Joan Newlon Radner

Background

Joan Radner was born in the United States. She keeps her life in secret so even her date of birth remains unknown.

Education

Joan Radner received a doctorate degree at Harvard University.

Career

Scholar Joan Newlon Radner began her career as a specialist in Middle Irish annals: she turned her Harvard thesis on this topic into her first published book, Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (1978). With the next book she edited, Irish Drama, 1900-1980 (1990), done in collaboration with Coilin D. Owens, Radner expanded her range into the contemporary era.

Another of Radner’s books, Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, although still aimed at an academic audience, received wider notice than her previous works, owing in part, according to Ruth Salvaggio in American Anthropologist, to its “timely” subject matter. Radner edited Feminist Messages, a collection of essays, and co-wrote its introductory essay with Susan S. Lanser. The subject of the volume is the expression of female protest against male domination, either consciously or unconsciously, through coded messages in folk art and in women’s daily lives.

Achievements

• Joan Radner is mostly famous as the author of books Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, Irish Drama, 1900-1980, and Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture

    (Burning dinners, stitching "scandalous" quilts, talking "...)

    1993
  • Fragmentary Annals of Ireland 1978
  • Irish Drama, 1900-1980 1990

Views

Radner holds that an understanding of codes of resistance might lead to the development of “a social order in which coding may no longer be necessary.”