Dr Ellen McWilliams

My interests are in the fields of twentieth-century women's fiction, anti-colonial history and the aftershocks of colonial violence, intergenerational memory/postmemory, transgenerational trauma, ancestral guilt, literary responses to the pain of revolution and civil war, political violence and literary form, and migration and diasporic identity. I am a member of the Routes: Migration, Mobility, Displacement Network and the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict.

The story of my writing can be found at this site. My book, Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, has just been published by Belfast's Beyond the Pale Books. 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 Linda Connolly, Lucy McDiarmid, Claire Mitchell, Fintan O'Toole, Jonathan Meades, and other readers are available on this page. To date, the book has been reviewed in the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, the Irish News, the Irish Post, the Morning Star, the Western People, the Irish Evening Echo, the Southern Star, the Bristol Post, the Northern Review of Books, and the Belfast News Letter with reviews forthcoming in History Ireland, the Arts Desk, the Irish Literary Supplement, the History Workshop, the Oxonian Review, New Hibernia Review, and Irish Studies Review. 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 and a profile of Resting Places was recently published in the New York Irish Echo.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 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). My next academic book is provisionally entitled Hauntings: Trauma and Narrative Repair in Irish Women's Lifewriting.

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.