Dr. Amy Prendergast

This project centres on the rich and extensive body of life writing produced by Irish women from 1690 to 1810. Life writing relates to ostensibly non-fictional writings about people's own lives, their memories, and lived experiences. MARGINS strives towards inclusivity, and the source material will incorporate life writing by women of all ages and all religious denominations. Focusing on life writing allows marginalised voices to be recentred. MARGINS prioritises life writing `from below", including oral testimonies and ephemera, as well as biographies, memoirs, and letters. It explores texts that have previously been overlooked and neglected, whether prose prefaces to the poetry of labouring class women or gallows speeches recorded on broadsides. MARGINS champions life writing by those whose voices are often forgotten, including `fallen' women, domestic servants, sex workers, and those charged with criminal offences. The corpus of material is vast, and the project will be divided into two work packages. The Principal Investigator will continue her focus on memoirs, while the PhD student will engage with the other forms of life writing, guided by the PI. Gender is at the core of this project, being central to its research objectives, outputs, and aims. The project actively contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. Engagement with life writing is key to our understanding of women and girls" participation in manuscript culture and literary culture more broadly. MARGINS contributes towards enhancing TCD"s local and global social and sustainability ambitions through its key outputs: 1. Doctoral thesis on Irish women's life writing from the margins 2. Establishment of a Life Writing Network at TCD 3. International conference on life writing by underrepresented individuals and communities 4. An edited collection on women"s life writing from the margins, arising from output 3, with PhD candidate and PI chapters within this 5. Workshops for advanced primary school pupils from DEIS schools, in collaboration with Marsh's Library Through this intersectoral collaboration with Marsh's Library, MARGINS will provide pupils with the opportunity to learn about women and girls' life writing from earlier periods, and also to produce their own stories as a form of empowerment. Given the ongoing crises in gender rights at a global level, interventions in the enhancement of young women and girls' relationship with their cultural and literary heritage are both timely and urgent.