Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s explores 50 years of Irish women’s prison writing, 1960s-2010s. It connects the work of women leaders and writers in the Six Counties of Ireland, especially during the Troubles. It analyzes political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs.

It highlights the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey, Ann and Eileen Gillespie, Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. It also includes interviews.

This project builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. It repositions Irish women and their work in order to accurately archive social movements for civil rights and cultural productions about them – and this tradition is relevant even now during this moment of transatlantic solidarity with #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter Movement, including in Ireland, post-Easter Rising Centennial, as part of the big conversations happening now around the impacts of political repression and state attacks on social justice advocates and the harms of the carceral state.

Red Washburn (they/he) is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. They are Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center (CUNY). His book Irish Women’s Prison Writing: Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s-2010s was published by Routledge. Red’s articles appear in Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Their essays are in several anthologies, including Theory and Praxis: Women’s and Gender Studies at Community Colleges, Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, and Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. They are the co-editor of Sinister Wisdom’s Dump Trump: Legacies of Resistance, 45 Years: A Tribute to Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Trans/Feminisms. Finishing Line Press published their poetry collections Crestview Tree Woman and Birch Philosopher X. They co-edited WSQ’s issue Nonbinary (forthcoming Fall 2023). He received an ACLS/ Mellon fellowship for their next project Nonbinary: Tr@ns-Forming Gender and Genre in Nonbin@ry Literature, Performance, and Visual Art.

This seminar is hybrid in both in-person (27 University Square 01/003) and online forms (via MS Teams). Please indicate your preference when registering.