From the archives: Annie M.P. Smithson Correspondence with Edmund Downey
Kathleen Williams, Network Team In 2016 staff at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College had opportunity to review a large collection of materials related to Irish women during the revolutionary period in Ireland that had been assembled by collector Loretta Clarke Murray. …
Network Publication: Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Alternative Histories, New Narratives
Edited by Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney Introduction: “A Palpable Energy” Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney Silenced female voices, the gendered gaps and absences in archives and literary histories, and silence as theme and technique, all feature in many of the essays included in…
Recovering Irish Women Writers: Lady Virginia Sandars, a Contemporary of Wilde, Hardy and Kipling
Dr Paul O’Brien (MIC, Limerick) Lady Virginia Sandars (17 March 1828 – 26 January 1922) Lady Virginia Frances Zerlina Taylour was the youngest daughter of Thomas Taylour, the 2nd Marquess of Headfort and Olivia Stevenson. A member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Virginia lived in…
Research Pioneers 8: David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase
David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase are in the final stages of a project that promises to be a milestone in scholarship on women’s contribution to Irish theatre. They are co-editing the weighty two-volume collection The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716-2016), forthcoming…
Reflections on the lockdown
We asked members to share their experiences of life in lockdown. In these strange times, we wonder, how quarantine is impacting our lives as scholars, students, and academics. Working from home is now the reality for so many globally. New work and research practices…
Research Pioneers 7: Margaret Kelleher
Margaret Kelleher’s first monograph on The Feminization of Famine and her co-edited volume on Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, both published in 1997, had gender questions at the very heart of her research. Her seminal work interrogated questions of tradition and canonicity in such…
Research pioneers 6: Gerardine Meaney
The publication in 2002 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Women’s Writing and Traditions volumes 4 and 5 was a watershed moment in Irish literary history. Gerardine Meaney was among the principal co-editors of this endeavour, which evolved in response to the…
Research Pioneers 5: Lucy Collins
Lucy Collins’ Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870-1970, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, has made a crucial intervention in the field of Irish women’s literary history. As one reviewer described it, it reveals ‘a hitherto hidden history of poetry’…
Research Pioneers 4: Heidi Hansson
Heidi Hansson’s edited collection New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Writing (2007) has been praised by reviewers for its call for the field of literary studies to be augmented and for ‘addressing women’s literature as a “distinct tradition”’. Together with her monograph Emily Lawless…
Roots of the Present: Memories of My Grandmother Mary Manning
By Lucien Senna I remember it vividly, as though it was this past summer. I was only seven years old and it was one of three joyous summers I spent in a house rented by my grandmother Molly Manning. It was a pink Georgian…
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