2020-21

Margaret Masterson

Margaret is a PhD candidate in the School of English. Her research examines constructions of girlhood through bibliography and book collecting in the Pollard Collection of Children’s Books, focusing on editions of Maria Edgeworth, the Collection’s most prolific author. Showing that girlhood is not a stable or limited concept but something dynamic, temporal, cultural, and negotiated among author, narrator, reader, narratee, the project explores the intersectionality of the authors’ textual constructions of girlhood, the ideological motivations of the printer and bookseller, and the assumptions about girlhood made by the collector and the researcher in the archive.

Maggie was a children’s librarian in the Chicago area before coming to Trinity. She holds an MLIS in Library and Information Science from Dominican University, Illinois, USA, and an M.Phil. in Children’s Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She was awarded the 2019 Pollard Fellowship in Irish Bibliography at TCD. She currently serves as board secretary for the Museum of Childhood Ireland Project, and sits on the executive committee for the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature.