Current Postgraduate Students

• Claire Brophy
• Sarah Byrne
• Alan Carmody
• Elizabeth Carville
• Thomas Connolly
• Paul Donnelly
• Brenda Farrell
• Bridget English
• Emma Galbally
• Fiona Gault
• Theresa Harney
• Mary O'Byrne
• Jessica Peart
• Marie Therese Ryan
• Annabel Sheehan
• Mark Tyndall

Recent Graduates

Academic Year 2012-13

• Sonia Howell
• Declan Kavanagh
• Siobhan O'Donnell

Academic Year 2011-12

Ciara Gallagher

Bernadette Trehy, PhD

Thesis Title: "In Ruin Unreconciled: Women’s Writing and the End of the British Empire"

Drawing on recent feminist cultural and historical scholarship on the roles of women in colonial societies in the twentieth century, Bernadette Trehy's thesis examines the works of four women writers who wrote important novels that reflect on the wider historical condition of late British imperial crisis and collapse in the last century. The women writers in question are Elizabeth Bowen (The Last September), Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus and Breakfast with the Nikolides), Doris Lessing (The Grass is Singing) and Nadine Gordimer (The Lying Days).

Academic Year 2010-11

Margaret O'Neill, PhD

Margaret was an IRCHSS scholar in the English Department, NUI Maynooth, from 2006 to 2010. Her PhD thesis, "The Politics of Desire in Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien", reads these authors from the perspective of relational psychoanalysis to consider the politics of canon formation, the sexualisation of discourse, and notions of feminist and national identity within Irish cultural studies. Her research interests lie in Psychoanalytic and Gender Theory and Twentieth Century and Contemporary Irish Women’s Writings.

Conference Papers

“Unpacking the Oedipal Triangle in Kate O’Brien’s That Lady”

Queering Ireland 2: Coming Out in Contemporary Ireland:

An International Interdisciplinary Conference University College Cork, 25th / 26th July 2011

“Arrested Development: Philip’s Imprisonment of Ana in Kate O’Brien’s That Lady”

New Voices in Irish Criticism: Emergent Voices: Tradition and Dissent  

University College Dublin, 17th / 18th June 2011

“The Politics of Desire in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour”

IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature) NUI Maynooth, 26th / 30th July 2010

“Desire Lost and Found in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour”

Space, Technology and Modernity in Irish Literature and Culture University College Dublin, 21st / 22nd May 2010

““If I am Henrietta, then what is Henrietta?”: Desire, Femininity and Social Form in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris”

The Politics of Irish Writing International Postgraduate Conference Charles University Prague, 18th / 19th September 2009

“Desire and Recognition in Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour”

Department of English Spring Seminar Series NUI Maynooth, 2009

““Living Space”: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Kate O’Brien’s The Ante Room”

Postgraduate Colloquium

NUI Maynooth, 2007

Academic Year 2009-10

Brian O'Neill, MLitt

Brendan Prunty, PhD

Sharon Tighe-Mooney, PhD

Sharon Tighe-Mooney’s doctoral thesis entitled ‘“Nun, Married, Old Maid”: Kate O’Brien’s Fiction, Women and Irish Catholicism” was completed in 2010. She also obtained a BA, and an MA in English, Sociology and Theology, from the National University of Ireland.

Sharon currently tutors and facilitates writing workshops in the Writing Centre in the Centre for Teaching and Learning. She has a Professional Certificate in Teaching and Learning (2012). She has also tutored on EN150 - Criticism, Research and Writing, and presented writing skills workshops in association with EN153 – Studies in Literary Form: Fiction, in the Department of English.

Publications and Conference Presentations

Book:

Quinn, Deirdre and Sharon Tighe-Mooney. Eds. Essays in Irish Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

Essays in Collections: 

• ‘What Kate Did: Subversive Dissent in Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room’ in Brisset, Sandrine and Noreen Doody. Eds. Voicing Dissent: New Perspectives in Irish Criticism. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012. 143-158. See http://eprints.nuim.ie/3800/
• ‘Exploring the Irish Catholic Mother in Kate O’Brien’s Pray for the Wanderer’ in Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien. Eds. Breaking the Mould: Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism. Reimagining Ireland Series. Bern: Peter Lang (Oxford), 2011. 69-85. See http://eprints.nuim.ie/2745/

• ‘Sexuality and Religion in Kate O’Brien’s Fiction’ in Deirdre Quinn and Sharon Tighe-Mooney. Eds. Essays in Irish Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. 125-139. See http://eprints.nuim.ie/2744/

Conference Papers and Presentations

• ‘Process and Product: Supporting Academic Writing in Higher Education’ (co-presented with Dr Alison Farrell). Dublin City University, All Ireland Society of Higher Education Annual Conference 2011, 25/08/11.
• Invited panellist for Postgraduate Workshop on structuring and managing a PhD, New Voices Conference, University of Limerick, 28/05/10.
• ‘Exploring the Irish Catholic Woman in Kate O’Brien’s Pray for the Wanderer, IADT, Dun Laoghaire, Catholicism and Public Cultures in Ireland, France, and North America, 18/06/09.
• ‘What Kate Did: Subversive Dissent in Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room’, St. Patrick’s, Drumcondra, New Voices Conference 2007, 20/04/07.
• ‘The Clash of Eternal, Fraternal and Earthly Love: Catholicism and Romance in Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room’, NUI, Maynooth, New Voices Conference 2006, 06/05/06.
• ‘Kate O’Brien, the Church and Women’, NUI, Maynooth Postgraduate Colloquium, 01/03/06.
• ‘Church Fathers and Literary Daughters’, UCD, Kate O’Brien Symposium, 25/01/06. 

E Journal:

Farrell, Alison and Sharon Tighe-Mooney. ‘Process and Product: Supporting Academic Writing in Higher Education’. AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 5.1 (Spring 2013). pp. 1101-11018. See http://eprints.nuim.ie/2753/ 

Academic Year 2008-09

Michael Cronin, PhD

Eileen Kinlon, MLitt

Eoghan Smith, PhD

Academic Year 2007-08

Ariane Hans, MLitt

Sinéad Kennedy, PhD

Bernard McHugh, PhD

Maria Sabistina, MLitt