Our Spring Seminar Series continues next Tuesday, 10 March 2026, at 4pm GMT, with a special panel event, Women, Cultural Politics, and Material Production.
We are thrilled to welcome Irina Malinina, Julita Oetojo, and Simona Valeriani to discuss their work on women’s material production and its role in cultural politics. The speakers will be presenting on the following topics:
- Julita Oetojo, University of Bonn – “Weaving Agency: Women, Heritage, and Cultural Resilience in Southeast Asia and the Global South”
- Irina Malinina, GCAS College Dublin – “Against the State, Through Sisterhood: Feminist Anarchy and the Resilience of Post-Soviet Women’s Collectives”
- Simona Valeriani, V&A – “Fragments of Labour: Women and the Cultural Politics of Mosaic Making in the 19th Century”
We hope that bringing these speakers together will enable us to ask questions across about the significance of women’s material production across geographies and chronologies and hopefully find exciting synergies between their research projects. The event will operate as a traditional panel, featuring three twenty-minute papers and a Q&A session at the end of the event.
We are also very excited to share that Kate Smith from the University of Birmingham has agreed to Chair the event. As some of you may know, much of Kate’s work focuses on how historical actors produced, consumed, and derived meaning from the material world, including her most recent monograph Keeping Hold: A Cultural and Social History of Possession in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2026). Kate is expertly placed to chair, and we are grateful to have her on board.
About the Speakers
Julita Oetojo is a doctoral researcher in Asian and Islamic Art History at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research focuses on women’s textile practices in eastern Indonesia, particularly ikat weaving, examined through art historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. Her work explores material culture, gender, cultural memory, and political agency in Global South contexts.
Irina Malinina is a doctoral candidate in Social Sciences at GCAS College Dublin. Her research interests include post-Soviet studies, the sociology of emotions, the sociology of migration, and decolonial and postcolonial studies. Irina previously worked in the field of Educational Studies, in which she holds a doctorate.
Simona Valeriani previously graduated in Architecture and, after attending the first year of the Scuola di Specializzazione in Restauro dei Monumenti at the University of Genoa (Italy), was awarded a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft to pursue a PhD programme in History of Art, Building Archaeology and Theory of Conservation (TU Berlin-University of Bamberg). She joined the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme in 2012, having worked for several years in the Economic History Department at the London School of Economics. Her recent work focuses on Victorian Britain, and has produced a number of publications, including the monograph The Royal Albert Hall, Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2025). Simona’s current research project is concerned with the important role plaid by women in the 19th c. British mosaic revival.
We are extremely grateful that our speakers and chair have agreed to share their expertise with us and hope you will consider joining us for this fascinating panel.
To sign-up, please click here to be taken to our event registration page.