EVENT: Early Career Research Seminar in Irish Studies
2pm Wednesday 6th November 2024
Seminar Room, Centre for Irish Studies, 4 Distillery Road, School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, University of Galway & on Zoom
We are delighted to welcome Ms Constanza Rapa from the Université Grenoble Alpes who will speak on her PhD research project, ‘Belonging with the (Non)Human Other: (Non)Human worlds in Transcultural Literature’, and also to welcome Ms Femke Langhout who will speak on her MA research project, ‘“Momoirs” and Motherhood Studies: The Rise of Maternal Subjectivity in Irish Literature’. Full details on our speakers and their respective MA and PhD research topics are available below.
Both Costanza and Femke are Visiting Scholars with us at the Centre for Irish Studies this year, and we look forward to hearing about how their research has developed during their stay in Galway this semester.
Constanza Rapa, Universite Grenoble Alpes, France (PhD candidate in Comparative Literature).
‘Belonging with the (Non)Human Other: (Non)Human worlds in Transcultural Literature’
Costanza Rapa is a PhD student in Comparative Literature from Université Grenoble Alpes, France and is a Visiting Doctoral Scholar in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, University of Galway 2024-25. Her research interests include transcultural literatures, and ecocriticism and literary representations of material and built environments, and she co-organised the SOFEIR annual conference on the theme of ‘Migrations’ at the Université Grenoble Alpes in March 2024. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the relationship between belonging and the natural world in transcultural literature, and her corpus includes texts in English, German, Dutch, French and Italian. You can contact Constanza about her work at: Costanza.Rapa@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
Ms Femke Langhout, Research Masters Scholar in Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, Radboud University, The Netherlands.
‘Momoirs’ and Motherhood Studies: The Rise of Maternal Subjectivity in Irish Literature
Brief abstract proposal for MA Thesis:
Motherhood Studies has been an academic discipline since the 1980s and aims to “articulate and theorize . . . becoming and being a mother from the perspective and subjectivity of mothers themselves” (Podniek & O’Reilly, 2010. p. 2-3). For a long time, however, this was a complicated task, as there were little to no works available that allowed the mother to express her very own experiences without fictionalising her writing to some extent. This is especially true for Ireland, where Anne Enright attempted to make the voice of the real mother present in literature in 2004 through her memoir (or ‘momoir’) Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. Only in the late 2010s do we see this trend being picked up by other authors, such as Emilie Pine, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Alice Kinsella. What do these and other writings by mothers tell us about the expectations of motherhood in Irish society? What cultural figures have proven particularly influential to these mothers? And what can explain the popularity of these writings in recent years?