At this year’s Merriman Summer School in Ennis, County Clare participants explored topics such as inherited understandings of emotional life and ways of transacting emotion; how a secular psychology emerged in Ireland; mothers and emotional formation; family and emotion; gender, sexualities and emotion; mental distress, social control and incarceration; self‑expression, repressions and resistances; "the unsayable": trauma and trajectories towards recovery through speech; emotion and the literature of emigration; feeling and the Irish song tradition.
Department of English lecturer, Dr Moynagh Sullivan, gave a talk entitled “Undressing My Mother”: Rethinking Irish motherhood at the Merriman Summer School.
Dr Sullivan directs the Department of English MA on Gender and Sexuality in Writing and Culture. She has published widely on psychoanalysis, contemporary poetry, modernism and postmodernism, gender studies, motherhood, and popular culture.