Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns
Schedule
Fri May 01 2026 at 05:30 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Elvin Hall, Institute of Education | London, EN
About this Event
Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns
Edinburgh University Press (2025)
Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland.
Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.
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About the Speakers
Naoise Murphy
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture, University of Manchester
Naoise Murphy is working on lesbian and transmasculine visibility in twentieth-century English fiction. Naoise has previously taught at the University of Oxford and Maynooth University. Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns is their first book.
More about Naoise Murphy
Juliana Demartini Brito
Lecturer (Teaching) in Gender and Sexuality Studies at UCL SELCS-CMII
I’m currently working on feminist and queer contemporary art practices, and how they challenge academic discourse of depoliticization in post-June 2013 Brazil. My research interests include decolonial approaches to gender and sexuality and perceptions of Brazilian and wider Latin American cultures and politics.
More about Juliana Demartini Brito
Where is it happening?
Elvin Hall, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
