Mary Noonan

• Dr Mary P. Noonan BA (French and English), UCC; MA (English) UCC; MA (French), Birkbeck College, University of London; PhD (French Drama), Royal Holloway, University of London; Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, UCC.
• Mary Noonan, Senior Lecturer, acted as Head of the French Department at University College Cork 2022-24. Over a period of 30 years, 1994-2024, she taught modern and contemporary French theatre, contemporary French cinema and French poetry. Her teaching and research were interdisciplinary, and focused on the work of French women playwrights and film-makers, on poetic creative practice and on the translation of poetry. Her research on French women playwrights focused on voice and the auditory in theatre, and she drew on areas of practice in this research. She brought this interest in creative practice to bear on her teaching of drama, film and poetry. As a practising poet, she aimed to teach creative responses to literary texts, and exploration of the nature of the creative process and its representation in art.
• Within the School of Languages, UCC, she coordinated and taught on the MA in Languages and Cultures 2015-21. She was one of the founding members of the Board of Drama and Theatre Studies at UCC, and contributed teaching and assessment to the MA Drama and Theatre Studies 1998-2012. In addition to her work within the School of Languages, she contributed to the MA in Film Studies.
• She has published widely in the area of contemporary French theatre. Her research monograph, Echo's Voice: The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude was published in 2014 by Legenda: http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/isbn/9781907975509.html. This monograph was shortlisted for the David Bradby Prize for Theatre Research in 2015. In 2014, she organised an international conference on the theatre of Marguerite Duras (Stage Presence: Marguerite Duras and the Theatre, UCC, 21-22 November, 2014), in celebration of the centenary of the writer’s birth. A collection of essays, entitled Marguerite Duras. Un théâtre de voix/ Marguerite Duras : A Theatre of Voices, edited by Mary Noonan and Joëlle Pagès-Pindon, is published by Brill/Rodopi (2018): https://brill.com/abstract/title/36190.
• Her first collection of poems – The Fado House (Dedalus Press, 2012) – was shortlisted for both the Seamus Heaney Prize for a First Collection 2013 and The Strong/Shine Award 2013: http://www.dedaluspress.com/p/the_fado_house. A limited edition pamphlet, Father (Bonnefant Press) was published in 2015. She was the poetry editor of the online literary journal Southword, 2016-18. Her second collection of poetry, Stone Girl, was published by Dedalus Press in February 2019: https://www.dedaluspress.com/product/stone-girl/. Stone Girl was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize in 2020.
• Her project, This Dust of Words: Poetry and/as Translation, saw a number of international poets, along with their translators, reading and engaging with the UCC community and the wider Cork public throughout the autumn of 2015. The reading series was run in tandem with a series of poetry translation masterclasses, which were open to poets, postgraduate students and anyone else interested in the translation of poetry: https://thisdustofwords.wordpress.com.
• She was the co-convenor of the CASiLaC Research Cluster on 'Poetry and Creative Practice': http://casilac.ie/translation-and-creative-practice/ and she is coordinator of the MA module LL6023, 'What Gets Lost: Poetry and Translation'.
• Dans un autre compartiment, a selection of her poems translated to French by poet Valérie Rouzeau, was published by Apic Éditions in 2025.

• Mary Noonan has published widely in the field of contemporary French theatre, including articles and chapters on the drama of Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hélène Cixous, Simone Benmussa and Noëlle Renaude. She has published on the poetry of Valérie Rouzeau, the history of French women playwrights of the twentieth century, the voice in contemporary French theatre and the theatre of Marina Carr. She is regularly invited to translate poems for inclusion in poetry-in-translation collections and anthologies - recent examples include translations of poems from French, Italian and Spanish. Her research has focused in particular on the work of French women playwrights and film-makers, on voice and the auditory in theatre and the representation of corporeal presence in theatre and on film. She draws on a range of theoretical approaches in her work, including psychoanalytical and feminist theory. When writing about theatre, she draws on elements of theatre practice.
• In 2005, she organized an international conference entitled The Contemporary French Theatre: Writing, Performing, Teaching, which featured presentations by scholars, directors and actors working in the field of French theatre. Her monograph Echo's Voice: The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude, was published by Legenda (Oxford) in 2014: http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/isbn/9781907975509.html (shortlisted for the David Bradby Award for Theatre Research 2015).
• In 2014, she organised an international conference on the theatre of Marguerite Duras, in celebration of the centenary of the writer's birth (http://durastheatreucc.com), at which speakers from France, Ireland, the UK and the US delivered papers on Duras's theatre. She co-edited a collection of critical essays, Marguerite Duras. Un théâtre de voix/A Theatre of Voices, with Joëlle Pagès-Pindon, and this was published by Brill/Rodopi (Amsterdam) in 2018: https://brill.com/view/title/36190?format=HC.
• She co-convened the research cluster Translation and Creative Practice within UCC's Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures. This cluster organised a programme of regular seminars and workshops on topics exploring the relationship between translation and creativity: http://casilac.ie/translation-and-creative-practice-2/.
• Mary Noonan was awarded funding from UCC's Creative Practice Support Fund in 2014 to develop a project on poetry and translation, as part of UCC’s Creative Campus initiative. Her project, This Dust of Words: Poetry and/as Translation, saw a number of international poets, along with their translators, reading and engaging with the UCC community and the wider Cork public throughout the autumn of 2015: https://thisdustofwords.wordpress.com.
• She is also a published poet. Her first collection, The Fado House, was published in 2012 by Dedalus Press (Dublin): http://www.dedaluspress.com/sp/directory/details/mary-noonan, and her second collection, Stone Girl, was published in February 2019: https://www.dedaluspress.com/product/stone-girl/. Stone Girl was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize in 2020. She teaches contemporary poetry in French, and is interested in contemporary poetics in both French and English. She was Poetry Editor of the online literary journal Southword, 2016-2018, and she judged the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize in 2017.
• She has supervised PhD theses on feminine practices of writing war in Delbo, Duras and Langfus, constructions of Futurist, Dada and Surrealist artisthood in the work of Mina Loy, the Francophone migrant theatres of Abla Farhoud and Marie NDiaye and Homeric exiles in twentieth-century French writing. She is currently co-supervising a PhD thesis on trauma and the crisis in language in post-war French and German literature.

My teaching centred on modern and contemporary French theatre, French cinema, French poetry and literary translation. In addition to teaching the theatre of Molière and the films of Louis Malle to undergraduates in French, I offered the specialist modules The Theatre of the Absurd (FR2303) to second-year French undergraduates, and The Contemporary French Theatre (FR4307) to final year undergraduates. I offered a course entitled Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (FX6004) to the MA in Film Studies, and I convened, and taught the module What Gets Lost: Poetry and Translation (LL6023), which is offered to students on the MA in Languages and Cultures and the MA in Translation Studies. I taught The Playwright in Contemporary Theatre (DR6010) to the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies 2000-2012. I taught on the interdisciplinary module – Negotiating Knowledges in the Networked Society (LL6008), which was taken by postgraduate students in the School of Languages. My teaching interests encompass feminist and psychoanalytical approaches to contemporary theatre and film, contemporary poetics in French and English and the translation of poetry. More broadly, I am interested in teaching creative responses to literary texts, and in exploring the nature of the creative process, and its representation in literature and film.