Cities Lauren Elkin - GSA Friday lecture

The flâneur has captivated our imagination at least since the 19th century; something about this lone figure strolling the city, taking in the theatre of urban life, is incredibly compelling. We all fancy ourselves flâneurs, out for a stroll in the city. But could there be a flâneuse, when women have not had the same freedom to walk and look in the city? This lecture will look at some of the great writing on cities by women - Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Martha Gellhorn, Sophie Calle - and make a case for the radical, subversive power of a woman on foot in the city. As part of CCA's cities ongoing programme and in collaboration with writer Laura Edbrook.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus), and the co-author, with Scott Esposito, of The End of Oulipo? (Zer0 Books). She is also the co-translator of Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau: a Life (with Charlotte Mandell, Yale UP), recently long-listed for a PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and is currently translating Michelle Perrot's Histoire de chambres, also for Yale. Her essays and criticism have appeared in, among others, The Guardian, The New York Times, frieze, the FT, and The White Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, where she also co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing. Originally from New York, she lives between Liverpool and Paris.