Irish Studies Seminar Series: “‘In a bad place’: A Topography of Romantic Entanglements in Recent Irish Novels”

Irish Studies Seminar Series

“‘In a bad place’: A Topography of Romantic Entanglements in Recent Irish Novels”

Ms Nathalie Lamprecht (Charles University, Prague)

We are delighted to invite you to the third seminar of our Irish Studies Seminar Series for this academic year. We offer a warm winter welcome to Ms Nathalie Lamprecht who is currently visiting the Centre for Irish Studies as a Visiting Doctoral Scholar from Charles University, Prague, this semester for her seminar at 4pm Thursday 16^th November 2023.   

Ms Lamprecht’s paper, ‘“In a bad place”: A Topography of Romantic Entanglements in Recent Irish Novels”, is based on her current doctoral research exploring the intersection between ‘emotion’ and ‘space’ in contemporary Irish fiction, supervised by Professor Ondrej Pilney at the Centre for Irish Studies in Charles University, Prague. Nathalie is also currently deputy editor of the student academic journal The Protagonist, and has recently co-organized the conferences Brendan Behan at 100: Legacy and New Directions and Reading Ireland in the 21st Century: The 6th International Postgraduate Conference in Irish Studies. 

This seminar will take place in the Seminar Room, Centre for Irish Studies, School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, 4 Distillery Road, University of Galway, and on zoom here: https://universityofgalway-ie.zoom.us/j/96586466030?pwd=WGFiNFY3L3F6dlVTZ3c3S1VxNnZqdz09 Further details are available below.  

As a reminder to our Irish Studies community at home and abroad, all of our research seminars will be run this year as hybrid events. While we are delighted to have you join us in person at the Centre on campus, we are particularly delighted to have those of you who may be unable to travel to Galway to join us in our zoom room on the day. Beidh an-fáilte roimh chách thar zoom!  

Seminar Abstract:  

All interpersonal relationships take place in space. The kind of relationship that perhaps occurs most frequently in recent Irish novels written by women is the unhealthy romantic relationship. Unhealthy relationships can be defined by secrecy, shame, emotional, sexual, or physical abuse and/or a power-imbalance between partners. In short, they fail to contribute to a sense of well-being in at least one of the people involved. In this seminar, the romantic relationships central to Eimear Ryan’s Holding Her Breath and Niamh Campbell’s This Happy, among others, will be discussed, paying particular attention to the spaces that these relationships can or cannot take place in. The relationships in focus will mainly be those between young women and significantly older, married men. It is these relationships, which need to be hidden, to be constrained to certain places, that are only allowed to exist in an intimate topography of secrecy. Using Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that emotions can move us through space, the seminar will address how these relationships and the emotions they produce move women both towards and away from certain places and why. Furthermore, it will be argued that space in these novels reflects the disparities between partners and that emotions influence the way space is experienced and perceived.

Presenter Biography: 

Nathalie Lamprecht is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University, Prague. Her research focuses on the portrayal of young women in recent Irish novels written by women, examining how gender, space, and emotion interact in these narratives. Nathalie holds a BA in English and American Studies from the University of Vienna and an MA in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures with a specialisation in Irish Studies from Charles University. Her MA thesis entitled “Class, Sexuality and Nationalism: Identity Building in the Prose Writings of Brendan Behan” (2021) won the Vilém Mathesius Award presented to the best theses in Anglophone Studies at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. She is deputy editor of the student academic journal The Protagonist and has recently co-organized the conferences Brendan Behan at 100: Legacy and New Directions and Reading Ireland in the 21st Century: The 6th International Postgraduate Conference in Irish Studies.