With the support of the TPO Foundation and UNIGEM, on December 3, 2025, Dr Slađana Stamenković delivered a lecture titled Women Who Wander: Flâneuse in Anglophone Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad.

The concept of the urban walker, stroller, or wanderer – known as the flâneur – became established in literary history as early as the nineteenth century (when it was first popularized in France and subsequently across Europe and Western civilization). More recently, literary theory has turned its attention to the female version of this well-known archetype, as critics such as Lauren Elkin (2017) introduced the term flâneuse, referring to the archetype of the aimless female walker or wanderer who moves through urban spaces. Walking within the framework of what is known as flânerie involves roaming city streets without a specific goal or final destination, while simultaneously bearing witness to the development of culture and urban communities in the centers of different societies. In the twenty-first century, within the frameworks of gender studies and feminist theory, the flâneuse becomes a witness not only to a specific historical moment and its cultural circumstances, but also to the problem of the absence of female wanderers in the history of literature and culture. She also becomes a quiet participant in events, rather than merely an anonymous, detached observer, as was the case with her male counterpart. Critics such as Annabel Ebbs, Kerry Andrews, Nina Bennett, Amy Hamilton, Katie Baker, and Naomi Walker consistently emphasize the implicit appropriation of street space and urban gathering places in which, prior to the twentieth century, only men could realize themselves as observing wanderers. In Anglophone literature, the archetype of the flâneuse is traced primarily from the period of modernism onward (although examples appear sporadically in earlier periods, most notably the Victorian era), most prominently in the prose of Virginia Woolf. Women who wander the streets of London appear in Woolf’s essays such as A Room of One’s Own and “Street Haunting”, as well as in novels including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Voyage Out. In addition to Woolf, writers such as Martha Gellhorn, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Nan Shepherd, Flora Thompson, Joan Didion, Jeanette Winterson, Rachel Kushner, Jennifer Egan, and many others also explore the female version of the archetype of the urban wanderer. In all of their works, women who wander claim physical and cultural space (and at times virtual space as well), symbolically exposing the misogynistic foundations of social environments in which female walkers, observers, and participants are often unwelcome and largely absent.

Slađana Stamenković is employed at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad as a teaching assistant with a PhD in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on contemporary Anglophone literature, primarily American literature, as well as postmodern and posthumanist theory. In addition, her work explores intersections between literature and media studies, popular culture studies, gender studies, and, more recently, ecocriticism. She is a member of the Serbian Association for Anglo-American Studies.