Dr Louise Brangan
Nominated Fellow, September 2024 - May 2025
Home Institution: University of Strathclyde
Louise Brangan is visiting from the University of Strathclyde, where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer. Her work explores the ways in which societies punish wrong doers, using historical and comparative approaches. She has written on Ireland’s use of Magdalene laundries, and the contemporary histories of Irish and Scottish prison systems, for which she received the Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize (2022) and the Brian Williams Prize (2020) for the best criminological article from an emerging scholar. She has also been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to study at UC Berkeley (2015). Along with her traditional academic writing, Louise is especially keen on the arts and how they can communicate research and engage the public. In 2023, she was named as one of the BBC’s New Generation Thinkers, and has made a radio essay based on her work. She also co-wrote a script for a piece of dance theatre (with Sinead McCann), shown in Dublin in 2024. In 2024 she signed book contracts with Bodley Head (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US) for a tradebook on her research regarding the rise and fall of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries.
Project title: The Fallen: Stories from Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
In 1996 Ireland closed the last of its Magdalene Laundries. We now know these facilities did far more than launder clothes, but confined thousands of women throughout the twentieth century. Their crime: being “fallen women”. Locked away for defying Irish social conventions by being too troublesome, too needy, too conspicuous.
Despite their widespread use, these institutions were shrouded in silence. When the doors and gates were locked for the last time, it was with a whimper not a bang. The secrets were sealed off. And then the nation moved on, or so it seemed.
In recent times however the ghosts of this shameful past have come back to haunt Ireland’s present. Mass graves of unknown women and babies have been unearthed, and civil society has in turn woken up to the many injustices that occurred. The problem is not just that of reckoning with past wrongs, but the unsettling blind-spot this reveals in Ireland’s national conscience: we just can’t comprehend how this happened. How could laundries have operated exploitation on an industrial scale? What made the unthinkable not only thinkable, but doable? Those are questions that have yet to be answered. In doing so, may help us confront that history today.