English and Creative Arts

Marie-Louise Coolahan is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA 1994), Oxford University (MPhil 1996), and Nottingham Trent University (PhD 2000). In 1996 she was awarded a doctoral bursary to work with the AHRB-funded Perdita Project, which was founded to research sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s manuscript compilations, and to produce a searchable electronic database comprising bibliographical descriptions and detailed analyses of approximately 400 manuscripts. Her doctoral thesis, ’Gender and Occasional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture’, was completed in 2000, since which time she has been a member of the English Department at NUI, Galway.

She was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 2004-5 and a Government of Ireland Research Fellow, funded by the IRCHSS, 2006-7. Marie-Louise was awarded a research fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., and elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) in 2012.

Most recently, Marie-Louise has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (Principal Investigator) for her project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700. This project, which will run from July 2014 to June 2019, will produce a new, large-scale understanding of how women’s writing circulated, using the results to analyse how texts, ideas and reputations gained traction in the early modern English-speaking world. It will focus specifically on international correspondence networks, transnational religious orders, and the manuscript miscellany as a mode of textual transmission. 

Marie-Louise is also Co-Investigator on ’Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh’ (in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland). Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from February 2013-2016, this project will produce an anthology of women’s poetry in the vernacular languages as well as a comparative critical study.

Marie-Louise was Secretary (Management Committee), and Leader, Working Group 2 (Tools and Interconnectivity), for the collaborative European research network, ’Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture’. This network was funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) for the period 2009-2013. This research collaboration continues under the auspices of the NEWW network (New Approaches to European Women’s Writing; http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/Women_writers'_networks).

She was also involved in the AHRC-funded project, ’Who Were the Nuns? English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800’. See http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/.

For the Perdita Project, see http://www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/. Adam Matthew Digital have published the Perdita catalogue, linking 230 of the entries to digital facsimiles of the corresponding manuscripts. If you have access to the Hardiman Library, you can access Adam Matthew’s Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 at: http://www.perditamanuscripts.amdigital.co.uk.libgate.library.nuigalway.ie/default.aspx. For further information, see: http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Perdita/default.aspx.