As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Clair Wills, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, will deliver the lecture, "Making Sense of the Missing: The Family, the Church and 'the Home' in Twentieth-century Irish society."
Lecture Abstract
In this lecture, Clair Wills considers the following questions: How do we approach the aftermath of the scandals of institutional abuse in Ireland? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame and responsibility? The lecture will trace a history of sexual secrecy in Ireland from the post-famine period to the 1950s and beyond, asking how and why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children. Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now?
Copies of Clair Wills' new book, Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets (FSG, April 2024), will be available for purchase after the lecture.
Speaker Biography
Clair Wills is regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a critic and cultural historian of Britain and Ireland. She has written prize-winning books on the history of Ireland during the Second World War, on post-war immigrant Britain, and her essays on contemporary fiction, poetry and cultural institutions appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Her most recent book, Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, published by FSG in April 2024, is a study of four generations of unmarried mothers in her own family, set in the context of the intertwined histories of Britain and Ireland from the 1890s to the 1980s.