The Limits of Certainty: Creative Use of Archives in Vona Groarke's Hereafter and Doireann Ni Ghriofa's Said the Dead

The Limits of Certainty: Creative Use of Archives in Vona Groarke's Hereafter and Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Said the Dead Catriona Crowe will deliver this year's Flatley Lecture. As someone who has cared for, curated, digitized, and publicized archives for over forty years in the National Archives of Ireland, Crowe has always been interested in the fact that records often raise more questions than they answer; there are also massive gaps in the Irish archival record. The works of two female authors (Vona Groarke & Doireann Ní Ghríofa), working respectively with genealogical records in search of an ancestor and mental health records in a search for meaning in a previous secret archive, tackle archival problems confronting their writing with ingenuity, imagination and crucial transparency as to the methodologies they are using. Crowe will be referring to Saidiya Hartmann's use of 'critical fabulation' as a theory and a methodology to help overcome major gaps in the African-American archival record. Catriona Crowe is co-presenter, with Diarmaid Ferriter, of the RTÉ history podcast What Were We Like? and Curator of First Through Talks at the Galway International Arts Festival. She was formerly Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. She is Chair of the SAOL Project, which helps women with addiction issues in Dublin's North Inner City. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.