22/07/2026
In this talk, Secrecy, Transparency and Dissidence in Contemporary Irish Literature, Professor Pilar Villar-Argáiz will explore how recent Irish poetry and fiction respond to crises of democratic thinking, institutional opacity, and the ethics of disclosure in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. This talk will focus on work by Colette Bryce, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and draws on literary studies, political theory, and cultural analysis.
Pilar Villar-Argáiz is Professor of British and Irish Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Granada. She has published extensively on contemporary and modernist Irish poetry and fiction, in relation to questions of gender, race, community, migration and interculturality. She is the author of the books Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider’s Culture (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) and The Poetry of Eavan Boland: A Postcolonial Reading (Academica Press, 2008). Her edited collections include Secrecy and Community in Twentieth-First Century Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2021, co-edited with María J. López Vizcaíno) and Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Professor Villar-Argáiz is a CASSCS Visiting Fellow in School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
Contact: Professor Rióna Ní Fhrighil - [email protected]
