UCD John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies 
UCD John Hume Institute for Global Irish StudiesUCD Crest

DR SUSAN CAHILL

Susan Cahill is a postdoctoral research fellow in the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies and the School of English, Drama and Film, UCD.  She is working on Irish Children’s Literature by Women Writers between 1870-1920. Previous publications include articles on Irish children’s literature, contemporary Irish fiction, gender and the body, and on fairytale cinema. Her book, Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory, will be published by Continuum in 2011 and an co-edited collection, with Dr Claire Bracken, Anne Enright: Irish Writers in Their Time,is also forthcoming in 2011 from Irish Academic Press.

Past research projects include ‘Inventing and Re-inventing the Irish Woman: External Influences on Gender Construction 1760-2005,’ led by Professor Gerardine Meaney, Professor Mary O’Dowd, and Dr Bernadette Whelan and funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). She has also worked as Research Co-ordinator for the IRCHSS-funded Graduate Research and Education Programme in Gender, Culture and Identities.

Copyright of the digital image belongs to the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA), which was funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) under the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (PRTLI) Cycle 3. For further information or to request permission to reproduce images, see http://ivrla.ucd.ie
Copyright of the digital image belongs to the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA), which was funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) under the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (PRTLI) Cycle 3. For further information or to request permission to reproduce images, see http://ivrla.ucd.ie

 

Irish Children’s Literature by Women Writers between 1870-1920
One of the major aims of this project is to delineate a literary history of women’s writing for children in Ireland between 1870 and 1920 as this writing has been neglected in critical material in which male writers such as Padraig Pearse, Padraic Colum, and Oscar Wilde are dominant. Despite a critical absence surrounding girls’ literary culture in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is a significant number of Irish women writing children’s books aimed at girls, particularly between 1870 and 1920. This includes writers such as L.T. Meade (1844-1914), Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921), May Crommelin (c.1850-1930), and Flora Shaw (1851-1929). Through a study of Irish women writers of children's fiction in this period this project will provide an understanding of the role children’s literature played in constructions of national identity in the period of time leading up to Independence, particularly from a gendered perspective. This project will explore the ways in which children’s books by Irish women writers, often themselves implicated in imperial practices, map contemporaneous assumptions about femininity, Irishness, childhood, and consumer culture as well as the ways in which these become imbricated in each other.

 

Publications

Books:

  • Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory. (London: Continuum Press, In prep. Forthcoming 2011).
  • Anne Enright. Eds. Susan Cahill and Claire Bracken (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, In press. Forthcoming Spring 2011).
  • This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann. Eds. Susan Cahill and Eoin Flannery (Oxford: Peter Lang, In prep. Forthcoming 2011)

Refereed Journal Articles:

  • “Through the Looking Glass: Fairytale cinema and the spectacle of femininity in Stardust and The Brothers Grimm,” Marvels & Tales 24.1 (2010): 57-67.
  • (with Emma Hegarty and Emilie Morin) 'Foreword: Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption'. SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 37.2 (2008): 3-7
  • “Corporeal Architecture: Body and City in Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness”, Etudes Irlandaises 32.1 (2007): 43-58.

Journal Special Issue:

  • Guest Editor (with Emma Hegarty and Emilie Morin) of Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption, Special Issue of SubStance 37.2 (2008)

Book Chapters:

  •  “Playing with the Past: The 1916 Rising in Irish Children’s Literature” Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing. Eds. Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan (London and New York: Routledge, In press. Forthcoming 2010).
  • “‘The “Other” that Moves and Misleads’: Mapping and Temporality in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing” Liminal Borderlands: Ireland Past, Present, Future, edited by Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten (Oxford: Peter Lang 2009) 69-83
  • “‘A Greedy Girl’ and ‘A National Thing’: Gender and History in Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza LynchIrish Literature: Feminist Perspectives. Eds. Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008) 203-222.
  • “Doubles and Dislocations: The Body and Place in Anne Enright’s What Are You Like?Global Ireland: Irish Literatures for the New Millennium. Eds. Ondrej Pilný and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragrnsia, 2005) 133-44.
 

Contact:
susan.cahill@ucd.ie
UCD School of English, Drama and Film
Belfield
Dublin 4

01-7168415