Munster Women Writers Project

About the Munster Women Writers Dictionary

The Munster Women Writers Project, based in the English Department at University College Cork, was a recovery project aiming to make available the basic materials for biographical and literary research and analysis on the extensive number of women writers with Munster backgrounds or strong Munster connections in the period 1800-2000. Our objective is to make more information on these writers available for future literary historians, feminist critics, and social historians to develop knowledge and understanding of this material. By making available the basic materials for scholarly research in this field, the project aims to help generate critical analysis of the role of regional, class and gender factors in the formation of writers, and the intersection of these factors in the nature of the work produced.

Project Researcher, Dr. Tina O'Toole, has compiled and edited a comprehensive biographical dictionary of Munster Women Writers 1800-2000. The database, which contains material relating to over 560 writers, provides material on the biographies, writings and published work of a range of writers. Irish language material in the database was edited by Síle Ní Chochláin.

Project Team

Prof. Patricia Coughlan (Project Director), Dr. Tina O'Toole, Dr. Éibhear Walshe.
June O’Sullivan and Kalene Kenefick (Part-Time Researchers), Roz Cowman (Project Consultant). [link] Further information on the English-language project team and advisory panel.
Síle Ní Chochláin, Gearóidín Nic Cárthaigh (Irish Language Researchers). [link] Further information on the Irish-language research team.
Jonathan P. Neville, Albert Williams (Programmers), Petra Stone (Web Designer), Diane Searls (Database Technician).

In addition to our research agenda, we have held feminist research seminars at NUI Cork, to encourage the sharing and dissemination of information, knowledge and critical thought about the field. In July 2001 we held an international conference here in NUI Cork Munster Women Writers: Towards a Feminist Literary History.

Links were created between those of us working in this field in Ireland, and parallel projects abroad, particularly the CEIR / Corvey project (which is engaged with digitising nineteenth-century texts) at Cardiff University. These links, and the existence of this project website have attracted ongoing communication with university departments and individual scholars working on Irish writing internationally.