Miriam Mara, assistant professor of English, has published an article in the November 2009 issue of Irish Studies Review. The article, “Reproductive Cancer: Female Autonomy and Border Crossing in Medical Discourse and Fiction” is about three contemporary Irish novels, "Down By the River" and "The Light of Evening" by Edna O'Brien and "My Dream of You" by Nuala O’Faolain, along side the Irish Medical Journal.

In the article, Mara argues that both contemporary fiction and Irish medical discourse attend disproportionately to female reproductive cancers. She says the texts construct female bodies as sites of pathology through textual representations of reproductive cancer and build upon Irish metaphors of landscape as female, which conceptualize women's bodies as the site of invasion.