About me
Dr Orlaith Darling is the coordinator of the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. In this position, she is responsible for providing feedback, support, and guidance – both academic and pastoral – to IPP members and doctoral candidates. This includes moderating the IPP’s regular Colloquia, facilitating travel for research trips and conference presentations, and organising workshops and masterclasses at the GCSC. She is also part of the GCSC team, and is involved in the internationalisation of the centre.
Previously, Orlaith completed her PhD at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Her project – titled ‘“Welcome to the Good Life!”: Neoliberalism(s) and Contemporary Irish Women’s Short Fiction’ – examined firstly, the implications of the neoliberal phase of late capitalist development for everyday life; secondly, how everyday life might be involved in (re)producing neoliberal norms; thirdly, the role of literature in subverting or reproducing neoliberalism as a “common sense” structuring principle for individuals and the collective in contemporary Ireland. In this, she followed Lauren Berlant and others in theorising the contemporary in terms of aesthetics and affect (rather than, say, chronology or events), where neoliberalism’s administrative influence both creates and forecloses on the possibility of future lives and narratives.
Her research has received funding from Trinity College Dublin School of English and the Irish Research Council, where she was a Government of Ireland scholar, and she held a graduate research fellowship with Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute from 2020-2023. Before her PhD, she read her MSc. In ‘Literature and Modernity, 1900-Present’ at the University of Edinburgh (2018-2019), and her BA in English Literature and History at Trinity College Dublin (2014-2018) where she was awarded a Foundation Scholarship in 2016.
Orlaith has published widely in the areas of Irish Studies, contemporary literature, and women’s writing, and has presented at conferences internationally in these areas. She is co-founder and co-editor of Contemporary Irish Literature, a research network for early career researchers in Irish studies.
Orcid: 0000-0001-6886-7530