Galway lecturer receives ERC literature grant

Dr Marie-Louise Coolahan, lecturer in English at NUI (National University of Ireland) Galway, Ireland, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council. It is the first such award ever made to an Irish researcher in any field of literature.

The award of almost €2m will fund Coolahan and a team of five postdoctoral researchers for a five-year period on her project ‘RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700’. The project aims to produce a large-scale understanding of how women’s writing circulated in the early modern English-speaking world, using the results to analyse how texts, ideas and reputations gained traction.

Coolahan said: “While there has been an increasing number of case studies on individual women writers in recent years, we have lacked an understanding of how and where women’s writing made an impact on a broader scale.”

NUI Galway president Dr Jim Browne said: “This is only the second time ever that a researcher in humanities in an Irish university has secured an ERC award. It is, as such, a remarkable achievement, not only for Coolahan, but for the discipline of English and for NUI Galway as whole.”

Adding further thoughts, Coolahan said: “RECIRC will provide a comprehensive view of how texts were used and re-used, and of how gender shaped ideas about authorship. The methodologies we develop are designed to be transferable to other languages and geographies, enabling future work on an even larger European scale.”