ACIS2021
Presentation Schedule
Midwest Regional Conference
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL
Thursday,
October 7th
Opening Reception – 5:00-7:00
Sky Room, Holmes Student Center (16th floor)
Dinner on your own.
Suggestions can be found here.
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Friday,
October 8th
PANEL 1 – 9:00-10:15
Panel 1A: Nineteenth-Century Irish America
(Chair: Timothy O’Neil),
Illinois Room, Holmes Student Center (hereafter HSC)
Erin Barr (Purdue Univ.), “The ‘Attempt to Levy War Against Her Majesty’: Irish Nationalism and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Buffalo, New York”
Mathieu W. Billings (Univ. of Indianapolis), “Making Their Mark: Women and Politics on the Canals of Ireland and the Early American Republic, 1815-40”
J. Hollis Harris (NIU), “By the strong hand”: A World of Violence Echoing in the Official Mind of Clan-na-Gael”
Panel 1B: The Politics of Nature in Contemporary Irish Culture
(Chair: Brian O'Conchubhair), Lincoln Room, HSC
Kevin Farrell (Radford Univ.), “Where’s the Spirit? Where’s the Soul? Making Sense of Van Morrison’s COVID Songs” – virtual
Molly Ferguson (Ball State University), “Bees as Vehicles for Mourning and Desire in Anne Enright’s “Honey” and Lisa Carey’s The Stolen Child”
Eamonn Wall (Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis), “Your House Is on Fire: Irish Writers on Climate Change” – virtual
Lawrence McBride Annual Lecture: Jill C. Bender
Associate Professor of History, UNCG
Illinois Room, HSC (10:30-11:30)
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“The Marriage Force”: Irish Women, Assisted Emigration, and the mid-nineteenth-century British Empire
LUNCH 11:30-1:00
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PANEL 2 – 1:00-2:15
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Panel 2A: Perspectives on the Nation
(Chair: Sean Farrell), Illinois Room, HSC
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José Lanters (Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), “Hazel Ellis’s Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context”
Timothy O’Neil (Central Michigan Univ.), “Give Constitutionalism a Last Chance: The Irish Nation League and its Failure, 1916-17”
Kenneth Shonk (Univ. of Wisconsin-LaCrosse), “’A space on the air’: Welsh Nationalism and the broadcast media in Ireland, 1950-69”
Panel 2B: Dialogues in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
(Chair: Molly Ferguson), Lincoln Room, HSC
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Brian O'Conchubhair (Univ. of Notre Dame), ‘He himself tempts no one’: Breandán Ó hEithir’s novels Lig Sinn i gCathú and Sionnach ar mo Dhuán
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James Silas Rogers (Univ. of St. Thomas), “Deflated Conclusions: Angela’s Ashes’s Debt to Borstal Boy”
Jessie R. Wirkus Haynes (Marquette Univ.), “The Man, the Myth, the Legend: Flann O’Brien’s Dialogical Search for National Identity” -- virtual
PANEL 3 – 2:30-3:45
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Panel 3A: (RE) Claiming Immediacy:
Derry's Girls and Dolls as Virtual Theater
(Chair: Kay Martinovich), Illinois Room, HSC
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Kay Martinovich (NIU), “Directing an Irish World Digitally”
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Brandon Wardell (NIU), “Building the Audience Relationship”
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Stanton Davis (NIU), “Sounding a Derry Dialect”
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Sylvie Baldwin/Rachael Yoder (NIU) Scene Performance, Girls and Dolls
Panel 3B: The Global Dimensions of Irish Nationalism
(Chair: Timothy G. McMahon), Lincoln Room, HSC
Alex Carlson (NIU), “We are all Gall Gael Now: Northern Irish Identity in a Post-Brexit World”
Christine Myers (Independent Scholar), “The Impossibility of Internal Borders: Pandemic Political Cartoons in the Era of Brexit”
Samantha Renee Haddad (NYU), “The “New Sinn Féin” in America: A Case Study”
Pedagogy Panel 1 – 4:00-5:00
Playing Games with Students in the Name of Peace
Illinois Room, HSC
Andrew Auge and John Burney (Loras College), “Ending the Troubles: Introducing a Classroom Role-Playing Game focused on the Multi-Party Peace Talks”
Book Launch and
Creative Non-Fiction Reading – 5:00-7:00pm
Byers Brewing Company, 230 E. Lincoln Hwy, Suite 100, DeKalb, IL.
Kenneth Shonk, Ireland’s New Traditionalists: Fianna Fáil Republicanism and Gender (Cork: Cork University Press, 2021).
Readings by ACIS Creative Writers
Saturday,
October 9th
PANEL 4 – 9:00-10:15
Panel 4A: Representing the Nation in Art and Literature
(Chair: Sean Farrell), Illinois Room, HSC
Kurt Bullock (Grand Valley State Univ.), “Playing with Cultural Politics: Boundaries of Representation in the Art of Jack B. Yeats”
Sally Barr Ebest (Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis), “Lies of Omission: Carson McCullers’ Very Misleading Autobiography”
Jane Kennedy (independent scholar), “Irish Famines in Art” -- virtual
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Panel 4B: Illness, Death and Healing in Irish Literature
(Chair: José Lanters), Lincoln Room, HSC
Barry Devine (Heidelberg Univ.), “The Blurred Boundaries of Folk and Modern Medicine in Ulysses”
Colleen English (Loyola Univ, Chicago), “Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Adam Smith’s Imagined Corpses”
Bridget English (UIC), “’Wounded where I had not foreseen—in the mind’: Mediating Psychological Wounds and Bodily Failure in Bowen’s The House in Paris”
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Plenary Lecture: David Cregan
Associate Professor of Theatre, Villanova University,
Illinois Room, HSC (10:30-11:30)
Transversing Identity Politics: The Epic and the Turn to the Subject in Irish Theatrical Vision and Form
11:45-1:00 – MWACIS BUSINESS LUNCH
(University Suite, HSC)
Pedagogy Panel 2 – 1:00-2:00
"Teaching Irish Texts and Culture in non-Irish Themed Courses",
Lincoln Room, HSC
Karen Babine (Univ. of Tennessee-Chattanooga), “These Green Streets: Benjamin Black in the General Education Classroom” -- virtual
Barry Devine (Heidelberg Univ.), “Playing the Long Game” (or “Death by a Thousand Cuts”)
Molly Ferguson (Ball State Univ.), “Teaching Northern Ireland in the Digital Literature Review Course”
PANEL 5 – 2:15-3:15
Panel 5A: Reimagining Ireland in America
(Chair: James Silas Rogers), Illinois Room, HSC
Conor O’Shea (Univ. of Illinois), Mary Rose O’Shea (UIC), and Michael O’Shea (Toronto), “No Longer at the Crossroads: Irish Dance Halls in Chicago and Late Generation Ethnicity” – virtual
James P. Walsh (Univ. of Colorado-Denver), “Making an Irish Memorial in Leadville, Colorado”
Panel 5B: Nature and Memory in Irish Poetry
(Chair: David Gardiner), Lincoln Room, HSC
Joseph Heininger (Dominican Univ.), “Aidan Rooney and Daniel Tobin: Memorial Poems for Seamus Heaney”
Bill Kerwin (Univ. of Missouri-Columbia), “Drawing Lines Around the Natural World: Mary O’Malley and the Uses of Ecopoetics"
PANEL 6 – 3:30-5:00
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Panel 6A: Kicking the Can Down the Road in Modern Ulster
(Chair: Kenneth Shonk), Illinois Room, HSC
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Abigail Bernhardt (Marquette Univ.), “The whole idea of Sunday football is contrary to the Ulster way of life”: The 1958 World Cup as a challenge to northern Protestant identity”
Sean Farrell (NIU), “’The Worst Understood Man of His Times’: Thomas Drew, Land Reform, and Orange Democracy, 1868”
Timothy G. McMahon (Marquette Univ.), “When a border isn’t a barrier: Rethinking the history of Partition”
Panel 6B: Screening of Girls and Dolls
(Chair: Kay Martinovich), Lincoln Room, HSC
