Complicating the idea of urban space as an outcome of male agency, QUB exchange faculty Sophie Cooper investigates the role of religious and lay women in shaping the build and material environments that they inhabited. It focuses on the ways that Irish women, in Ireland and abroad, shaped and claimed pubic space through the built and material environment. Using case studies in Chicago, New York, Limerick, Belfast, and Manchester between 1800 and 1937 - when Irish women were placed 'within the home' by the Irish Constitution - this seminar tracks different approaches to claiming space in the context of shifts in Irish migration, religious practice, and gender expectations. This builds upon the concept of 'brick and mortar Catholicism' (Skerrett, 1996) and frameworks of power, space, and emotion to present a new perspective on the role of women in prioritizing individual and communal resources to demand a public presence for themselves, their religion, and their ethnic community. 

This paper considers both the long-term interventions in the built environment (such as fundraising for religious furnishings or parish school buildings) and the more temporary ways that women demonstrated their own agency in creating space that they belonged to including through the decorative arts and fundraising for objects with religious, ethnic or gendered symbolism. This seminar is a work in progress, and forms part of Cooper's research project on 'Irish Women, Religion, and Public Space.' At this project's core is the question of whether there were particularly 'Irish' tactics that women across Ireland and its urban diaspora deployed to demand public space within male-dominated institutional buildings and streetscapes. It therefore takes a particularly gendered approach to investigating the role of Irish communities in shaping their streetscapes in order to find, and declare, a sense of belonging in the city.

Dr. Sophie Cooper is a Senior Lecturer and Subject Lead in Liberal Arts at Queen's University Belfast. Sophie is a social historian of Irish migration, with a particular focus on gender, religion, and the built environment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sophie's monograph, Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c. 1830-1922 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), was awarded the ACIS Lawrence J. McCafferty Prize for Books on Irish America in 2023. She is part of the HIstories of Emotion in the Built Environment (HEBE) network and her recent publications include articles on women religious, material culture, and gendered minorities in the city.