Dr. Klara-Maeve O´Reilly

• 10/2012 - 06/2017 PhD, Trinity College Dublin: European Studies (funded by post-graduate scholarship of TCD, Fritz-Stern-Stipendium 2014)
• "Perspectives of Collectivisation: Popular Opinion and Memory in Saxony and Lower Silesia, 1948-1961"
• 10/2010- 09/2011 MPhil, Trinity College Dublin: European Studies (Distinction)
• 2009 Bachelor of Arts, TU Dresden: Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften (Anglistik/Polonistik)

Previous projects

• Projektleitung "Gegen das Vergessen - NS-Zwangsarbeit in Görlitz" bei Meetingpoint Music Messiaen e.V., gefördert durch Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft (EVZ)
• Projektleitung "Netzwerkstatt - Zeitgeschichte & Zivilgesellschaft in der Oberlausitz"  bei Hillersche Villa gGmbH, gefördert durch das Sächsische Ministerium für Soziales und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt
• "F wie Kraft - Fachkräfte haben ein Geschlecht" (Redaktionelle Leitung, Formatentwicklung) Hochschule-Zittau Görlitz & Fachkräfteförderung Landkreis Görlitz 
• Thespis Zentrum - Soziotheatrales Zentrum (Akademie) am Deutsch-Sorbischen Volkstheater Bautzen

Strike or Punishment: Urban Spaces and Female Laundry Workers in 1940s Dublin

The laundry strike organised by the Irish Women Workers' Union (IWWU) in Dublin during the summer of 1945 took place in a space of convergence of historically specific aspects of gender, city and work. The laundry strike offers a promising area for the inquiry into historical notions of religious and urban actors alike on the place and organisation of female work/ers in the city, and the religious organisation of female propriety and penitence, i.e. the im-/proper ways of behaving as Irish Catholic women in Dublin.

The project will adress the following set of research questions: First, where was non-domestic laundry work in Dublin located and interrupted over the course of the strike? What can be said of the geographical and social spaces of these places, and their history? Second, what can be said about the interaction and discourse of urban/religious agents surrounding the strike and the field of female laundry work more generally? Third, how did the historical agents represent/enact urbanity in the context of the strike?