Dr Ellen McWilliams
Senior Lecturer
English and Creative Writing
My interests are in the fields of twentieth-century women's fiction, anti-colonial history and the lived aftershocks of colonial violence, intergenerational memory/postmemory, transgenerational trauma, and literary responses to the pain of revolution and civil war. I am most interested in restorative justice and the role that writers can play in truth and reconciliation and intercultural understanding.
My early academic work was dedicated to coming of age narratives and migration and diasporic identity.
I am a member of the Routes: Migration, Mobility, Displacement Network, the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict, and the Justice and Violence Research Network.
I am also interested in the ethics and difficulty of writing about living with cancer.
The story of my writing can be found at this site. My book, Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, was published by Belfast's Beyond the Pale Books in 2023. Literary scholar Lucy McDiarmid describes it as 'the creation of a new literary form' while historian Ronald Hutton concludes that ‘Land, family, community and tragic history make one of the most powerful and poignant combinations of which human experience is capable, and rarely has it found such an expressive and humane voice, capable of such wonderful language, as that of Ellen McWilliams’. BBC War Correspondent Fergal Keane calls it it 'a work of eloquent, haunting beauty, a song of mourning and revelation that deserves the widest possible audience. This is a story rooted in a place and time, but it is truly the story of all wars in all times'. Further details of pre-publication reviews from Lucy McDiarmid, Claire Mitchell, Fintan O'Toole, Jonathan Meades, and other readers are available on this page. The book has been reviewed in the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, the Irish News, the Irish Post, the Morning Star, the Irish Evening Echo, History Ireland, the Arts Desk, New York Irish Central, the New York Irish Echo, New Hibernia Review, Irish Studies Review, and the Belfast News Letter. A short article on the genesis of the book, 'A Broken Prayer for a Most Painful History', can be found on the RTE Culture site. A further essay, 'Resting Place: The Legacies of Civil War', was published on the West Cork History Festival blogsite.
The origin essay of the book, 'Dunmanway Fields: Saying Something to Break the Silence about a Great Local Hurt', was published in the Irish Times on Good Friday in 2022, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Dunmanway Massacre in West Cork.
In 2024, the book was profiled in an Irish Times essay on a new wave of Irish writing, 'Secrets and Lies: Memoirs that Unlock Ireland's Past'.
Resting Places was completed with the support of an Arts Council of Ireland Writer's Agility Award and a Foundation Award from the Society of Authors.
I have given talks about the book and my work with the Dunmanway Massacre Discussion Group at the James Connolly Centre on the Falls Rd, the West Belfast Community Festival, and at the 'Shankill Citadel' at an event organised by the Shankill Orange Order Historical Society.
In 2024, alongside Neale Jagoe, convenor of the Dunmanway Massacre Discussion Group, I gave a talk at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation to mark the 50th Anniversary of Glencree.
The panel, 'Between Memory and Legacy: Navigating the Dark Past of Irish History', was moderated by Glencree Political and Community Dialogue Programme Manager, Pat Hynes. A recording of the event can be found here.
I am in the later stages of work on The Miracle Keepers, a coda to the Irish Big House Novel, inspired by the ruins of Castle Bernard in Bandon, Co. Cork, about the long shadows of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War.
My next book will be called Battle Cry: On Cancer, Conflict, and the Writing Cure. I published an excerpt from the prologue to the book in The Sunday Times.
I have written three academic books, Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009), Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (2013), and Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (2021).
I have a special interest in New York magazine culture and have published four essays on Maeve Brennan's writing for The New Yorker, including '"A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design": Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning, and the Uses of Style' for Women: A Cultural Review and an article on Brennan's years at Harper's Bazaar, 'Maeve Brennan, Celebrity, and Harper's Bazaar in the 1940s'.
I have received a number of awards for research, including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Award, a British Library-Eccles Centre Fellowship in North American Studies, and a John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies Fellowship.
I contributed to an RTE Radio 1 Book Show programme dedicated to the life and work of Maeve Brennan and in 2017 coordinated a series on Women Writers and Irish America for The Irish Times to celebrate the centenary of Brennan's birth. I was also one of the academic consultants for, and appeared in, the BBC1 documentary 'Imagine... Margaret Atwood' (directed by Katy Homan and presented by Alan Yentob).
My teaching at Exeter focuses on Transatlantic Literary Relations, American Literature, and Irish Literature. I teach a special option in Year 3, 'Modern Irish Literature: Rebels & Radicals', and a strand of the first year module Academic English called 'Write For Your Life: Autobiographical Fiction, Lifewriting, and the Personal Essay'. I have received three awards for teaching, including a University of Exeter Teaching Fellowship.
I grew up in West Cork but have lived in the West Country for over 20 years. I attended the Convent of Mercy Sacred Heart Secondary School in Clonakility and hold close the value of a Sacred Heart education. I was lucky to benefit from the Irish government's visionary expansion of Higher Education in the mid-to-late 1990s and luckier still to receive a Cork County Council Higher Education Grant to study for an Arts Degree at University College Cork.
I was the first in my family to go to university and have been committed to widening access to Higher Education and to teaching in community settings since the beginning of my academic career.
My Office Hours for this term fall on Monday (via Microsoft Teams) and Tuesday (In Person in Queen's Room 120). Please book in for a meeting here.
Biography:
I completed my undergraduate degree at University College Cork and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Constance to pursue postgraduate study.
I received a National University of Ireland Travelling Prize in English before completing my PhD at Bristol with the assistance of a University of Bristol Arts Faculty Graduate Student Scholarship and an International Council for Canadian Studies Graduate Student Scholarship. Prior to being appointed at Exeter, I taught at the University of Bristol and Bath Spa University and spent time as a Fulbright Scholar at Fordham University in New York.