EDDA researchers Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iceland, Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Assistant Professor of Gender History, and Þorgerður Þorvaldsdóttir, a Specialist in Gender and History, have been accorded a special project grant by the Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannis). The project, which is entitled “Following Women‘s Civil Rights: Social and Cultural Study of Women as Political Agents, 1915–2015”, is led by Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir and supported by EDDA. Rannis administers the main public competitive funds in the fields of research, innovation, education and culture in Iceland. Out of 173 applications this year, 33 project were selected and thereof only three projects within the field of humanities and the arts.

The project on women’s civil rights focuses on the cultural history of Icelandic women as political agents in the 20th and 21st centuries. It examines how Icelandic women, in all their diversity, wrote about and created their own space to deal with visible and invisible barriers that prevented their participation as full members of society. The aim of the project is to show that Icelandic women took an active part in shaping contemporary Iceland and, thereby, transform their own lives and power structures within society.