped by her thinking, the volume reflects both on the intellectual reach of her work and on its continuing capacity to inspire feminist inquiry.
The chapters engage with key strands of Stanley’s intellectual legacy, including feminist epistemologies, the auto/biographical I, letters and correspondences, the epistolarium, and her concept of archigraphics as a way of opening the “black box” of the archive. Through a wide range of studies, contributors explore her challenge to mainstream sociology, her distinctive approach to feminist research with texts, her foundational role in auto/biography studies, her systematic analysis of letters and correspondences, and her pioneering work on archives, temporality, and the writing of history. Collectively, the contributions trace an intellectual lineage and demonstrate the enduring relevance and generative power of Stanley’s scholarship across disciplines.
This volume is intended for scholars and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities, particularly those working in feminist theory, qualitative methods, archival studies, auto/biography, and the sociology of knowledge.
This festschrift honours the work of Liz Stanley, whose scholarship has been highly influential in opening new paths in feminist research across the human sciences. With contributions from scholars shaped by her thinking, the volume reflects both on the intellectual reach of her work and on its capacity to inspire feminist inquiry.
Foreword Introduction: Liz Stanley and the Power of Texts: A Feminist
Sociological Tribute Part I: Challenging Sociology
1. On Provocation
2. How
we feel: the Mass Observation Archive, Elias and doing sociology Part II:
Doing Feminist Research with Texts
3. Beyond the cookbook: Feminist research,
personal narratives, and scholarly insights
4. A Stanleyian Toolkit Approach:
Learning to Read and Write with Feminist Fractured Foundationalism Part III:
Thinking Auto/Biographically
5. Wave~Diffractions. Revisiting the Untimely
Academic Novellas in the Anthropocene
6. (Un)alienated Groundings: Feminist
and Queer Revisions of Indian Personal Narratives
7. Relating with past
lives: cultural historian as a biographer Part IV: Reading and Rewriting
Letters
8. The stroke of my pen: On transferring the past into the present
9.
Learning and Teaching about the Epistolarium in a Foreign Language Degree in
Brazil: A Correspondence Between a Teacher, Her Two Students, and the Author
They Read
10. Emergent properties in the letters of Nancy Nolan and Leonard
Woolf: produce something good for yourself and possibly at some time good
for other people Part V: Problematising the Archive
11. Fan letter from a
sociologist of secrets in the archive
12. Women mathematicians
epistolaria: between the personal and the scientific Afterword: Toward
Feminist Textualities Yet to Come
Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/they) is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University, Fellow at Durham Universitys Institute for Medical Humanities, and co-founder of the Institutional Ethnography Network. Their research addresses inequalities in higher education, sociology of the gut, and feminist knowledge production, primarily through Institutional Ethnography.
Maria Tamboukou is a scholar in Gender and Feminist Studies and has held professorial roles in the UK, Sweden, and Australia. Her work spans feminist epistemologies, narrative inquiry, and archival research. She has published widely, including her latest book, Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies (2025).
