'It’s a phenomenon - we’re very privileged’: Contemporary Irish women writers celebrated at symposium in Mexico

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Irish studies programme in Mexico has introduced students to writers such as Sally Rooney and Claire Keegan

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To open the symposium, UCC’s Professor of Modern English, Dr Claire Connolly, delivered a lecture titled Irish Women’s Writing from Maria Edgeworth to Sally Rooney: A Motherless History? Connolly paired an early 19th century writer with an early 21st century writer “because in Ireland we have these grave and acknowledged difficulties of creating a kind of meaningful history of Irish women’s writing over the centuries”.
“There’s a huge interest in [Rooney’s] work, so there is a big focus on that,” says Connolly, “but also on the idea of a literary history characterised by the cleavages of colonialism and class and the ruptures of famine and mass migration”.
“The great achievements of the past continue to feed student interest – not just academics who want to do research, but students who are buying work by contemporary [Irish] women and reading it and thinking about it and studying it to the extent that it feeds Irish studies as a discipline,” says Connolly. “It’s a phenomenon – we’re very privileged.”
Period19 Sep 2025

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