Guest Lecture: Dr. Maryam Najafibabanazar (Haliç University in Istanbul, Turkiye), "Negotiating Female Identity and Feminist Movements in 19th- and 20th-Century Irish and Iranian Society and Literature: A Comparative Perspective"

This lecture examines the construction and transformation of female identity in 19th- and 20thcentury Ireland and Iran through a comparative literary and socio-historical lens. By situating women’s experiences within the broader contexts of colonialism, nationalism, religion, and modernization, the talk explores how feminist consciousness emerges in parallel yet distinct ways across these two cultures. In Ireland, the rise of nationalist movements and the legacy of British colonialism shaped gender roles, often positioning women as symbolic bearers of cultural identity while restricting their social agency. Literary texts—from the late 19th century to modernist works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—reveal tensions between domestic confinement and emerging female autonomy. Similarly, in Iran, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and later modernization efforts under the Pahlavi era contributed to new discourses on women’s education, visibility, and rights, while also generating ideological tensions between tradition and reform. Drawing on key feminist frameworks and comparative literary analysis, this lecture places Irish and Iranian women writers and representations in dialogue, highlighting how female identity is negotiated at the intersection of patriarchy, nationalism, and modernity. The lecture ultimately argues that despite differing cultural and religious contexts, both societies reveal strikingly similar patterns of resistance, negotiation, and redefinition of womanhood.

Dr. Maryam Najafi is a graduate of the Department of English Language and Literature at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Haliç University in Istanbul. Her academic interests include Irish, British, and American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on feminist studies, colonial and postcolonial literature, and minority voices and literatures. She completed her PhD with a dissertation titled “Literary Encoding of Modernist Alienation in the Language and Spaces of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl,” a comparative study of Irish and Iranian modernist literature. Dr. Maryam Najafibabanazar is currently an academic visitor at the University of Würzburg as part of the "Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Training“ programme.

Registration 
If you are interested in participating in this event, please sign up by submitting this registration form or by sending an email with the subject line “NAJAFIBABANAZAR” to irishstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de by June 29, 2026. Please include your full name and affiliation. Online participants will receive a zoom link to the event in due time. Please note that the above given email address is used solely for registration purposes. If you want to contact ISWÜ, please use the contact information given below.

Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de