Patriarchal Aftermaths: The Rise of Motherhood Studies in 21st Century Irish Studies

Dr Sarah Arnold is an associate Professor in Maynooth University’s Department of Media in September, and currently Head of Department. She previously worked at the school of Film & Television at Falmouth University in the UK, and received her PhD from NUI Galway’s Huston School of Film & Digital Media in 2010.
   She is co-PI of the Women in Focus project – an IRC/AHRC Digital Humanities funded project investigating women’s amateur filmmaking. She is also a lead researcher on the MotherNet project, an interdisciplinary project that builds research capacity across three European universities through the topic of ‘narratives of motherhood’, and on the GEMINI project, a pan-European collaboration aimed at tackling gender stereotypes by engaging high school students with serial drama’s representation of gender issues.

Esther Borges is a PhD candidate at the university of São Paulo. Their dissertation focuses on Queer Diaspora in Irish literature, and is financed by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). She is an associate member of the Brazilian association of Irish Studies, (ABEI), the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and the Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses (AEDEI).

Moynagh Sullivan is Professor of English at Maynooth University. Her research focuses on motherhood, gender and sexuality, visual, medical and environmental humanities in Irish culture. She has published widely in these fields, especially on contemporary writing, literary traditions and Irish women poets. She is currently writing a monograph on Maternal Imaginaries in Irish culture and was PI on the Irish Research Council funded project, ‘Mamecology’ https://mamecology.ie/. She has been a Visiting Professor at Boston College, a Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies at the Moore Institute, UG, and the held the Department of Foreign Affairs Fulbright Fellowship In Irish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Moynagh lived and worked in Tokyo from 1992-1994, at Chūō Daigku and Kyōrin Daigku, where an invitation to speak at IASIL Kyoto, 1993 kindled her interest in Irish women poets.