Irish Women's Writing | Discussion with Dr Naoise Murphy

 

 

 

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. In this talk, Naoise Murphy discusses how queer ways of reading disrupt 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.

 

Biography: 

Naoise Murphy is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture, University of Manchester, 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 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) is their first book.