MARIE-LOUISE COOLAHAN

Marie-Louise Coolahan is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA 1994), Oxford University (MPhil 1996), and Nottingham Trent University (PhD 2000). In 1996 she was awarded a doctoral bursary to work with the AHRB-funded Perdita Project, which was founded to research sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s manuscript compilations, and to produce a searchable electronic database comprising bibliographical descriptions and detailed analyses of approximately 400 manuscripts. Her doctoral thesis, ’Gender and Occasional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture’, was completed in 2000, since which time she has been a member of the English Department at NUI, Galway. She was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 2004-5 and a Government of Ireland Research Fellow, funded by the IRCHSS, 2006-7. Marie-Louise was awarded a research fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., and elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) in 2012.

For the Perdita Project, see http://www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/.

Adam Matthew Digital have published the Perdita catalogue, linking 230 of the entries to digital facsimiles of the corresponding manuscripts. If you have access to the Hardiman Library, you can access Adam Matthew’s Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 at: http://www.perditamanuscripts.amdigital.co.uk.libgate.library.nuigalway.ie/default.aspx. For further information, see: http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Perdita/default.aspx. 

Marie-Louise is Secretary of the Management Committee, and Leader of Working Group 2 (Tools and Interconnectivity), for the collaborative European research network, ’Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture’. This network is funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) for the period 2009-2013. The network currently consists of 100 researchers from 27 countries. Research is focused on the reception of women’s writing in Europe prior to 1900. It aims to answer the following research questions: what was the extent of women writers’ influence? Which active roles did they play as authors and readers? What happened to them when they fell into the hands of 19th-century canonizers? This COST Action has a significant Digital Humanities dimension: data on the reception and internationalisation of women’s literature are shared in an online database (see http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/Database_WomenWriters). For further information, see http://www.costwwih.net/.

Marie-Louise is Co-Investigator on ’Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh’ (in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland). Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from February 2013-2016, this project will produce an anthology of women’s poetry in the vernacular languages as well as a comparative critical study.

Marie-Louise currently teaches undergraduate courses on Renaissance and early modern literature, Milton’s Paradise Lost, eighteenth-century satire, and theories of literary history. She also teaches ’Early modern print and manuscript cultures’ for the MA in Literature & Publishing, as well as coordinating the Structured PhD module, ’Theory/Methodologies: Humanities’.

Her research interests lie in the areas of Renaissance manuscript culture, literary networks, devotional prose, and early modern women’s writing. She welcomes enquiries regarding doctoral research in any aspect of early modern British and Irish literature.  

Current Roles

Head of 2BA English 
Editorial Board, Irish University Review.
Advisory Panel, ’Who Were the Nuns? English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800’. See: http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/.                                           
Member, ESF-COST Programme Domain Committee (Individuals, Societies, Cultures and Health), http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch.
Member, steering committee, Irish Renaissance Seminar.
Member, Gender, Discourse, Identities research group, Gender ARC, http://www.genderarc.org/.
Member, Centre for Antique, Medieval & Pre-Modern Studies (CAMPS), http://www.nuigalway.ie/camps/.

PUBLICATIONS

Monograph

• Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2010). This book was awarded ’Honorable Mention’ in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Prize (2011); http://www.ssemw.org/awards11.html.

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

• ’Ideal Communities and Planter Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29 (2012): 69-91. 
  
• ’Transnational Reception and Early Modern Women’s “Lost” Texts’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 7 (2012): 261-270.
• ’Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Literature Compass 7 (2010): 1049-61.
• ’Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing’, Women’s Writing 14 (2007): 306-20.
• ’Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 124-43.
• ’ “We live by chance, and slip into Events”: Occasionality and the Manuscript Verse of Katherine Philips’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (2003): 9-23.

  Essays/Book Chapters

• ’Literary Memorialization and the Posthumous Construction of Female Authorship’, in Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (eds.), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post-Reformation (Ashgate, forthcoming 2013).
• ’Archipelagic Identities in Europe: Irish Nuns in English Convents’, in Caroline Bowden and James Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Ashgate, forthcoming 2013).
• ’ “And this deponent further sayeth”: Orality, Print and the 1641 Depositions’, in Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (eds.), Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland, 1600-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 69-84.
• ’Caitlín Dubh’s keens: Literary Negotiations in Early Modern Ireland’, in Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers of the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Ashgate, 2004), pp. 91-110.
• ’The Literary Contexts of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, and his family’ (co-author Victoria Burke) in Martyn Bennett (ed.), Society, Religion, and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Nottinghamshire (Edwin Mellen, 2005), pp. 115-41.

Editorial Work

• Contributing editor, ’Queen Elizabeth I at Theobalds’ and ’Material relating to Lady Jane Grey’, new edition of John Nichols’ The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, gen. eds. Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke and Jayne Archer (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013).
• Contributing editor, ’Katherine Philips’, ’Anna Ley’ and ’Jane Cavendish’, in Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 77-95, 128-162. This book was awarded the Josephine Roberts Edition Prize (2006) by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; see http://www.ssemw.org/awards06.html

Articles for the Perdita Project on women’s manuscripts, 1500-1700

’Lady Anne Twysden’; ’Anna Cromwell Williams’; ’Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’; ’Katherine Philips’; ’Lady Mary Carey’; ’Anna Ley’; ’Katherine Thomas’; ’Katherine Nanney’. See: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/ and Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 (Adam Matthew Digital, 2008); http://www.amdigital.co.uk/Collections/Perdita.aspx.

She has also contributed to The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (Blackwell, 2012), the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Literature Online; and reviewed for Early Modern Literary Studies, Historians of Women Religious in Britain and Ireland (HWRBI, http://www.history.ac.uk/history-women-religious/), Irish University Review, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies , Notes and Queries, and Women’s Writing. She regularly presents her research at conferences in Ireland, Europe and North America.

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