Dr Shonagh Hill (QUB): will present a seminar‘Theatres of Freedom and Resistance: Women Playwrights during the years of the Irish Free State’ on 5th October 2022, 16:30 – 18:00.

Dr Shonagh Hill is a Marie Curie Fellow (2020-2) at Queen’s University Belfast. Her project, ‘Generational Feminisms in Contemporary Northern Irish Performance’ (GenFem) examines the embodied experiences of different generations of women in Northern Ireland, as well as their differing relationships to feminisms: both feminist movements and feminist ideas as they circulate within culture. These embodied experiences are explored through the context of performance and will investigate working practices that address the tensions and solidarities of intergenerational relationships.

Her edition, Plays by Women in Ireland (1926-1933) was published this year by Bloomsbury. It provides access to neglected theatrical work and broadens our understanding of the history of Irish theatre as well as the vital role of women within it. The introduction places these plays in dialogue with one another as well as within the national context of the repealing of women’s rights during the Irish Free State years. These are plays by authors including Mary Manning, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Kate O’Brien and Margaret O’Leary, which are difficult to access, but which are increasingly visible in Irish theatre scholarship. This unique collection places the playwrights in dialogue to form a tradition of women’s theatrical work that challenges the male-dominated literary canon of Irish theatre, as well as enriching the body of women’s theatrical work in the Anglophone world during the interwar years.

This will be a hybrid event meeting in the Irish Studies Seminar Room (27 University Square 01/003) and also online via MS Teams. Please indicate your preference when registering.

All welcome.

Register here