Whelan, Ruth 1956–

PERSONAL: Born February 26, 1956, in Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland; daughter of Patrick Joseph (a civil servant) and Margaret Mary (a nurse and homemaker; maiden name, Byrne) Whelan. Ethnicity: "Irish." Education: Trinity College, Dublin, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1977, higher diploma in education, 1978, M.A., 1981, Ph.D., 1984; University of Paris X, diploma, 1982. Politics: Labour. Religion: Presbyterian. Hobbies and other interests: Swimming, roller-blading, hill-walking, food, chess, cultivating her garden.

ADDRESSES: Home—Dublin, Ireland. Office—Department of French, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. French teacher at schools in Glenageary, County Dublin, Ireland, 1977–78, and Dublin, 1978; École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, instructor in English as a foreign language, 1981–82; École Nationale Supérieure de la Statistique et des Affairs Économiques, Paris, instructor in English as a foreign language, 1983–84; Trinity College, Dublin, lecturer, 1984–96, senior lecturer in French, 1996–97, fellow, 1990; National University of Ireland, Maynooth, professor of French and head of department, 1997–, research professor, 2004–05. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, visiting fellow, 1988; Oxford University, senior visitor at Linacre College and Voltaire Foundation, 1992; University of Nantes, research associate, 2005; lecturer at other European institutions. National Museum of Ireland, board member, 2005.

MEMBER: Royal Irish Academy, Society for French Studies, Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Friends of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

AWARDS, HONORS: French Government scholar, 1981–82; Winifred Cullis grant, International Federation of University Women, 1982–83; fellow, Collège de France, 1982–83; grant from Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2005–06.

WRITINGS:

The Anatomy of Superstition: A Study of the Historical Theory and Practice of Pierre Bayle, Voltaire Foundation (Oxford, England), 1989.

(Editor, with M. Magdelaine, M.C. Pitassi, and A. McKenna, and contributor) De l'humanisme aux Lumières, Bayle et le protestantisme, Voltaire Foundation (Oxford, England), 1996.

(Editor, with E. Labrousse, E. James, and others) Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, Voltaire Foundation (Oxford, England), Volume 1: 1662–1674, 1999, Volume 2: Novembre 1674—novembre 1677, 2001.

(Editor, with Carol Baxter, translator, and contributor) Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and Its Implications in France, Britain, and Ireland, Four Courts Press (Portland, OR), 2003.

(Editor, with A.C. Kors, R.L. Emerson, L. Hunt, and others, translator, and contributor) Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, four volumes, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Coauthor of exhibition catalogs. Contributor to books, including Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth Century, edited by R.H. Popkin and A. Venderjagt, E.J.

Brill (Leiden, Netherlands), 1993; Propagating the Word of Irish Dissent, edited by K. Herlihy, [Portland, OR], 1998; Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century, edited by A.P. Coudert, S. Hutton, and R.H. Popkin, Kluwer (Dordrecht, Netherlands), 1999; The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1740, edited by R. Vigne and C. Littleton, Sussex Academic Press (Portland, OR), 2001; and The Making of Marsh's Library: Learning, Politics, and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750, edited by M. McCarthy and A. Simmons, [Portland, OR], 2004. Contributor to scholarly journals, including Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Modern Language Review, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Proccedings of the Huguenot Society.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Refugees for Religion's Sake: The Huguenots in Early Modern Ireland; Writing the Self in Early Modern Europe, with Bruno Tribout; research on autobiography in early modern Europe.

SIDELIGHTS: Ruth Whelan told CA: "Ostensibly my profession drives my writing. I am an academic who has the privilege of drawing a salary from the public purse so that I can do research, write, and teach. And I am passionate about my calling, about the way education can open up a whole life, about books that can become voices speaking to what is deepest in us, helping us to make sense, to find a way. In reality, something more secret makes me write: a complex mixture of curiosity, passion to understand, a raw vulnerability within. The best kind of writing, in my opinion, comes from brokenness as well as creativity, from the questions that we ask of ourselves and of the world.

"From the beginning my research has centered on Huguenot refugees in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Europe. People who had a sense of what was important to them, which helped them to make meaningfulness with their own lives and choose to give up everything rather than let go of that symbolic world, fascinate me.

"It was an odd subject for a skinny Dublin kid to become enmeshed in when she went to university in the 1970s, but it is a subject entwined in my own existence, my own symbolic world, and my own questions in the face of the mysteries of existence. My reading and reflection as an undergraduate, a skeptical crisis concerning the possibility of philosophical knowledge, and, of course, my own scalded heart prompted me to exchange the familiarity of the Roman Catholicism of my upbringing for the strange place (in the Republic of Ireland) of the Reformed tradition. It is a choice that has enriched my life beyond measure, a choice that tore me apart in the still sectarian culture of my country, and a choice that drives my research.

"Fundamentally questions and puzzles arising from and within human knowing drive my life and work. I work at the crossroads of a number of academic disciplines: French studies, literature, history, theology, psychology, politics, and philosophy. I was fortunate to be educated at a time when the goals of a university program in the arts were different from our contemporary society's pursuit of 'training' for specific goals and functions. The values of my education, which I continue to cherish, were rather those of curiosity and openness, the formation of citizens, and the shaping of people who could continue to grow in knowledge for the rest of their lives, should they choose to do so. I have three main clusters of interest: epistemology, refugees, autobiography—all of them connected to each other, and all connected to an innate interest in theological issues.

"In my early years, as I tried to come to terms in my self with the way changing places involved negotiating a symbolic world defined by my Catholic upbringing, and a national history shaped by sectarianism, I focused on the work of Pierre Bayle, the greatest French Protestant intellectual after Calvin. In my undergraduate years I was drawn to him for his philosophical skepticism, but as a graduate student I was preoccupied with the shape of his historical knowing and the problems associated with it. In my first book, The Anatomy of Superstition: A Study of the Historical Theory and Practice of Pierre Bayle, I sought to make sense of the way he conceptualized history and practiced historical writing. I situated him in the context of Roman versus Reformed religious controversy and his own experience of belonging to a persecuted minority. My methodology, reading Bayle intertextually—although I did not draw at that time on any particular theory of intertextuality—was one of the most original aspects of the book, and it stimulated other scholars to read Bayle through the eyes of the virtual library he recreated in his Dictionnaire his-torique et critique, first published in 1697. I continued to work actively on Bayle until 1998, as part of the team of scholar preparing an edition of his correspondence for the Voltaire Foundation, and I still write the occasional essay on his work.

"In the meantime, I developed an interest in Jacques Abbadie, a Huguenot pastor and exile in Germany, Britain, and Ireland, who was a seventeenth-and eighteenth-century best-seller. He wrote a famous (in its day) treatise on the truth of the Christian religion, and some of my essays on his work explore epistemological issues associated with religious belief. However, as a former Irish Catholic, a practicing Presbyterian, and citizen of the Republic of Ireland, I bring my own inner conversation between the place of my origins and the place of my unfolding to my academic work. In my essays on Abbadie's politics and on issues of toleration and the changing identities of Ireland's Huguenots, I sought to understand how former victims of persecution came to support penal legislation directed at Catholics in early modern Ireland. Historians of an earlier generation, particularly from Protestant backgrounds, tended to explain away, or not to notice, the evidence pointing to this less idealized interpretation of Ireland's Huguenot Refuge. These concerns drew me into a reassessment of the French Protestant presence in Ireland, of what it felt like and meant, and of how that changed over time, which is the subject of the book Refugees for Religion's Sake: The Huguenots in Early Modern Ireland. They also stimulated an interest in autobiographical writing by Huguenots (the subject of recent essays), and in the politics of identity construction and the politicization of memory and history, which I explored with the help of colleagues in the book of essays I edited with Carol Baxter.

"Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and Its Implications in France, Britain, and Ireland arose out of my own, very personal and yet inherently interdisciplinary, nexus of intellectual interests. The Edict of Nantes (1598) was more of a truce than a toleration, but the dynamics of commemoration—among which figure idealization, denial, introjection, and projection, as in all forms of memory—meant that in 1998 some public commentators in France repeatedly asked whether Ireland might benefit from an Edict of Nantes. I set out to explore that notion, with the help of colleagues in French studies, history, philosophy, theology, sociology, and psychiatry, academics, and pastors. I also wanted to ask what got left out of the question—for example, the repressed memory of Protestant violence during the wars of religion in sixteenth-century France, because French Protestants have a strong self-identity as victims of persecution. The book is intended to be a laboratory of memory, where viewpoints interact and even conflict in a historical quest for factual accounts, but also for the way we represent facts, emplot them, turn them into stories. We met, tragically and unexpectedly, in the wake of the Omagh bombing and the national grief that it unleashed, which made us all look for the moral truths interwoven with the facts and stories and conflicts of history that we were telling each other. I suppose the overall purpose of that book was that of all education, and perhaps all narrative: namely liberation from the narrowness that divides, from the grudge and disdain that lead to violence.

"Ultimately, toleration and education are driven by similar concerns: to make room for the other in our midst and the other in ourselves, to make an open space where human creativity can flourish. However, the stranglehold that the law of the market has acquired on education—making it about products rather than people, training rather than creativity, profit and grasping, rather than giving and openness—is squeezing out that kind of serendipity and scholarship.

"So, maybe the bookish child that I was (and repeat-reader of Robinson Crusoe) and the liberal arts academic that I have become, thinks of writing as sending out a message in a bottle, hoping that someone will find it, open it, and join me in a lifetime of curiosity."