'I had suddenly found that I could speak': Lady Gregory's Early US Lecture Tours and the Transnational (Re)shaping of an Irish Theatre History, 1911-1913.

A lecture by Nora Grimes (School of Creative Arts) for the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.

Abstract:
This paper reflects the continued development of the methodological and historiographic frameworks that I am refining during my third year of doctoral research on Irish and American women theatre-makers in the early 20th century. I will consider the various encounters between Lady Gregory and her American audiences through her lecture tours which overlapped with her leadership of the Abbey Theatre’s first American tours. The Irish Players toured the U.S. three times between 1911 and 1914, during which time the Irish artists cultivated relationships with Americans who sought to develop an American equivalent of a national theatre. During this period, Lady Gregory further delivered lecture tours reflecting on playwrighting, the history of the Abbey, and the potential for the United States to develop its own national dramatic tradition, ideas which she in turn reshaped into her consolidated history of the early Abbey in Our Irish Theatre. Analysis of how Gregory questioned and shaped her own histories in her lectures and creative output has informed my own self-reflexivity about the construction of feminist historiographic space by foregrounding women’s work in order to reclaim/reshape history. Interdisciplinary feminist methodologies offer new avenues for an embodied transnational historiographic practice. In their introductory essay “Space and Scale in Transnational History,” Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel ask: “How might we practice and spatially frame transnational history alternatively?”1 This paper will consider how feminist and spatial methodologies offer expanded modes to promote the practice of transnational history. This approach challenges a neat, linear historical space by constructing a multi-layered, collaborative feminist historiography as an alternative framework for exploring transnational history.
1 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History” The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 576.

About the Speaker:
Nora Grimes is a Trinity Research Doctorate Award funded doctoral candidate in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. Her dissertation seeks to recentre the contributions of women theatre artists in both Irish and American theatre histories through the development of a transnational feminist history. Her research interests are theatre history, feminism and gender in theatre, and myth and mythmaking in historical and contemporary feminist theatre performance. She is a 2024-25 Edith and Richard French Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, a 2024-25 Short Term Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and a 2025-26 Helen Krich Chinoy Fellowship awardee. She teaches on the Performance Analysis course at Trinity and teaches academic writing and theatre history at the Lir Academy.

This event is run in accordance with Trinity’s Dignity and Respect policy, and its commitment to nurturing a respectful and inclusive research culture.
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