Utopias in Times of Crisis: Irish Modernist Literature in the 1920s and 1930s (UT-MOLI)

is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie/ERA Postdoctoral Fellowship (Horizon Europe, 2025–2027) hosted at FLUP/CETAPS, University of Porto.

About the Project

Focusing on the interwar decades, the project explores how literature engages with crisis not merely as a backdrop, but as a condition that reshapes temporal, national, and affective imaginaries. The project centers on key figures of Irish modernism, including James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O’Brien, analyzing how their works articulate alternative visions of community, identity, and futurity. UT-MOLI approaches utopia not as a fixed ideal, but as a critical and ambivalent mode that emerges in times of crisis—marked by a tension between possibility and impossibility. Irish modernist writing of the 1920s and 1930s provides a particularly rich site for exploring this dynamic, as literary experimentation intersects with questions of national identity, colonial legacies, gender, sexuality, and the relationship between the human and non-human.
By bringing into dialogue modernist studies, utopian studies, and Irish studies, the project addresses an important but still understudied intersection, while also historicizing concerns—such as environmental crisis, shifting gender roles, and democratic transformation—that remain central to contemporary Europe.

Research and Objectives

The project is structured around three interconnected research clusters:

National Utopias: This strand examines how utopian imaginaries contribute to the formation and critique of Irish national identity. It explores how literary texts negotiate the (im)possibility of national belonging in the context of colonialism, independence, and cultural revival, particularly in the works of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.

Environmental Utopias: Focusing on the relationship between the human and non-human, this cluster engages with the concept of the Anthropocene to analyze modernist representations of environment, space, and materiality. Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction is central here, especially in its depiction of emptied or transformed spaces.

Feminist and Queer Utopias: This strand explores how non-normative gender identities, sexualities, and forms of sociability function as utopian critiques of patriarchal and heteronormative structures. Drawing on queer theory, it examines works by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, and James Joyce as sites of alternative imaginaries and affective relations.

Objectives of UT-MOLI:

To bridge the gap between modernist and utopian studies through a comparative literary framework,
To identify and analyze understudied utopian impulses in canonical and lesser-studied Irish modernist texts,
To historicize key contemporary concerns—such as climate crisis, gender transformation, and social inclusion—within early twentieth-century literature.

Case Studies

The project focuses on a selection of key Irish modernist writers whose works engage with utopian thinking across national, environmental, and gendered dimensions:

James Joyce

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) provides a complex site for exploring utopian tensions within everyday life, particularly through the figure of Leopold Bloom and the negotiation of national, cultural, and diasporic identity. Episodes such as “Circe,” “Eumaeus,” and “Penelope” are read as spaces where alternative forms of belonging, temporality, and subjectivity emerge, often through fragmentation and irony.

W. B. Yeats

Yeats’s work, including “The Second Coming” (1920) and “A Vision” (1925, 1937), articulates utopian thinking through cyclical models of history and mythic constructions of Irish identity. His early investment in cultural nationalism and later engagement with mysticism reflect both the aspiration toward and the instability of idealized national futures.

Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen’s interwar novels, including The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938), are central to the project’s exploration of affective and environmental utopias. Her representation of space—often emptied, transitional, or estranged—foregrounds the relationship between human and non-human worlds, while also engaging questions of gender, intimacy, and social constraint.

Kate O’Brien

O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936) and Farewell Spain (1937) offer important perspectives on feminist and queer utopianism. Her work challenges dominant narratives of nation and gender by foregrounding female subjectivity, mobility, and desire, often situating utopian possibility in moments of displacement and transnational encounter.

Outputs

Planned Outputs

The project will produce:

Peer-reviewed journal articles in leading international journals
An international workshop (University of Porto, 2027) and a co-edited special issue
Presentations at major international conferences
A monograph proposal on modernist Irish utopias

All outputs will follow open access principles in line with Horizon Europe requirements, including deposit in institutional repositories.

Submitted Publications (as of April 2026):

“Queer(ing) Molly: Time, Queer Sexuality and Identity in ‘Penelope.’” Joyce Studies Annual 2026 (accepted for publication)
“Sexual “Non-Occurrence”: Celibacy in Elizabeth Bowen’s Interwar Fiction.” Humanities, Special Issue “Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing,” vol. 15, issue 51 (2026) (under review)

Conference Presentations (Completed as of April 2026):

“The modernist fascination with time: ‘Penelope,’ temporality and queer sexuality,” Relational Forms X – 1925, 2025: Which Twenties? Empathy and Estrangement Across Time in Literature and the Arts, FLUP, University of Porto, Portugal, December 2025.

Upcoming Presentations

“Ordinary Crises and Minor Utopias: Joyce and Bowen,” XXX International James Joyce Symposium, Jagiellonian University Kraków, Poland, June 2026.
“Utopian Impulses in Elizabeth Bowen’s Interwar Fiction,” International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) Conference 2026, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, July 2026.
“Modernist Utopias in Times of Crises,” The Pasts and Futures of Utopia, 26^th Conference of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe, University of Bucharest, Romania, July 2026.
Early Career Research Panel, moderator, The Pasts and Futures of Utopia, 26^th Conference of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe, University of Bucharest, Romania, July 2026.
“Moving Through Modernism: (Un)Belonging and Migration in Joyce and Bowen,” Avant-Garde and Migration, the 10^th International Conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), Stockholm University, Sweden, September 2026.

Researcher

Iva Dimovska is an ERA Fellow under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (Horizon Europe) at CETAPS. She holds a PhD (2021) in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University (Vienna). Her PhD thesis was title “Queer(ing) Time in Modernism and How to Read it: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” From 2022 to 2025, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the project “Democracy in East Central European Utopianism” based at the Democracy Institute at Central European University in Budapest, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. She has taught courses in modernist literature, feminism and queer theory. Iva’s research interests include: modernist literature, utopia and utopianism, 19th and 20th century literature, gender studies and feminism, and queer theory. She is a member of the steering committee of the Utopian Studies Society Europe, where starting from 2025, she also holds the position of an Early Career Research Officer.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0009-0007-0271-2393

Ciência ID: https://www.cienciavitae.pt//en/9F1F-4713-F00C

Contact

Email: idimovska@letras.up.pt

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (ERA Fellowships) grant agreement No 101244207.