Arnold Toynbee reminds us that all civilizations fall (cf. also Diamond). We are arguably at a cliff edge, over which the U.S. is by many accounts already tumbling in slow motion, possibly dragging much of West... Read More...

As a lifelong lover of Mark Twain’s writing and his ironic humour, I came to American studies abroad assuming Twain’s work would be one of the foundation stones of most of the American Literature modules taught... Read More...

Caroline Lee Hentz’s 1854 pro-slavery novel The Planter’s Northern Bride was one of the many responses to the sensational success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published two years earlier). In H... Read More...

Growing up in California, I often heard stories of my ancestry. There were the ones I heard from my maternal grandmother, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Then there were the ones I heard from my pat... Read More...

Born into slavery in North Carolina around 1815, Moses Roper is a significant if understudied figure in Irish studies, Black Atlantic studies, and American studies more generally. His flight to the United Kingd... Read More...

Rather than inflict another piece of my torturous critical prose on anyone, I have opted for a more personal reflection on some of the Association’s history as it has intersected with my own academic career to ... Read More...

My early interest in American history originated in what I now realise was my woefully incorrect and naïve impression that, unlike Northern Ireland, America’s past was uncontested. In my teens, I read To Kill a... Read More...

According to a comprehensive study of the year 2018 published in the journal Democratization (“State of the World 2018”), democracy is in decline around the world. A retreat in democracy implies a weakening of ... Read More...

George Floyd was the latest in a long line of Black Americans killed by white police officers in the United States. The horrifying video of his killing sparked worldwide protests in the middle of a pandemic wit... Read More...

For a little over two decades, I have been teaching American literature and other subject matter in an institution of higher learning with a technological orientation. Unlike those who study English in most uni... Read More...

This is not the article I had intended to write. I had planned to write about a conference I co-organised with friends in Irish and American studies in collaboration with the QUB Centre for the Americas, which ... Read More...

In its early iterations, Irish American Studies focused almost exclusively on Irish American writing, on literature produced by Americans of Irish descent (for example, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy ... Read More...

In the spring of 2002, as a second-year undergraduate at University College Dublin, I took a course called “Contemporary Irish Literature: Excavating the Present.” I still remember vividly its opening lecture, ... Read More...

In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s 1911 short story “Broken Glass,” the narrator, a fussy mother living somewhere in rural America, is reproached by a mysterious figure for having scolded her young Irish nursemaid. As ... Read More...

The private roots of scholarship are seldom very respectable. I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about the two small events that made me an Americanist. They happened in adolescence, when we are at our ... Read More...