Members

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Margot Gayle Backus

Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston. She was 2014-15 Queens University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her books include Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), and The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Duke University Press, Post-Contemporary Interventions, 1999). With Joseph Valente, she has co-authored The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Indiana University Press, 2020). Her current book project is tentatively entitled Keeping James Joyce Out of Oscar Wilde’s Trousers: Ulysses, Open Secrets and the Cold War.

Giulia Bruna Email Profile Page

Giulia Bruna is Postdoctoral Fellow at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, working on the project “European Local-colour Fiction in Transnational Contexts, 1830-1914,” funded by the Dutch research council NWO. She holds an MA and a doctorate from University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, where she also worked as a lecturer. She has published a monograph on Synge entitled J.M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival (Syracuse UP, 2017) and essays on the Irish Revival, Revival travel writing, and Irish periodical culture in The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Irish Studies Review, Studies in Travel Writing. She also co-edited a podcast series with UCD Scholarcast, and co-curated an exhibition on Thomas MacDonagh for UCD Library. As part of her NWO-funded project, she has an article on the European and transatlantic reception of Scottish local-colour writer Ian Maclaren forthcoming in Translation and Literature and is currently researching London-based Irish writer and periodical columnist Erminda Rentoul Esler.

John Beddoes Email

My recent presentations include papers delivered at the AGM of Erasmus Darwin House in Litchfield in 2016, the Maria Edgeworth Literary Festival in Edgeworthstown, Ireland, in 2017, and paper given at the “Worlds of Maria Edgeworth” Conference, at York University’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies in 2018. At the 2019 BARS International Conference in Nottingham my paper was entitled “Letters from the Pneumatic Medical Institution : The Life and Fantasies of Anna Beddoes. I was also honoured to chair a panel on Maria Edgeworth. I have collected and researched over 500 unpublished letters and manuscripts associated with Dr Thomas Beddoes and Anna Beddoes, nee Edgeworth, as well as discovering an original portrait of Anna. I am in the process of compiling a biography of Anna Beddoes and her daughters. My latest Paper is entitled “Anna, Emmeline and Maria Edgeworth: Three Sisters of the Enlightenment.” To be given at the Foundling Hospital. London to the Women’s Study Group on November 23rd 2019

Emily Bloom

Emily Bloom is Associate Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. This book chronicles the emergence of the British Broadcasting Corporation as a significant promotional platform and aesthetic influence for Irish modernism. Her current research explores the role of deafness and hearing loss in shaping Irish literary history. 

Deirdre Brady   Email

Deirdre Brady currently teaches at the University of Limerick having completed her PhD in 2014. Her research focus is on Irish literary coteries of the mid-twentieth century. In 2015, she published an essay entitled “Modernist Presses and the Gayfield Press” in Bibliologica. She is currently writing a monograph entitled: “Literary coteries and the Irish Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958)”, and her recent publications include articles in the New Hibernia Review (Autumn 2017) and in Irish Migration Studies in Latin America (January 2018). Her research interests include Irish female print culture, women writers, writers’ networks, private printing presses and the history of the book in the twentieth century.

Anne Byrne        Email     Website

Dr Anne Byrne is a sociologist with a creative interest in narrative, biography, art and visuality. She has published on women in Irish society, feminist research methodologies and pedagogies, gender, identity, inequality, singleness, stigma, rural development and on the historiography of anthropological research in rural Ireland in the 1930s. Interested in obscure lives, subjectivities and identities, her current research, Narratives of Ireland, concerns community and individual biographies and stories as held in everyday artifacts, letters, diaries, paintings and archives in early to mid twentieth century Ireland. Some examples of written work include: Byrne, A. 2018. Autobiography, Chocolate Creams and Letterpress Printing in Virginia Woolf Bulletin , 57 (1): 24-31. ‘A Passion for Books: The early letters of Nancy Nolan to Leonard Woolf (1943-1944)’ in Virginia Woolf Miscellany , No 86, Fall 2014/Winter 2015, pp32-34, Southern Connecticut State University, USA.

Susan Byrne Email

My research looks at women’s experience of the Free State justice system (1922-37). Finding women’s voices in the prison system, or those of women who came into contact with the justice system as victims or perpetrators, is difficult. If any members have any leads to information, I’d love to hear from them.

Theo Joy Campbell

Theo Joy Campbell is a PhD student in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They previously completed an MA at Villanova University, where they wrote a thesis focusing on the memoir of Bridget Hedderman, a nurse working in the Aran Islands from 1903-1922. Theo’s research sits at the intersection of folklore and medical humanities; they are particularly interested in how gendered assumptions impact depictions of supposed tensions between folk medicine and “scientific” medicine in nineteenth and early twentieth century writing.

David Clare   Website

Dr. David Clare is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, UL. His books include the monograph Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and the edited collection The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft (Carysfort/Peter Lang, 2018), and his past and forthcoming publications have covered various women writers from Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, including Mary Balfour, Somerville & Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Manning, Christine Longford, Maura Laverty, and Lizzie Nunnery. Dr. Clare was co-organiser of the Irish Women Playwrights and Theatremakers Conference held at MIC in June 2017 and he is curator of the online database, www.ClassicIrishPlays.com.

Rachel Clifford

Rachel Clifford is a PhD student and Tutor within the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Rachel graduated with a first-class Honours degree in English and History and was awarded the MIC College Medal for Excellence in English for achieving first place in English. Rachel’s PhD thesis is titled ‘Good Grief! Changing attitudes to Childhood Grief in Children’s Literature’ and studies a range of childhood losses in children’s literature. Analysed through the lens of literary trauma theory, it explores how childhood grief is portrayed in children’s literature and examines how societal attitudes to childhood grief and trauma has developed over the course of the last century. Rachel’s research interests include Children’s Literature; Trauma Theory; Childhood Grief; Child Migrancy; Absence and Loss.

Lucy Collins          Profile

Lucy Collins is an Associate Professor in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. She holds a BA in English and History from Trinity College Dublin, where she also completed a PhD on modern Irish poetry. She was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship to Harvard University and has since published widely on women poets from Ireland, Britain and America. Her critical anthology, Poetry by Women in Ireland 1870–1970, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, includes more than 180 poems by fifteen women of the period, demonstrating the range of their achievement and the lasting value of their work. Her most recent book is a monograph, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool, 2015).

Dr Caroline Copeland    Email Twitter

Dr Caroline Copeland is a literary editor, author, and researcher. She was awarded a PhD on the Irish novelist Katherine Cecil Thurston in 2007, entitled The Sensational Katherine Cecil Thurston: An investigation into the life and publishing history of a New Woman author. Caroline is currently completing a biography and publishing history of Thurston – hopefully with a much shorter title. With over twenty years of experience, she has taught Publishing and Book History at undergraduate and postgraduate level at universities across the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and China.  Caroline was a senior lecturer and led the MSc Programme in Publishing at Edinburgh Napier University; where she was also instrumental in establishing the MA in Creative Writing; and was a Director of the School of Arts and Creative Industries. She is an experienced PhD supervisor. Her wider research interests include contemporary publishing; early twentieth century and contemporary women’s writing; Transatlantic publishing connections; and the history of publishing in Scotland and Ireland.

Marguérite Corporaal  Email

Marguérite Corporaal is Associate Professor of British Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she chairs the interdisciplinary research group (Trans)national Europe. Corporaal was the principal investigator and coordinator of the research project Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847-1921, for which she obtained a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (2010-2015). Furthermore, she is the director of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies, funded by Dutch research council NWO (2014-2017), and the Gate Theatre Research Network, funded by NWO (2017-2020). Among her international publications are: Relocated Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847-1870 (Syracuse University Press, 2017); Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (co-edited, forthcoming Palgrave, 2017); Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory (co-edited, Peter Lang 2017); Recollecting Hunger: An Anthology (co-authored, Irish Academic Press, 2012), Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (co-edited, Peter Lang, 2014). Corporaal currently researches Irish local colour fiction from the Revival period, including female authors such as Jane Barlow, Charlotte O’Connor Eccles, Julia Crotty, Emily Lawless, Katharine Tynan, Mary Tench.

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa Email

Dr Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wollongong. Her research is situated at the intersections of imperial/colonial, gender, emotions and violence histories. Transnational in scope, it spans Ireland, Britain, Australia and the USA. Within that, she pays particular attention to how women used militancy and violence for feminist and anti-colonial nationalist ends, as well as on the controversial memory of those women in moments that are deemed post-feminist and post-colonial. She is the author of Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890-1920 (Routledge 2018) and co-author of Remembering Women’s Activism (with Vera Mackie, Routledge 2019). Her current project on how women preserve and archive their own memory has been awarded a National Library of Australia Fellowship. She is the Deputy Editor of Women’s Historical Review and committee member of the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Chris Cusack Email Website

Chris Cusack is a researcher and lecturer at Radboud University, the Netherlands. His PhD, awarded in 2018, focused on the memory of the Great Famine in Irish and Irish-diasporic fiction published between 1892 and 1921. He has published widely on this topic, including essays on Famine texts by women writers such as L.T. Meade, Louise Field, Mildred Darby, Mary Synon, and others. He is currently working on a project on Irish American and German American regionalisms.

Tricia Cusack Email

Now retired I taught at the Open University, Cardiff Metropolitan University and the University of Birmingham. My research focuses on how visual art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embodies ideas about cultural and national identities. My work is cross–disciplinary, with reference especially to history and literature.

Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures was co-edited with Síghle Bhreathnach–Lynch (2003, reprint. 2018). My book Riverscapes and National Identities (Syracuse University Press) was published in 2010 (pb. 2019), followed by two edited collections: Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (pb, 2017) and Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space (pb, 2017). Among book chapters is: ‘Looking Over the Ship Railings: The Colonial Voyage and the Empty Ocean in Empire Marketing Board posters’, in Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History eds,Courtney J. Campbell, Allegra Giovine and Jennifer Keating (London University Press, 2019).

Articles include: ‘“This pernicious tea drinking habit”: Women, Tea and Respectability in Nineteenth–Century Ireland’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies; ‘“The Brightons of Ireland”: The Creation of the Irish Seaside and the Anglo–Irish Civilizing Mission’, Nineteenth Century Studies; ‘Bourgeois Leisure on the Seine: Impressionism, Forgetting and National Identity in the French Third Republic’, National Identities; ‘Janus and Gender: Women and the Nation’s Backward Look’, Nations and Nationalism. Articles also in: Art History; New Formations; Irish ReviewVisual Culture in Britain and Journal of Tourism History.

My book, The Reading Figure in Irish Art in the long Nineteenth Century, will be published by Anthem Press in November 2021.

Orlaith Darling EMAIL

Orlaith Darling is a Ph.D. candidate in Trinity College School of English where she is researching contemporary short fiction by Irish women. In particular, she is interested in how contemporary writers relate to history, engage with foundational ideologies of Irish society, and challenge gendered traditions. She previously completed an M.Sc. in Literature and Modernity at the University of Edinburgh and read English Literature and History in Trinity College Dublin, where she was elected to scholarship in 2016. She has published with Estudios Irlandeses AEDI, FORUM and Rejoinder, and is interested in the intersection of women’s studies, contemporary politics and
literature.

Elke D’hoker Website


Elke D’hoker is professor of English literature at the University of Leuven, where she is also co-director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies and of the modern literature research group, MDRN. She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary British and Irish fiction, with special emphasis on the short story, women’s writing and narrative theory. She is the author of a critical study on John Banville (Rodopi, 2004) and of Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Palgrave, 2016). She has also (co-)edited several essay collections, including Unreliable Narration (De Gruyter, 2008), Irish Women Writers (Lang, 2011), Mary Lavin (Irish Academic Press, 2013), The Irish Short Story (Lang, 2015), The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture (EUP, 2021), and Ethel Colburn Mayne. Selected Stories (EER, 2021). She is vice-president of EFACIS and a member of the editorial board of RISE (Review of Irish Studies in Europe).

Dara Downey        Email

Dara Downey lectures in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and on the Trinity Access Programme. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave 2014) and co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). She is Vice Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies, and the Editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (https://irishgothichorror.wordpress.com/). She is currently working on a monograph on servants and slaves in American gothic fiction and popular culture.

Kate Doyle Email

Affiliation: Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.

Biography: Kate is a PhD researcher in English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Her areas of specialty are literary theory, ancient literature, medieval literature, and romantic literature. Currently, her PhD research is focusing on the representations of the feminine in ancient and medieval literature through a post-structuralist lens. She is using a combination of linguistic, philosophical, and feminist literary theories to analyse the effect of gendered misrepresentation on societal paradigms. 

Michelle Dunne Profile Email Twitter

Dr Michelle Dunne is a bilingual independent researcher. She holds a B.A. (Double Honours) in Modern Irish and English, an M.A. in Modern Irish from Maynooth University and a PhD in Modern Irish (Folklore) from Dublin City University. She has worked bilingually throughout her career to date. She was awarded the Ríocht na Midhe Postgraduate Prize for Research in 2018 for her research on commemorative minor placenames in the Meath-Westmeath region of Ireland. Her work has featured in many online and print publications (Irish-language and English language) and she has presented at various seminars and conferences in both Irish and English. She is passionate about the preservation and promotion of the Irish language and all aspects of Ireland’s culture and history. Michelle’s research interests include women’s folklore, women’s history, Irish folklore and the Irish-language dialects, literature and (minor) placenames of Ireland.

Viviana Fiorentino Email

Viviana Fiorentino is Italian and lives in Belfast where she teaches Italian literature. In 2018, she was awarded two Italian poetry prizes. Her poems, short stories and translations (Irish women poets) have appeared in international literature webzines and magazines (as Nazione Indiana, Poetarum Silva, Carteggi Letterari, Larosadipiu, Brumaria, FourXFour NI Poetry Journal, Poethead, The Blue Nib, Paris Lit Up). She published in international webzines, journals, in anthology (Dedalus Press, 2019); a poetry collection (Controluna Press) and a novel (Transeuropa Publishing House). She co-founded two activist poetry initiatives (‘Sky, you are too big’,‘Letters with wings’) and Le Ortique (forgotten women artists blog).

Deirdre Flynn  (Network Team)

Dr Deirdre Flynn is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. A former Teaching Fellow in the School of English, Drama, Creative Writing and Film at University College Dublin, she has lectured at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level in English Literature, and Drama and Theatre Studies. She recently completed a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway researching the representation of female middle age in Post-Celtic Tiger fiction. Her research interests include World Literature, Postmodernism, Murakami, Irish Studies and Feminism. She worked professionally as a journalist for a number of years and is the former Network Chair of Sibéal, the postgraduate and Early Career Network for Feminist and Gender Studies and founder of the Sibéal journal.

Carleigh Garcia

I am studying at Mary Immaculate College in the English Language and Literature department: MA by Research Thesis, DA English Language and Literature MIC, RA Irish Institute for Catholic Studies. Research interests: shame, affect theory, Catholicism, and Irish literature.

Suz Garrard   Twitter

Dr Suz Garrard is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin, funded by the Irish Research Council. Her current project explores the representation of Irish emigrants and emigration in Dublin and Belfast newspapers throughout the long nineteenth century. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2017, and an MLitt (Distinction) in Women, Writing and Gender from St Andrews in 2013. She also has a BA (Hons) in English and History (2012) from Southwestern University. Her research interests include the creation of social identity in Victorian periodicals and newspapers, working-class writing, and nineteenth-century women’s poetry.

Genoveffa Giambona Email

Genoveffa Giambona is a Doctoral Researcher and Sessional Lecturer at the University of Reading, School of English Literature. Her research focuses on depictions of Irishness and identity in contemporary Irish fiction. In particular, she has focused on disjointed and fragmented narrative as a projection of displacement and uprootedness as seen against a postcolonial backdrop, both in terms of colonial past and post-independence legacies. She has a particular interest in the intersection between nation, identity and gender in fiction by both female and male writers. She has published on Irish and postcolonial literature and female writing.

Tara Giddens        Email

Tara Giddens is a PhD candidate with the School of English, Irish, and Communication at the University of Limerick. Tara’s thesis, “Investigating the Irish New Woman: Tracing Journalists in Media and Fiction” compares the Irish New Woman journalist with her fictional counterpart between the 1880s and 1920s. Currently, she is focusing on Irish-Canadian journalist Kathleen “Kit” Coleman who performed her national and gender identity, to maintain readership, in her popular column the “Woman’s Kingdom”.
Tara received her BA in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, at Western Washington University, (Bellingham, WA) in 2009. In 2015, she completed her MA in Irish Literature at Maynooth University. After receiving the AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) Faculty PhD Teaching Fellowship in 2016, she started her PhD under the supervision of Dr Tina O’Toole.

Brian Haman

Dr Brian Haman is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He completed a PhD and MA at the University of Warwick, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. His ongoing scholarly research includes a focus on literary and philosophical representations of travel in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with an emphasis on the Anglo-Irish and German contexts. A second research strand examines Irish women’s travel writing about Asia (understood broadly). Since 2017, he has been an editor of The Shanghai Literary Review.

Niamh Hamill Email

Dr. Niamh Hamill is a lecturer in Irish history and literature. In 2015, her work She was a poetess- the world of Mary Ann Allingham 1820-1836 was awarded the Drew University prize for best interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation. Niamh is the Director of the Institute of Study Abroad Ireland, an organization that provides educational study trips for American schools, colleges and universities in Donegal. Niamh is also the director of the Drew University Transatlantic Connections Conference, which takes place in Bundoran each January. Her work is focused on promoting the history and culture of Donegal to a global audience.

Heidi Hansson Email

Heidi Hansson is Professor of English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her main research interest is women’s literature, and she has previously published in the fields of postmodern romance, Irish women’s literature, nineteenth-century travel writing and northern studies. Among her works on Irish topics are a full-length examination of the nineteenth-century writer Emily Lawless, Emily Lawless 1845–1913: Writing the Interspace (Cork University Press, 2007), the edited collection New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose (Cork University Press, 2008) and Fictions of the Irish Land War (Peter Lang, 2014), edited together with Professor James H. Murphy. She has also written about contemporary Irish writers such as Anne Enright and William Trevor and is currently finalising an edited collection on Ireland and the North.

Elaine Harrington

My name is Elaine Harrington and I am Special Collections Librarian at UCC Library, University College Cork.

This role includes facilitating user engagement of reference, early printed books and unique and distinctive collection by focusing on how this interaction occurs and the necessary skills required for effective engagement. My research interests include libraries in a historical context and how the use of emerging technologies in a Special Collections’ context may provide different collaborative opportunities. I am a founding member of The Sonic Histories of Cork City research project and I was the recipient of CONUL’s 2018 research award for ““Listening to Libraries’ Sounds Today for the Library of Tomorrow.” Since 2022 I’ve has been Treasurer of the Library Association of Ireland’s Rare Books Group and in 2020 I chaired CONUL’s Unique & Distinctive Collections Group.

Sean Hewitt      Profile      Twitter

Seán Hewitt is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He read English at Girton College, Cambridge, and received his PhD, on modernism and the works of J.M. Synge, from the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool. His research interests focus on the interrelations of natural science, religion, and literature during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. He is also a poet, and won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2016 and the Resurgence Prize in 2017.

Heather Ingman

Heather Ingman is Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College, the University of Dublin. Her most recent publications include Strangers to Themselves: Ageing in Irish Writing (Palgrave 2018), Irish Women’s Fiction from Edgeworth to Enright (Irish Academic Press, 2013), A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender (Ashgate, 2007). She is co-editor, with Clíona Ó Gallchoir, of A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

Emmet Jackson Website

Emmet Jackson is a part-time distance Ph.D. Candidate in the Archaeology Department, University of Exeter. He is researching the history and development of Egyptology in Ireland in the long 19th century and the public and private collections of Egyptian antiquities in Ireland. One of his focuses is the unpublished travel documents of Lady Harriet Kavanagh and other notable Irish women travellers to Egypt. He is a trustee for the Association of Studies for Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE) and a member of the Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (INMENAS)

Bonnie Lander Johnson
Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge. Her academic books on early modern literature include Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (CUP), Blood Matters (UPenn) and Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare’s England (CUP). Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in HOWL, Hinterland, The Brick Lane Bookshop Anthology, Dappled ThingsThe Belfast Review and First Things. In 2025 her non-fiction book Vanishing Landscapes will be published by Hodder and Stoughton. With Julia Meszaros, she edits the multi-volume series of forgotten writing by Catholic women, Catholic Women Writers (CUAP)

Christine Kinealy

Since completing her PhD at Trinity College in Dublin, Christine Kinealy has worked in educational and research institutes in Ireland, England and, more recently, in the U.S. In September 2013, Professor Kinealy was appointed the founding Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Professor Kinealy has published extensively on modern Ireland, her books including This Great Calamity. The Great Famine in Ireland (1995 and 2007), Frederick Douglass and Ireland. In his own words (2018) and Black Abolitionists in Ireland (2020). In 2017, she received an Emmy for her contribution to the documentary, ‘The Great Hunger and the Irish Diaspora’.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra Website

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She directs Yellow Nineties 2.0, a site dedicated to the study of 8 fin de siècle little magazines.

Karen Ievers Website

 Karen Ievers is originally from the United States where she studied at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her interest in Irish history began when she married her husband, Norman, in 2011, and began organising the Ievers family archives. Karen has recently begun collecting 19th century books, letters, and other antique collectibles relating to Irish/English women writers and hopes to one day open an exhibition at her husband’s ancestral home, Mount Ievers Court, in Co. Clare. Karen’s published articles include: “Edward Austen Knight’s Descendants in Ireland” – co-written with Dr. Sophia Hillan & published in the 2018 Jane Austen Society Report, “Lost and Found: The Ievers/Hill Discovery & Jane Austen’s Irish Family” – co-written with Dr. Sophia Hillan & published in Issue 59 of the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation’s “Pride & Possibilities” magazine, and “Rare photographs of Oscar Wilde and Family Unearthed on eBay” for the Irish Times (6th Sept., 2019). 

Maria Johnston

Maria Johnston holds a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin and is a poetry critic, editor and teacher. She has presented papers at many conferences in Ireland and abroad and has published widely on modern and contemporary poetry. An established reader of contemporary poetry, her reviews and essays have appeared in a range of publications including, most recently, Poetry Ireland ReviewPoetry ReviewIrish TimesSymbiosis and the Dublin Review of Books. She has also contributed essays to the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013), Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018), and A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is the co-editor of Irish Women Poets Rediscovered (Cork University Press, 2021).   

Anne Jamison     Profile

Anne Jamison is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Western Sydney University, as well as a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. Her research focus is on nineteenth-century Irish and, more recently, Australian women’s writing. She has published broadly on Irish writing, including works by Alicia Lefanu, Kate O’Brien, James Clarence Mangan and Anne Enright, as well as on the intersections between law, literature and authorship in the early Victorian period. She is most recently author of E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross. Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration(2016) and was awarded the State Library of New South Wales’ Nancy Keesing Fellowship for her work on Australian colonial writer, Catherine Helen Spence, in 2016. One of the outcomes of the fellowship was a collaborative online exhibition illustrating the interconnections between children’s literature and education in nineteenth-century Ireland and Australia by bringing together collections from the State Library of NSW, Queen’s University Belfast, and National Museums Northern Ireland: http://omeka.qub.ac.uk/exhibits/show/irelandaustralia/summary. Prior to relocating to Australia, Anne worked as Lecturer in Irish Literature at the University of Ulster, as well as Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, and Visiting Fellow in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Limerick.

Lindsay Janssen  Email

Lindsay Janssen is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University’s Department of Modern Languages & Cultures. She wrote a thesis on Irish and Irish-diasporic popular fiction from the period 1871-91, the Great Irish Famine and cultural identity formation and obtained her PhD in 2016. She was awarded a fulltime individual Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (GOIPD) by the Irish Research Council and between 2017 and 2019 researched Irish transatlantic periodical culture between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For this research, Lindsay was affiliated to the School of English and the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin. In 2019, she obtained a grant from the Research Society for Victorian Periodical (RSVP) to do research into textual reuse practices in colonial periodicals at the British Library. Since April 2020, Lindsay is part of the Heritages of Hunger research project (https://www.ru.nl/heritagesofhunger/), funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council) and she researches educational practices surrounding the Irish Famine in primary and secondary schools and the heritage sector. Lindsay has also taught at Emerson College’s European Centre (the Netherlands).

Yiling Jiang

Affiliation: Beijing Foreign Studies University

A brief bio: I’m from Hunan Province, China and currently a first-year PhD student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, specializing in Irish literature with a special interest in Irish Women writers. My recent research centers on woman awareness in one of  Lady Gregory’s plays, Grania. In future studies, I would also like to explore Lady Gregory’s reception in China. One of her plays, The Rising of the Moon, was adapted by Chinese playwrights into an inspirational play during the War of Resistance.

Cathy Kawalek   Email

Lecturer, Strategy and Planning, Baruch College, CUNY. Independent researcher on women in business and management, 1900-1940.

Katrina Kell Email Website

Dr. Katrina Kell is an honorary postdoctoral associate at Murdoch University in Western Australia. She is the award-winning author of two novels for young adults, Juice (2001) and Mama’s Trippin’ (2006) published by Fremantle Press. Her PhD thesis Capturing Chloe: Reimagining a Melbourne Icon (including a novel inspired by George Moore’s youthful years in Paris), explores the historical background of Jules Lefebvre’s iconic painting Chloe, and the impact of the artwork on Australian soldiers during World War One. 

Sadbh Kellett Email Twitter

Sadbh Kellett is an Irish PhD candidate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland researching Gaelic mythology in modern Irish and Scottish literature. She is also a published writer, her recent work appearing in anthologies and journals such as SonderPoems from Pandemia, and Strange Times.

Mária Kurdi 

Mária Kurdi is professor emerita in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary. Her research focuses on modern Irish, American and British drama and theatre. She has published seven books and edited or co-edited several essay collections. Her own books include Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2010), Approaches to Irish Theatre through a Hungarian’s Lens (University of Pécs, 2018) and a monograph on J. M. Synge in Hungarian (Pécs: Kronosz, 2021). Her edited volumes include Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (co-edited with Miriam Haughton, Carysfort Press, 2015) and a collection in honour of Arthur Miller’s birth a hundred years before (AMERICANA e-books, 2015). She has scholarly articles in international and Hungarian journals and essay collections. In 2022 The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan, co-edited by Mária Kurdi and Lisa Fitzpatrick was published with Peter Lang. Currently she is editing one of the HJEAS Books, New Series, on age, ageing, ageism in contemporary Anglophone literatures and theatre, to be published in 2023.

Kathryn Laing (Irish Women’s Writing Network Committee)

Kathryn Laing lectures in the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Her teaching and research interests are principally in late nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing, New Woman fiction, modernist women writers, periodical and print culture. She has published widely on Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, George Moore, F. Mabel Robinson and Irish writer Hannah Lynch. Her most recent publications include Hannah Lynch (1859-1904): Irish Writer, Cosmopolitan, New Woman (Cork University Press, 2019), co-authored with Faith Binckes; ‘ “An Outpour of Ink”: From the “Young Rebecca” to “The Most Important Signature of These Years”: 1911-1920’ in Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s­1920s: the Modernist Period, eds. Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); K. Laing and Sowon Park, ‘Writing and Politics: Writing the Vote: Suffrage, Gender, and Politics’ in Vol 2 Futility and Anarchy? British Literature in Transition 1920-1940, eds. Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and ‘“Only Connect”: Irish Women’s Voices, Latin America and the Irish Women’s Writing Network’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 9.1 (2018) http://www.irlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/women-6.pdf

Patricia Laurence Website

Patricia Laurence is a writer, critic and professor of English in the City University of New York. Her research interests include transnational modernism, modernist women’s writing, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury studies, and twentieth-century Irish women writers and their precursors. Her publications include The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition; Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China, and her biography, Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life, that will be published as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Lives Series, January 2020. Her article, “The Dreamwork of a Nation: Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and Virginia Woolf,” will appear in Global Woolf in 2020.

Eleni Loukopoulou   Email

I completed my PhD at the university of Kent in 2011 and my thesis based on a fully revised version of the PhD was published in 2011. Title: Up To Maughty London: Joyce’s Cultural Capital In The Imperial Metropolis. See http://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813062242 I am currently researching on Irish women modernist writers.

Aisling Lyons

My background is in publishing and children’s books retailing, but I am currently requalifying to become an archivist with the University of Dundee, Scotland. I have come by chance across the work of fellow Cork woman, L. T. Meade, and, particularly as a burgeoning writer for young adults myself, am now keenly interested in the work of this almost forgotten author and her peers.

Dr Kate Louise Mathis  Email  Website

I received my doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2011 (‘The evolution of Deirdre in the Ulster Cycle’), and have taught since in the Celtic departments of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Other than the women writers of the Celtic Revival – in both Ireland and Scotland – my research interests include Scottish Gaelic women’s poetry, and the reception of medieval Irish Ulster Cycle characters in Scotland. I was previously Scottish Gaelic research assistant for ‘Women’s Poetry in Ireland, Scotland, & Wales, 1400-1800’ (funded by the Leverhulme Trust), and have published widely on women’s poetry in Gaelic, and on Deirdre’s depiction in the 9th-century Longes mac n-Uislenn. I am currently preparing a monograph assessing the development of Deirdre from the early medieval period to the Celtic Revival.

Sheila McAvey

Sheila McAvey, chair of the Humanities Division at Becker College, Worcester, MA, teaches literature and related courses. My research interests include the problematics of female desire and definitions of masculinity in Irish fiction, in the novels of Somerville and Ross, and the stories of Maeve Brennan, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Cullinan, and Norah Hoult, as well as the characterization of women in novels of Charles Lever. A particular focus is on ways in which these writers demonstrate the struggle for realization of inchoate sexual desires in young, single females, alongside their longing for autonomy, a growth to maturity that demands rebellion, or compromise, or, often, exile from roots that strangle such efforts.

Jaki McCarrick

Jaki McCarrick is an award-winning writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Her debut short story collection The Scattering was published by Seren Books and was shortlisted for the 2014 Edge Hill Prize. The collection includes her story ‘The Visit’, which won the 2010 Wasafiri Short Fiction Prize and was included in Best British Short Stories (published by Salt), 2012. On the basis of her debut collection, Jaki was longlisted in 2014 for the inaugural Irish Fiction Laureate. Her play LEOPOLDVILLE won the 2010 Papatango Prize for New Writing, and her play THE NATURALISTS premiered in 2018 in New York to rave reviews: “Impeccable, a gift to its actors” New York Times; “Beautifully performed” The New Yorker. Her play BELFAST GIRLS, developed at the National Theatre Studio, London, was shortlisted for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award. It premiered in the US in Chicago in 2015 to much critical acclaim and has since been staged widely internationally with recent premieres in Australia and Sweden. In 2016, Jaki was selected for Screen Ireland’s Talent Development Initiative and has recently completed the screen adaptation of BELFAST GIRLS. She is currently working on her second collection of short fiction and her first novel, The Family Wolves. Jaki also writes critical pieces for the Times Literary Supplement, Irish Examiner, Poetry Ireland Review and other publications. 

Charlie Mc Evoy

I am studying European history at Trinity College Dublin and planning a dissertation on Vernon Lee’s interactions with Irish women writers during the fin-de-siecle. My research interests include self-fashioning, decadence studies, the history of emotions, women’s and gender history, and Jewish history

Rev. Dr. Patricia McKee Email

 I have been immersed in the study of Nineteenth Century Ireland for quite some time now and my main focus has been on the period from 1830 to 1870. I have found this to be a most fruitful period for my work but have at times come across the lives of those born in the 1850s and 60s whose life and work head on into the period you are beginning to open up and bring to light. I think there will be a fresh cross-over of events, causes and consequences so am very glad to join the network. Thank you for setting it up.

Recent published work includes ‘James Henthorn Todd, an Irish High Churchman and Early Tractarian at Trinity College, Dublin’ in ed. Thomas P. Power, A Flight of Parsons: The Divinity Diaspora of Trinity College Dublin Eugene, OR, Wipf and Stock, Pickwick Publications, 2018, pp 102-128.

A forthcoming chapter on the 19th century manuscript retrieval networks of Irish,  British and European Waldensian scholarship, with their emphasis on minority religious survival, is due to be published by Peter Laing in 2021, in a collection of essays edited by Dr. Sarah Alyn-Stacey, TCD.

Hollie McDonnell Email

First-year PhD student and department assistant in the department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Research interests include feminism, structuralism, deconstruction, popular and contemporary literature, fairy tales, and world literature

Jude Mc Inerney

Jude Mc Inerney is a Ph.D. student and the Departmental Assistant for the Department of Media and Communications in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She has a first-class Honours degree in English Literature and Media and Communications. She also has a first-class Honours Masters in Media and Communications. She has extensive experience of community radio having presented a number of shows on College radio Wired FM over a five-year period, where she is currently on the board of management. Jude has won a number of broadcasting awards at local and national level, e.g., Smedia and Craol awards. Her doctoral research explores the narrative elements of podcasting today, and focusses on its role in the cultural shift in our understanding of mental health issues.

Dr Julia Meszaros

Dr Julia Meszaros is a Lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Patrick’s Pontifical University Maynooth. Her work has focused on questions of love and human selfhood, with a particular interest in theology and literature. Together with Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson, she edits Catholic Women Writers, a recent series of fiction bringing the forgotten writers of the Catholic Literary Revival back into print (CUA press). The series has featured novels and short stories by Caryll Houselander, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Josephine Ward, and Enid Dinnis and is about to publish its first Irish work, Mary Beckett’s Troubles novel Give Them Stones. 

Julia is the author of Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch (OUP, 2016), co-editor of In the Image of Love: Key Voices for Theological Anthropology [Special Issue in the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2017, with Yves de Maeseneer), and of Sacrifice and Modern Thought (OUP, 2013, with Johannes Zachhuber). She has published in Philosophy and TheologyLiterature and Theology, New Blackfriars and the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. 

Susan Curley Meyer Email

I am a first stage PhD student with the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at UCD. I am exploring the visual and material culture of street trading in Dublin in relation to women, welfare and labour, using the ontology of images. My MA thesis (2018) looked at the development of a flower trade in Dublin which included research on street traders, shop traders and indoor and outdoor markets. My current date range is (1871-1926) and coincides with specific legislation introduced for street traders in Ireland.

Angus Mitchell   Profile

Historian Angus Mitchell is recognised for his work on Roger Casement and the publication of a trilogy of edited volumes: The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (1997), Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness (2003) & One Bold Deed of Open Treason (2016). This research is foundational to the retrieval of a network of Irish, British and European activists and pacifists, who challenged the structures of colonial power, international foreign policy and the deepening culture of political secrecy. Critical to this broader inquiry is the figure of Alice Stopford Green (1848-1929) and her alliances and friendships with a coterie of intellectual women, most notably Vernon Lee, Marie Souvestre, Beatrice Webb, Mary Kingsley, Mrs Herbert Ward, N.F. Dryhurst and Mary Spring Rice. With Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin, he is currently completing a study of the relationship between Green and Elizabeth Robins. They recently guest co-edited a special issue of Irish Migration Studies in Latin America (2018). Mitchell’s work has also appeared in Field Day Review and Dublin Review of Books.

 Eilish Mulholland 

I am currently researching my masters dissertation concerning the work of modern Irish and British women’s writers in relation to food studies at TCD in Autumn 2021. My work has been accepted for publication by Penn State University’s Bishop and Lowell Studies and I am the recipient of the No Alibi’s prize for American literature for June 2020

Jade Dillon

Dr Jade Dillon holds a PhD in children’s literature and visual culture. Her research focuses on the visual iconography of the ‘Alice’ figure created in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and it traces the progression of Alice’s characterisation through multimodal platforms including illustration and fine art photography. She has published her research with numerous academic journals and books, as well as general articles on children’s literature with RTE Brainstorm (Ireland).

Sinéad Mooney (Irish Women’s Writing Network Committee)

Sinéad Mooney graduated from University College Cork with a BA in 1993, and an MA in English in 1996, followed by a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2002). Having been a lecturer in the English Department at the National University of Ireland, Galway, from 2002 to 2014, Sinead joined De Montfort University in 2014 as a Research Fellow and in 2016 was appointed a Senior Lecturer in English. Her research interests include Irish literature, modernism, the work of Samuel Beckett, and women’s writing, particularly Irish women’s writing of the late 19th and early 20th century, and contemporary writing. She has taught and published widely in these areas.

Marisol Morales-Ladron    Email

My main field of research is contemporary Irish women’s writing, but I am still interested in the female precursors from the past.

Mary Mullen

Mary Mullen is Assistant Professor of English and faculty member in the Irish studies program at Villanova University. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian and Irish literature, colonialism, institutions, and theories of the public. She is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published articles on settler colonialism, the politics of time, public humanities, and fast-day literature in the midst of the Irish Famine. She is currently working on a new book project on the colonial politics of public interest, which considers how public interest is a strategy for managing racial and colonial difference in an era of globalization. 

James H. Murphy Publications

James H. Murphy has been professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago, and Boston College. He is the author of six monographs on the political history and the history of fiction of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Chris Murray Website Email

Chris Murray lives in Dublin. She founded and curates Poethead, a website dedicated to platforming work by women poets, their translators, and editors. She is an active member of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon which seeks to celebrate and draw awareness to the rich cultural heritage of Irish women poets through readings. Her forthcoming book ‘Gold Friend’ is due in Autumn 2020. (Turas Press, Dublin)

The Fired! Archive at Queen’s University Special Collections
RASCAL

The Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon archive is a digital repository housed at RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally) at Queen’s University, Belfast. RASCAL is an online gateway to research resources relating to Ireland. It aims to enhance awareness of these resources amongst researchers. Keira Dobbin invited me to curate objects related to Fired! and to the wider issues of women in irish literature in January 2019. In the past year, a conversation about presenting these digital materials has been ongoing between us and it has presented us with a wonderful opportunity to create a contextual discussion around this area of research. Fired! began as a collaborative effort between active poets on the island of Ireland. It enjoys strong supportive academic input from Laura Loftus, Eavan Boland (1944-2020), Lucy Collins, Alex Pryce, Moyra Donaldson, Kathy D’Arcy, and Emma Penney, among others. The Irish Times, Billy Mills, and The Honest Ulsterman have kindly allowed reproduction of materials related to Fired! for which we are very grateful. The project is an ongoing concern. 

Ciara Nash   Email

I am a postgraduate in the History Department at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick who is currently doing her thesis on the nineteenth-century literary author Mary Anne Sadlier.

Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin            (Network Team)

Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin lectures in Communications at the Kemmy Business School in the University of Limerick. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the NUI, her PhD in English focused on the cultural history of the Irish Free State, specifically exploring the production, structure and role of alternative histories, temporalities and agencies in the decades following the war for independence. Emanating from this study, she has published essays on the dramatist Teresa Deevy, on radical newspapers and journals from the Free State period, and on alternative modes of activism and political protest.

Paul O’Brien

Dr Paul O’Brien received his doctorate from the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, where he now lectures. In 2016, he was a research fellow at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (Irish College, Paris). He is a recipient of the Military Heritage Trust of Ireland award for his research into recruitment practices in the First World War. In April 2019, Paul published his first monograph, based on his doctoral thesis: The Glynns of Kilrush, Co. Clare, 1811-1940: Family, business and politics. He is currently working on a biography of Lady Victoria Pery (1893-1918), an accomplished early aviatrix. 

Sarah O’Brien

Dr. O’Brien is a cultural historian with special interest in 19th and 20th century Irish emigration. She received a PhD in History from MIC (2009), and a B.Ed in Education (2004) . Her doctoral research was funded by the Irish Research Council and investigated Irish associationalism in post-World War II Birmingham. Her subsequent research on the Irish in Argentina won an outstanding research award from Riocht na Midhe and was published as a monograph in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. Sarah has published her work in Irish Studies Review, Dublin Review of Books, New Hibernia Review and frequently writes for the Irish Times. Prior to her appointment in MIC she was Lecturer in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Linguistics, Speech and Communications Sciences (2015-2019). From 2012 to 2015, she was Director of Bilingual Education in Northern New Mexico University. She has been an invited Visiting Professor in the School of Sociology, University of Buenos Aires (2017) and will be Visiting Professor in Department of Applied Linguistics, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil in 2019. 

Margaret O’Callaghan

Margaret O’ Callaghan MA (NUI) PhD (Cambridge) is an historian and political analyst at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. A former Laski Research Scholar at St John’s College Cambridge and a former Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, she has taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous works on aspects of British high politics and the state apparatus in Ireland from the late nineteenth century to the revolution’ including British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland; Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour. She has written on the Royal Irish Constabulary, on the genealogy and high politics of partition , on the Boundary Commission of 1925. She has also written articles on the fringe-Fenian press, the careers of Richard Pigott and Tom Kettle, on Belfast in the 1960’s and 70’s ,and on Ian Paisley and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. She co-edited with Mary E .Daly 1916 in 1966; Commemorating the Easter Rising (Royal Irish Academy, 2007).Her most recent publications are on commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916 in the 1970’s, on Roger Casement and the First World War and on female political autobiography. She currently writing a book on Alice Stopford Green.

Mary O’Connell Email Website

I am a Taranaki born, Sydney based writer, editor, historian and community arts organiser, with particular interest in matters of spirit. My latest book is The Country of Our Dreams – a novel set in 19th century Ireland and 21st century Australia, exploring the Irish Land War of 1879 -1882, the complex inheritance of the Irish diaspora, the luminous almost Christological figure of Michael Davitt, and the more occluded figures of Anna Parnell and the marvellous and courageous Ladies Land League. My other books include an historical novel about the twelfth century mystic and musician Hildegard of Bingen. The King’s Daughter was reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘Here is surprise, delight and instruction in skillfully blended harmony. Mary O’Connell has brought off the feat of recreating an entire society triumphantly. The achievement is extraordinary. … This is a delight, and, I’m prepared to bet, unlike anything you have read before.’ My PhD explored the amazing story of the young Irish Australian mystic, Eileen O’Connor (1892-1921). Published as Our Lady of Coogee by Crossing Press in 2009, it was described by Professor Alison Bashford, Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University as ‘a substantive social and interior history – of romance, conflict, love, sacrifice and pain. This is a work of extraordinary literary as well as intellectual skill.’ I’d love to do more work on exploring the wonder-full Brigid stories both medieval and modern – pondering why and how this particular divine feminine archetype is so powerful (and useful) within us Irish communities. I entertained myself with producing calendars in 2015 and 2016 which were photographic and poetic celebrations of Sydney’s ocean Pools (click here for sample of 5 pools)- working with the talented photographer Mike Gal and designer Helena Brusic. I am a happy member of the Randwick Community Organic Garden and I served as the Festival Director for the innovative Heaven & Earth Writers Festival – a biennial Sydney Festival devoted to celebrating works and words on the integrated themes of arts, environment and spirit matters. I am also a proud member of the Australian Women’s History Network, the Irish Studies Association of Australia & New Zealand (ISAANZ), and the Randwick and Coogee Ladies Swimming Club.

Maureen O’Connor

Maureen O’Connor lectures in the School of English in University College Cork. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010), co-editor, with Derek Gladwin, of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, ‘Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities’, 40.1 (2018); with Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney, of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006); with Lisa Colletta,of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien (2006); and, with Tadhg Foley, of Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (2006). She has recently completed a book-length study of Edna O Brien’s fiction and is working on a monograph on nature and nation in the writing of Irish first-wave feminists, including Eva Gore-Booth, Margaret Cousins, Charlotte Despard, and Alice Stopford Green.

Maggie O’Neill E-mail

Dr Maggie O’Neill’s research is in representations of gender and ageing in Irish literature and culture, and interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology and the Huston School of Film in NUI Galway. Recent publications include chapters on ageing and Irish writing in The New Irish Studies (Cambridge, 2020) and the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2020), and a co-edited collection, Women and Ageing: Private Meanings, Social Lives (Routledge, 2020).

Diane O’Doherty

Diane O Doherty is a final year PhD student at Limerick Institute of Technology and a research assistant at the Graduate Entry Medical School at the University of Limerick. She is currently awaiting viva for her PhD by Research with her thesis entitled “The effectiveness of anti-smoking warnings: An Irish third level student perspective”. She graduated with a B.A Economics & Sociology in 2011 and an M.A Sociology (Youth, Community & Social Regeneration) in 2013 from the University of Limerick. Diane has an interest in tobacco marketing, tobacco control & public health and novel research methodologies. 

Clíona Ó Gallchoir

Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a lecturer in English at University College Cork. Her publications include Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (UCD Press, 2005) and A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-edited with Heather Ingman. She has published numerous articles and essays on eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish literature, most recently an essay on narratives of childhood in eighteenth-century Ireland, forthcoming in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, edited by Moyra Haslett Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Bairbre O’Hogan

Bairbre O’Hogan has had a varied and interesting career journey  – a BA in Celtic Studies (Old Irish, Welsh, Celtic Archaeology and Early Irish History) was followed by an MA in Early Irish Language and Literature, both from UCD.  Her working life has included teaching Irish, Celtic Studies and Tourism Awareness in Dominican College, Sion Hill, teaching Irish in the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, working with the ‘Viking Adventure’ in Dublin’s Millennium (1988), tour guiding, appointments as Director of Dublinia and as DIT’s Alumni Officer, and for the past twenty or so years, being a State-accredited self-employed translator. Alongside all of this, she has been researching – for her own satisfaction initially – the life and works of Winifred M. Letts (1882-1972). Realising that she is probably the youngest person alive who knew Letts well (as Letts was a friend of her mother) she is now on a mission to document Letts’s life and works.

Tina O’Toole

Tina O’Toole is senior lecturer in English at the School of English, Irish, and Communication, University of Limerick. Her publications include The Irish New Woman (Palgrave, 2013), and chapters on Irish women’s writing for Irish Literature in Transition 1880-1940 (CUP, 2020), A History of Irish Women’s Writing (CUP, 2018), Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism (Routledge, 2017), and The History of British Women’s Writing 1880-1920 (Palgrave, 2016). Her journal publications include articles for Modernism/ModernityIrish University Review, and New Hibernia Review, and special issues of Irish University Review on Elizabeth Bowen (2021; co-edited with Anna Teekell) and Éire-Ireland on ‘New Approaches to Irish Migration’ (2012; with Piaras Mac Éinrí). Other collaborative projects include the co-edited Women Writing War (2016), with Gillian McIntosh & Muireann O’Cinnéide; Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives (2008), with Patricia Coughlan; Documenting Irish Feminisms (2005), co-authored with Linda Connolly; and The Dictionary of Munster Women Writers (2005). 

Lauren Ottaviani

Lauren Ottaviani is an FWO-funded PhD student in English literature at KU Leuven, where her research focuses on middlebrow English and Irish women’s magazines at the turn of the twentieth century. Working under the supervision of Professor Elke D’hoker, her particular focus is on domestic ideals and the women’s suffrage movement in the Irish periodical Lady of the House alongside its English counterpart, the Woman at Home. After completing her undergraduate studies in English at Allegheny College, she earned an MA in English literary studies from Durham University and spent two years at the University of Antwerp as a Fulbright ETA. Her research interests include fin-de-siècle and Irish literature, periodical studies, and gender studies

Anna Pilz       (Network Team)

Anna Pilz is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish Literature. In particular, her research interests focus on space and place; reception and intertextuality; and literature and the environmental humanities. She has published on Irish writing of the long nineteenth century, Irish theatre history, and Irish women’s writing. She is co-editor of Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (Manchester University Press, 2016). A chapter on Lady Augusta Gregory and forestry management is forthcoming in a collection of essays on Women and the Country House (Four Courts Press, 2017).

Benjamin Ragan Email

Benjamin Ragan is a historian researching supernatural and paranormal beliefs and experiences in the Irish Revolution. He has identified numerous accounts written by Irish women on the subject, some more and some less known, and hopes to share these stories with a wider audience. He received his BA from The Evergreen State College in the United States of America studying history, literature, and philosophy, and received his MA in History from the Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, studying witchcraft and colonization in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Benjamin is a recipient of both the Government of Ireland International Education scholarship and the Universities Ireland history bursary. He is a doctoral candidate and departmental assistant to the department of history at the Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.

Lisa Redmond    Email  Website

I am researching Irish women writers of the 18th 19th and 20th centuries. I am interested in women in history and the history of the witch trials in the UK and Ireland.

Eadaoin Regan    Email

I am a first year PhD student in UCC. My project links with the aims of this site. My project discusses the narrative representations of psychological disorder in Irish women’s writing 1850-1914. I am currently researching ill studied texts in conjunction with psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist and narrative theory. The main research questions are; what psychological disorders are represented in the narrative and do the texts suggest these disorders are the result of universal struggles with femininity confined by patriarchal society or are they due to postcolonial issues. While I am in the initial stages of my research, I am looking forward to becoming more involved with conferences and promotion of engagement with these critically neglected texts in the near future.

Natasha Remoundou Email, Email

Natasha Remoundou is a Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at Deree, The American College of Greece, Athens. She studied English & American Literature in Athens (ACG), and she holds an MSc. in English Literature: Writing & Cultural Politics (University of Edinburgh) and a PhD in Classics/ English Lit. (National University of Ireland, Galway). Previously, she held academic posts as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Moore Institute researching archives on Irish drama and human rights, NUIG and as an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Qatar University.  She has published papers and book chapters in academic publications on Irish theatre and classical reception studies, the representation of the Middle East in Irish literature, Irish feminisms, post-humanism, asylum narratives, visuality, memory, and interculturalism. She is also a poet, translator, dramaturg, and a volunteer teacher to migrant and refugee communities in the West of Ireland. Her current monograph in progress deals with Irish literature and culture, classical adaptation, and human rights issues in the 21st century in the works of Marina Carr, Stacey Gregg, Anne Enright, and Edna O’Brien among other Irish writers.

Paige Reynolds

Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, has published on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge UP, 2007) and editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016), as well as special issues of Éire-Ireland (on material culture) and the Irish University Review (on Kate O’Brien).  More recently, she has edited The New Irish Studies and Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (with Eric Falci), both published in 2020 for Cambridge University Press.  Her monograph Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2023.

Matthew L. Reznicek     Email   Website

Matthew L. Reznicek is Assistant Professor of English at Creighton University where he teaches Nineteenth-Century British and Irish Literature. He is the author of The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists (Clemson University Press, 2017) and numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish women writers. Currently, he is completing a manuscript on Opera and Irish Women Writers.

Andrew Rodgers       Email     Twitter

Andrew Rogers is a candidate for the Diploma in Liberal Studies degree at Rice University, a post-masters (or “masters +30”) interdisciplinary program currently unique to Rice. He received his Master of Liberal Studies degree from Rice, with a capstone on the antiwar writing of Eva Gore-Booth, and is continuing his focus on Gore-Booth’s life and thought in the DLS program. He received his BA in history from Trinity University in San Antonio in 1988. Professionally, he is an associate creative director with a fundraising agency working with leading medical centers, social-relief organizations, and other national and global relief, development, and social-welfare charities.

Sarah Ryan Email

Worked on Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories for undergraduate research thesis at the University of Oxford, followed by a research masters at Goldsmiths, London in Second World War autobiography of childhood, and additional work on wartime literary journals. After a twenty year teaching career I am now returning to research and beginning a PhD at the University of Bedfordshire looking at Pilgrimage, quest and meaningful journeys in the writings of Elizabeth Bowen.

Melissa Sarikaya

Melissa Sarikaya has been a lecturer at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen/Nürnberg, Germany, since 2019 and is currently writing her dissertation thesis on marginalised women writers of the late Victorian / early Modernist era. Her research interests are poetry, gender and queer studies, media studies, and pop culture. Her latest projects are a co-edited volume on social inequality, and paper contributions on Instapoetry and nautical symbolism. Melissa Sarikaya is also speaker of the early career researchers’ section of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Difference Diversity (IZGDD). Together with Dr. James Dowthwaite (University of Jena, Germany), she is putting together a network on Modernism, Aestheticism, and Decadence Studies (MADS). 

Heather Sarsfield Email

I have been enamored with Irish Women’s literature for as long as I can remember. In my MA work, I branched out a bit, and delved into Scottish women’s literature (my thesis was on Waulking Songs, which are songs primarily extemporaneously composed by women(. But for my PhD work, I am going back to my love of Irish literature, and working on Nationalistic Women writers, pre-1916…..and pre 20th century, really.

Lucien Quincy Senna

My name is Lucien Quincy Senna. I am a legal historian, poet, essayist, and political activist. I have dual Irish/US citizenship and have lived mainly in England since I was 19. I have have a degree in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford (as well as a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University). I am a single mother to two young adults and one teenager. My poems are published in a collection which is available on Amazon and also online. My poetry appears in a number of anthologies. I also have poems published under my pen name “Anora Mansour”, one of which was recently published in the Perch Journal at Yale University. Poems of mine can also be found on the Irish women’s website Poethead.

Catherine Shannon

Professor Emerita of History at Westfield State University, specializing in modern Irish history with particular interests in An Gorta Mor, Northern Ireland and late 19th early 20th century Irish American history, and Women in Irish History.

Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado

Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She specialises in Global Irish Studies, and focuses on Irish women writers and histories of sociopolitical conflict. Dawn has expertise in Postcolonial Studies and World Literature more broadly. She has taught at Maynooth University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School (SUISS). Dawn received a 2018-2019 Arts Council of Northern Ireland award for her work as a feminist literary and cultural critic. She is the co-editor of Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland (Dublin: New Island Books, 2017). She has also published in Irish Studies ReviewReview of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE), The Literary Review, Breac, Callaloo, Open Library of Humanities, The Stinging Fly, Sunday Business Post, the Political Studies Association Blog, Four Nations History, and Writing the Troubles. Dawn is regularly invited to contribute to the Dublin Review of Books, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Irish Times, and she has appeared on RTÉ Radio and BBC Radio Ulster to discuss her research.  She tweets @drdawnmiranda.

Elena Emma Sottilotta Website

 Elena Emma Sottilotta is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where she is working on an interdisciplinary research project in co-supervision with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Department, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award. Before coming to Cambridge, she was awarded a Fulbright grant in the United States. Her PhD research aims to shed light on nineteenth-century women writers who published anthologies of folktales, fairy tales and other genres of popular narratives in Italy and Ireland, by relocating them within a broader transcultural and transnational framework. Among the folklorists included in her corpus, she is investigating the collections penned by Lady Wilde and Lady Gregory in Ireland. Her research on nineteenth-century comparative literature, women’s studies, language teaching methodology and intermedia studies has featured in several international peer-reviewed journals.

John R Spiers    Website

John R Spiers is a scholar of publishing history [Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London] and as a publisher I am much interested in the work of the network and its members.

He still holds academic appointments at The School of Advanced Study in the University of London, in the Ruskin Programme at The University of Lancaster, and in the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University.

John built The Harvester Press from scratch over 20 years. It then formed a group of companies sold to Simon & Schuster. John’s other imprint, Wheatsheaf Books, published successful text-books. As with his previous company, he again stresses academic distinction, quality in production, and effective sales.

Whitney Standlee        (Network Team)

Dr Whitney Standlee specialises in the study of Irish women’s writing, particularly the process of recuperating the reputations of overlooked or understudied Irish women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further research interests include writings of Irish exile and the diaspora, Ireland’s contribution to and engagement with the literary fin de siècle, and the intersection of Irish literature, politics and popular culture.

Maryam Tadayon

Maryam Tadayon is an English Literature graduate student from Kharazmi University of Iran. Coming from a middle Eastern country, she has always been absorbed by the topic of women and feminism. The topic of her master’s thesis was “the Construction of the Gendered Subaltern Voice in Lady Gregory’s Selected Works,” where she has worked on Lady Gregory. This and other projects have helped the development of her immense interest in Irish Studies and Irish Women’s Writings. In her thesis, she explores the suppression of Lady Gregory by Irish nationalist and colonial discourses despite having her works be paramount in Irish literary revival and nationalist movement against Britain. Her mission is to explore the silent and marginalized voices and how they are portrayed in women’s writings, especially those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her research interests include woman writers, feminist theory, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality, and Irish Literature. She has researched the topic of “Savushun,” the first novel in Persian written by a female author, where she evaluates the representation of women under the shadow of nationalism. She also has a doctoral proposal for the exploration of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s techniques in creating female characters who stand against the predetermined gender roles propagated by nationalist discourse and subvert the inscribed ideal national identity to make their voices heard.

Mary Stenson Shanahan Website

I am retired and live in Abbeyfeale. Worked as a social researcher and facilitator. I write poetry and have published. I have MA Gaelic Lit from UCC and MA Sociology from UL. I have a lifelong interest and love for writing and especially Irish literature. 

William Shortall

Billy Shortall is the Ryan Gallagher Kennedy Postdoctoral Fellow on the Cuala Press Print Project in TCD Irish Art Research Centre. My main area of research is focused on the intersection between art and politics in post-Independent Ireland. My previous project, Seeing Ireland, resulted in the development of a virtual recreation of the Irish Race Congress in Paris in 1922. Developed in collaboration with the Trinity Long Room Hub and others, it was funded through the Decade of Centenaries Programme. The Congress website and associated art exhibition are accessible at www.seeingireland.ie

Cuala Press Project website is still under development but is available at, https://cualapressproject.wordpress.com/

Sinéad Sturgeon
Sinéad Sturgeon is a Lecturer in Irish Writing in Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses particularly on nineteenth-century Irish writing and culture: recent publications have explored the influence of Eastern Europe on the imagination of James Clarence Mangan, and the significance of the natural world in Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short fiction. She is currently researching the life and work of Charlotte Riddell and May Laffan Hartley.

Julie Anne Stevens   (Network Team)

Julie Anne Stevens lectures in the School of English, Dublin City University. From 2009 to 2017 she served as the Director for the Centre for Children’s Literature and Culture in St. Patrick’s College and then in Dublin City University when the universities merged. From 2017 to 2019 she is visiting professor in John Paul Catholic University, San Diego, California. She publishes and lectures on Irish literature and the visual arts, women’s writing, illustrated children’s books, and short fiction. She published The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross in 2007 and co-edited The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century in 2010. Somerville Press published her latest book, Two Irish Girls in Bohemia: The Drawings and Writings of E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross, in 2017.

Melania Terrazas Email Website

MELANIA TERRAZAS is on the Executive Board of AEDEI (The Spanish Association for Irish Studies), head of the Centre of Irish Studies BANNA/BOND (EFACIS-European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) and Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of La Rioja (Spain). She is the author of Relational Structures in Wyndham Lewis’s Fiction: Complexity and Value (Lincom Europa, 2005), the editor of Journal of English Studies, vol. 8. (2010), guest editor of Gender Issues in Contemporary Irish Literature (Estudios Irlandeses, vol. 13.2, 2018) and the editor of Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture (Peter Lang Reimagining Ireland Series, forthcoming December, 2019). She helped set up the Wyndham Lewis Project websites through grants from the AHRC and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Competitiveness. She has published extensively on a number of British and Irish modernist and contemporary authors and film directors, and on applied linguistics. Her work has been recognized by positive reviews in international journals, grants and awards received to date.

Elizabeth Tilley

Elizabeth Tilley is Senior Lecturer in Book History and Victorian Literature and Head of the Discipline of English at the National University of Ireland Galway. She researches and publishes on Irish print culture and nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Her scholarly edition of J.S. Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly appeared in 2018, and her monograph on nineteenth century Irish periodicals will be published in 2019 by Palgrave. In 2009 she served as an associate editor for the Dictionary of Nineteenth Journalism, with responsibility for entries on Irish titles (gen. editors Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor).

Jane Tottenham

I am working on an edition of a journal written 1834-1861 by Caroline Synge.

Mary Trotter

I am an Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the UW-Madison and past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies. 

Pilar Villar Argaiz  Website

Pilar Villar-Argáiz is a Senior Lecturer of English in the Department of English Philology at the University of Granada and currently the Head of the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Granada . She is the author of the books Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider’s Culture (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) and The Poetry of Eavan Boland: A Postcolonial Reading (Academica Press, 2008). She has published extensively on contemporary Irish poetry and fiction, in relation to questions of gender, race, migration and interculturality. Her edited collections include Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (Manchester University Press, 2014), the special issue of Irish Studies Review (entitled “Irish Multiculturalism in Crisis”, co-edited with Jason King, 2015), and the special issue of Nordic Irish Studies (entitled “Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion: Artistic Renderings of Marginal Identities in Ireland”, 2016). Her research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals of her field such as New Hibernia Review, Irish University Review, Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford Journal), An Sionnach, Estudios Irlandeses and Études Irlandaises, among others. In March 2010, she was awarded by her University with the Prize of Outstanding Research for young researchers in the field of Humanities. Villar-Argáiz is currently a member of the board of AEDEI (Spanish Association of Irish Studies). In October 2014, she founded the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Granada. She is now working on the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and is editing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, entitled Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities.

Olga Walker   Twitter

Following a career in financial management in the private sector, and as a financial analyst with the Australian Public Service in Canberra, Olga Walker is now a PhD Candidate with the University of Canberra. Her creative-practice project, historical novel, The Filing Cabinet and Suitcase, and Exegesis, Fallen Angels: The Proclamation’s Lost Warriors, focuses on Irish female emigration to Britain 1948-1954

Jennifer Way Email

I am an art historian who works on the 20th and 21st centuries in modern and contemporary art. I am interested in themes of the nation and internationalism in Irish art, including histories of the Irish nation at home and in the world, with emphasis on the period from the mid to the late 20th century. One of my publications is “Visualizing Dublin: O’Connell Street as the ‘Nation’s Main Street’,” in Reimagining Ireland: A Reader, edited by Eamon Maher (Peter Lang, 2017), 197-220. 

Kathleen Williams

Kathleen received a Master of Arts in Irish Literature and Culture from Boston College in 1999. For approximately 25 years, Kathleen has served as reference librarian, bibliographer for Irish Studies, and collection development librarian.  Currently working in the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special collections, Kathleen is an active member of the Instruction Program that introduces students to the use of rare and archival materials.

In 2005, Kathleen worked on a project that sought to raise visibility of Irish women writers.  The project included creating a research guide, and identifying the many women writers who worked in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  After identifying the women writers, Boston College library cataloging staff added a special note to the book records for the works.  This search retrieves bibliographic records for the works. See notes on how to do this search in the research guide above.

Kathleen is currently managing a similar project that will allow a special library catalog search for Irish women published from 1955 on.

Anne Marie Williamson Email

My Ph.D, awarded June 2016, focused on female authored plays and performances that represent the pained and suffering female body in Northern Irish theatre. More specifically, it examined how these representations of corporeal and psychological ‘imperfection’ and difference trouble dominant cultural scripts surrounding normalcy, ableism and femininity. I have taught for four years on English Language, Literature and Drama degree programmes, specialising in the history, theory and practice of dramatic writing and performance. As a full-time Teaching Affiliate with the University of Nottingham, I am currently working as part of the Applied English Distance Learning Team; developing online learning material for Post Graduate students.