Project Description
Our conference, ‘Bad Feelings: Sadness and Gender in Contemporary Culture’, takes the ‘sad girl’ as its starting point. A trope encapsulated by literary and cultural phenomena from Sally Rooney to Lana Del Rey, the ‘sad girl’ exemplifies our current moment of gendered disillusionment with politics, society, and the very idea of a future. To conceptualise the ‘sad girl’, as our conference will, is to historicise and anatomise sadness in women’s culture, and to facilitate an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and timely conversation around socio-cultural understandings of female mental health. By inviting contributions from international experts on fields ranging from disability studies to affect theory, the politics of emotion to bibliotherapy, our conference will redress the persistent tendency to pathologise or dismiss women’s emotional responses to destructive social and historical conditions even as such responses from men garner widespread concern.
The conference will take place 8-9 June 2026 at MoLI, and will feature keynotes from two international leaders in the fields of medical humanities and literature: Anne Whitehead (Newcastle) and David James (Birmingham). Alongside traditional parallel panels, it will feature a roundtable discussion of Contemporary Disability Studies (moderated by Fionnula Simpson) and a guaranteed panel on Millennial Sad Girl Literature (convened by Orlaith Darling). The former includes three confirmed panellists - Lucy Burke (Manchester Metropolitan), Victoria Heney (Durham), and Ruairi Kennedy (Galway) - who will deliver contributions on gendered sadness and affirmative reconceptualisations of Disabled/Mad experiences, followed by a moderated discussion. The roundtable will focalise Disability Studies’ capacity to include neurodiversity, personality disorders, and other ‘non-normative’ mental states.
Organisers
Dr Fionnula Simpson is a medical humanities researcher in the School of English, Drama and Film, and HI resident scholar. She is a postdoctoral fellow on the Wellcome-Trust funded project, ‘Drinking cultures: the cultural reception of medical developments related to alcohol in Ireland, 1700-1900,’ which explores the interaction between new alcohol-related medical frameworks and representations of problematic or excessive drinking in Irish literary sources throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She completed her PhD at University of Galway’s School of English in 2023. Her first monograph, Pain and Madness in Postwar American Literature: Narrating the Unspeakable, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.
Dr Orlaith Darling is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and HI resident scholar, where she is developing a project on how contemporary literature treats the broken promises of upward social mobility in the age of late capitalism. Previously, Orlaith was a postdoctoral researcher at Justus-Liebig Universität, Gießen, where she was also coordinator of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). She completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin School of English, where she was funded by the Irish Research Council and held a Graduate Research Fellowship in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute (TLRH). Her first monograph, Contemporary Irish Women's Short Fiction: Neoliberalism, Desire, Affect, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.