Call for papers: American Conference for Irish Studies

American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) will host two panels at the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Philadelphia, December 27-30. Please send 200-word abstracts to Ellen Crowell (crowelle@slu.edu) by March 15, 2009. Presentations may not exceed 20 minutes. All panelists must be registered MLA members by April 1st, 2009; all panelists must also be registered ACIS members.


Panel 1: New Ireland: Race and emigration in contemporary Irish Art
Papers should address changing representations of race, ancestry, nationality and immigration/emigration in contemporary Irish writing, film, and/or the visual arts. Of particular interest will be papers addressing the 2007 Roddy Doyle/Bisi Adigun production of a revised Playboy of the Western World, Roddy Doyle's recent collection The Deportees, and John Carney's Once (2007).


Panel 2: Irish Temporalities
This panel will explore how changing representations of time anticipated and responded to the rise of the Irish nation-state. To what extent did the Celtic Twilight underwrite, or disable, the emerging free-state of the early twentieth century? What does the representational rise of the "Celtic Tiger," or Ireland's recent economic resurgence, say about the persistence of popular images of the Irish past, or about their supplantation? We welcome papers on any genre or literary period in keeping with a broad exploration of how conceptions of past, present, and future shape and are shaped by Irish literary endeavors.