Folklore & Women: The power of folklore in reclaiming female stories

Women's stories have often been hidden or overlooked, with history mostly told from men’s perspectives. But women have always shared their stories – through oral traditions and conversations among themselves. Think of women’s salons in 17th and 18th century France where modern fairytales were born, or the deeper meanings behind tales of selkies and sirens. 

This talk explores how folklore preserves and shares women’s experiences, through stories about monsters, mermaids, and marriage plots. We’ll journey around the world to meet the women in these tales and the women who collected them. By uncovering these forgotten stories, we gain a better understanding of history and discover new ways to imagine the future. 

Doors open at 6pm, talk starts at 6.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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 Speaker Bio:

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specialises in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focusing on the gothic and the supernatural. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has spoken at Hay Festival and from the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph, Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

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This talk is 16+

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Cambridge Junction, Clifton Way, Cambridge, United Kingdom