Tag Archives: women

Postgraduate student interviews: Isabella Gammon-McConville (MRes)

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2023-2024.

Can you tell me a bit about your academic experience at Queen’s so far?

I started at Queen’s back in 2018 and I did my undergraduate [degree] in Spanish. I did my [first] two years at Queen’s and then I went abroad to Spain, where I worked as a language assistant. That was during Covid, so it was a bit of a different experience, but I was in the south of Spain there. I came back and did my final year, then went on and did the MRes, also looking at Spanish.

Isabella Gammon-McConville, personal archive

What topic did you choose for your MRes and what drew you to it?

I handed in my dissertation back in September [2023] and the title was ‘Language Acts and World (Un)Making: The Poetics of Power and Resistance in the Drama of Ana Caro and Leonor de la Cueva’. I was looking at Golden Age drama and specifically the comedia. I’d done a bit of that in my undergraduate work, I’d looked at a few different areas but I hadn’t seen a lot of work done by female dramatists. I was interested in how they wrote resistance into a lot of their work, because they followed the societal norms and expectations of writing literature in order to be able to write in the period, and they also managed to get in things that made their work different to the canonical work of the period.

What was the highlight of your post-grad experience?

That’s a difficult one. Honestly, probably handing my dissertation in! No, making my work and research fit within the field and seeing links between the research done by everyone else. The collaborative idea of research is that you get to do something that’s a bit different, but you get to draw on work that has already been written by other people and make your own space within the field. For me, this was developed throughout the MRes: the research methods classes which introduced various lenses to look at Caro and Cueva’s work, the discussions with my supervisor, and my own research into publications on the authors. Coming to conclusions using different research methods was really interesting. I guess it’s [about] coming up with something new, isn’t it?

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Travel Experiences and Illness in Early Modern Female Religious Communities, 17 April 2024 – Seminar write-up

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2023-2024.

María Martos (photo by Cara Reid)

On Wednesday 17th of April 2024, Dr María D. Martos Pérez (UNED, Madrid-Bieses) delivered a seminar on the topic of “Travel Experiences and Illness in Early Modern Female Religious Communities”, based on her research into female religious pilgrimages from Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. Her research for this seminar focused on recovering female authors. She considered themes of female authorship and the history of female participation in the production of literary works. 

Dr Martos Pérez began the seminar by explaining how she used women’s writing about their travel experiences to further understand the Early Modern female experience. The majority of the texts she examined were written by nuns travelling from the Iberian Peninsula to establish new convents in Spanish colonies. Their writings took the form of biographies, autobiographies or letters. The aim of this research was to compare the nuns’ individual experiences, investigate what these texts emphasise about the travelling conditions, study descriptions of the illnesses that the nuns’ endured while travelling, and consider how their suffering was transmitted through discursive rhetoric in the texts. She noted that the majority of female written manuscripts were addressed to the members of their religious community for informative purposes, while male-written texts were more often used as propaganda. 

Dr Martos Pérez outlined three main purposes of the travel narratives: they acted as points of reference for the other nuns, established the social role of religious women, and depicted a model for women’s writing. The manuscripts provide subjective accounts from the nuns, and give authority and legitimacy to their experiences, therefore legitimising women in public and scholarly roles. 

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Critical Interactions panel

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June 2021, Dr Dominique Jeannerod (PhD supervisor in French at Queen’s University), Dr Ashley Harris (former PhD student and departmental colleague until end of June 2021) and Ciara Gorman (current PhD supervisee) delivered a session entitled ‘Critical Interactions’ at the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. The trio of speakers aimed to highlight how their different respective research objects share structural and methodological affinities translating into common lines of enquiries. The overarching title for their collaborative paper, a preview of a joint panel at the (then) upcoming Society for French Studies conference 2021, was ‘Crime on the Margins: Peripheries, Alienation and Criminalisation of Women’. Whilst each of the three researchers is investigating different time periods and corpuses of French crime fiction, film and media, their papers incorporate many cross-cutting themes. These parallels include marginalization as well as space, place and liminality.

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