2022

Orlaith Darling

Orlaith is a doctoral candidate in the School of English. Her project, funded by the Irish Research Council, asks how contemporary Irish women’s literature engages with or represents neoliberal culture and economics. In particular, she is interested in the short fiction of Claire Keegan, Nicole Flattery, Cathy Sweeney, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Danielle McLaughlin, Wendy Erskine, and Claire Louise Bennett. She is more broadly interested in contemporary anglophone literature and political aesthetics, and has published on various topics, such as austerity, the Künstlerroman, ageing, embodied politics, epistemological violence, in work by the likes of Sally Rooney, Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, as well as in popular culture such as Fleabag.

She is co-founder of the Contemporary Irish Literature research network, and is currently working on co-editing a special issue of the Irish Studies Review on the topic of women's literature and discourses of work, due for publication in early 2023.

Before starting her PhD, she studied at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin, where she received a Foundation Scholarship in 2016.