Organised by Orlaith Darling and Fionnula Simpson, this conference took contemporary representations of female sadness as its critical object, asking how we might read the ‘sad girl’ as an artefact of the historic – late capitalist and neoconservative – present. While mental health remains largely the preserve of Biomedical and/or Psychology departments, this conference foregrounded interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives on gendered emotion, thereby widening the scope of what counts as knowledge, and who count as experts, on mental health and wellbeing.
While I do not centre my work on the sad girl, I do write about gendered emotion in interior spaces, specifically as they relate to caste and class in 1930s India and Argentina. It was an honour to be accepted to this conference, in which psychologists, literary scholars, historians and sociologists alike traced threads of the sad girl across time and space.
More information on Orlaith and Fionnula here: https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/research/hiseedfundingopportunities/hifundedresearchprojects2025-2026/badfeelingsconference8-9june2026/
poojasastry.com 