Katherine Fisher and Dr. David Hatch, English

When I began this project, I planned to investigate the ways in which Irish students engaged with and wrote about certain philosophical and literary tenets of modernism. As I conducted background research on the social and political climate in Ireland during the 1920s, however, my focus shifted somewhat to an exploration of the cultural, religious, and social tensions that informed Irish modernism generally and the writings of Trinity College students in particular. I traveled to Ireland and spent a week in the archives of Trinity College, Dublin, reading contemporary issues of a once-popular student-published newsletter, TCD: A College Miscellany. I examined several volumes of installments (from 1907 to 1934), taking digital pictures of relevant articles and images. After reading through and collecting a wide range of material, I decided to concentrate specifically on the emergence within the students’ writings of gender divisions that on some level parallel the religious and political divisions outside the college in the 1920s.

By the ’20s female students had been a part of life at Trinity College for a number of years, their involvement in higher education backed by the same Protestant values that defined the college itself as an ideological fortress of sorts surrounded by predominantly Catholic Dublin. TCD: A College Miscellany printed a number of editorials and features dealing both directly and indirectly with the presence of women at the college. Despite the official sanction of and praise for the attempts at integration, however, these student writings suggest a more complex response within the college. Particularly notable is the contradiction between the welcoming tone and progressive content of the front-page editorials—the public face of TCD—and the often derisive quality of the less formal columns—a venue less visible to the public and to the college administration. The contradictions in these texts not only illuminate the complexity of in-house responses to the consequences of admitting women, but also suggest that in some ways the same ideological divisiveness that put Protestant Trinity College on the defensive against its Catholic neighbors reached within the walls of Trinity to manifest itself in gendered, rather than religious or political, terms.

I will present the results of my research at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research in February; I will then expand this conference paper in the coming months into an article I hope to publish in an Irish studies journal. In my conference paper and the subsequent article, I will review the cultural and political factors that placed Trinity College and its students in a unique ideological situation, then examine the way these tensions are manifested in the attitude of student writers toward the integration of women into the student body. Using examples from both the formal editorials and the less institutionally informed features in this little-studied campus newsletter, I will show how external tensions played out within the college and how the students presented a rhetorically contradictory stance that undermined the some extent the equalizing effects of integration.

Although this period of Irish history, particularly the correspondences between religious and political loyalties during the early twentieth century, is the subject of much existing scholarship, my research sheds light on at least two issues that have been largely neglected: 1) the ways in which the deeply entrenched cultural divisiveness in early twentieth-century Ireland influenced matters of education and gender equality, and 2) the ways in which students, in the often ideologically volatile setting of the university, understood and wrote about their situation. Mine is not an exhaustive study and could benefit from a greater comparative element—e.g., how similar issues are discussed by students at University College, Dublin, Trinity’s Catholic equivalent, or even by students at other UK universities not directly influenced by characteristically Irish tensions—but it brings to light a unique historical and textual perspective on the intersections between politics and social issues in a particular stratum of Irish society.

Although I am still in the process of sifting through the hundreds of digital images I collected in Trinity’s archive, selecting the most relevant examples of gender-related editorializing, and writing a paper situating this editorial commentary in a larger social and historical context, my experience conducting archival research and drawing conclusions from texts that have received little scholarly attention has already proved invaluable in my own development as a scholar. I look forward to extending the benefits of this project by presenting my findings at one or more conferences and, hopefully, further developing my research to a point at which I can make a publishable contribution to the field of Irish studies.