Cara Delay
Associate Professor
Office Hours: Fulbright Research Fellowship 2012-2013
Phone: 843.953.7597
E-mail: delayc@cofc.edu
Cara Delay received her Ph.D. in Comparative History from Brandeis University. Her research focuses on Irish women, religion, and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She has been awarded a year-long research Fulbright and will spend the 2012-2013 at The University College Dublin Humanities Institute, Ireland, conducting research on her project, Desolate Journeys: Reproduction and Motherhood in Ireland, 1950-2000. This project investigates women’s experiences of reproduction, contraception, abortion, and motherhood in late twentieth-century Ireland. It also explores the ways in which late twentieth-century Irish society perceived and represented reproduction and motherhood. I will complete archival research in Dublin and Belfast and also conduct oral histories with women in order to demonstrate that women’s bodies were and are central to debates about Ireland’s place within Europe, as well as to definitions of Irishness itself.
She is currently completing her book manuscript on lay Catholic women in modern Ireland. Her work has been or will be published in Eire-Ireland, New Hibernia Review, US Catholic Historian, and Feminist Studies, and her essays "Churchings and Changelings Childbirth in Modern Irish History" and "'Ever So Holy':Girls, Mothers, and Catholicism in Irish Women’s Life-Writings, 1850-1950" are forthcoming in volumes published by Irish Academic Press and Four Courts Press. She has received grants and awards from the American Association of University Women and the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Education
Ph.D., Brandeis University
Research Interests
European Women's and Gender History; Modern Britain and Ireland
Courses Taught
HONS 391 ST: The Great Hunger-Famine in Ireland
HIST 241 ST: Women in Europe, 1500-1800
HIST 241 ST: Women in Europe, 1800-present
HIST 241 ST: Modern Ireland
HIST 299 The Historian's Craft: Birth, Death, and the Human Lifecycle
HIST 441 Research Seminar: Fairies, Fantasy, and Folklore
Honors and Awards
2012-2013 Research Fulbright at The University College Dublin Humanities Institute, Ireland.
Elected to the board of the American Conference for Irish Studies, 2011
Recipient of grants and awards from The American Association of University Women and the American Conference for Irish
Interim Director, Women's and Gender Studies Program, spring 2010
- Honors Faculty Lecture Series: "Before the Pill: Women, Reproduction, and Birth Control in History"
- Affiliated Faculty Member, British Studies Program
- Member of Prize Committee, American Conference for Irish Studies James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize, 2010
Publications
"‘The Gates Were Shut': Catholics, Chapels, and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland," New Hibernia Review 14, 1 (Earrach/Spring 2010): 14-35.Review of Crossman, Virginia, Politics, Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. March, 2010.
