Marie-Louise Coolahan on “Women’s Writing and Early Modern Ireland”

Marie-Louise Coolahan of National University of Ireland, Galway, shares her pioneering research with a lecture, “Women’s Writing and Early Modern Ireland,” on a previously under-explored area of study.

Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a tumultuous, multi-cultural place; the site of political, religious and linguistic contestation and struggle. Amidst the turmoil, women forged space for their voices in a multitude of ways. This lecture will introduce the range of writing produced by women in Irish, English, Spanish and even Latin, during this period. The kinds of writing discussed include poetry, history, autobiography, letters and drama. The authors range from nuns and keeners to adventurers and refugees.

Prof. Coolahan has recently been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (Principal Investigator) for her project, “RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700.” This project will produce a new, large-scale understanding of how women’s writing circulated, using the results to analyze how texts, ideas, and reputations gained traction in the early modern English-speaking world. It will focus specifically on international correspondence networks, transnational religious orders, and the manuscript miscellany as a mode of textual transmission.

She is also Co-Investigator on “Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh” (in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland), which will produce an anthology of women’s poetry in the vernacular languages as well as a comparative critical study.

Introduction by Prof. Thomas M. Truxes, Clinical Associate Professor of History and Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House NYU.