Stitching Fragments: Feminist Historiographic Encounters with Lady Gregory and Neith Boyce
A lecture by Nora Grimes (Department of Drama, TCD) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.
This paper reflects the continued development of the methodological and historiographic frameworks that I am refining during my second year of doctoral research on Irish and American women theatre-makers in the early 20th century. Through my encounters with two of the women featured in my research, Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright and co-founder of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, and Neith Boyce, playwright and co-founder of the American little theatre company, The Provincetown Players, I will consider how the artistic and archival practices of these subjects have informed my own embodied research practice as a feminist scholar and theatre historian. I will first consider how Lady Gregory, crafts a feminist historiography across her folk-history trilogy, Grania (1912), Kincora (1905/09), and Dervorgilla (1910). Analysis of how Gregory questioned and challenged the consolidation of Irish history as a masculine space in her plays has informed my own self-reflexivity about the construction of feminist historiographic space by foregrounding women’s work in order to reclaim/reshape history. This, in turn, informs the second half of this paper, which draws from my three-month immersion in Boyce’s archives as a Beinecke Graduate Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The particularities of Boyce’s papers, and especially those of her daughter Miriam Hapgood DeWitt, emphasize the ways in which women sought to preserve their own legacies. I will further reflect on how my time in the archives (re)situated my own embodied feminist historiographic practice. This paper represents a collage of the methodological, dramatic, and archival fragments that I continue to stitch together and shape into the whole of my dissertation.
Nora Grimes is a Trinity Research Doctorate Award funded doctoral candidate in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. Her dissertation seeks to recentre the contributions of women theatre artists in both Irish and American theatre histories through the development of a transnational feminist genealogy. Her research interests are theatre history, feminism and gender in theatre, and myth and mythmaking in historical and contemporary feminist theatre performance. She is a 2024-25 Edith and Richard French Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and a 2024-25 Short Term Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She teaches on the Performance Analysis course at Trinity and teaches academic writing and theatre history at the Lir Academy.
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