“The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s Olga Thierbach-McLean Articles The new millennium has entered its third decade, but the 1990s have never quite left us. For twenty years, they have been haunting the pop-cultural imagination as a lost golden era. In what is just the latest i... Read More...
“The Fire Is Not in the Future”: Reflections on American Studies in a Year of Crisis. Andrew Clarke Articles The fire is not in the future, so don’t ask when it will be. The fire is not yet to come, for it has happened already. The pandemic took hold, and the world became different. The sense that we lived in a tim... Read More...
A Transatlantic Conversation: Poetry, Politics, and Violence Peggy O'Brien Articles In September of 1967, I boarded a ship in New York and sailed to Cobh in County Cork. I somehow found my way up to Dublin and eventually to Earlsfort Terrace, where UCD was then, and enrolled in a graduate cour... Read More...
“The Conviviality of Thinking Together”: Personal Notes & Recollections for IAAS@50 Philip Coleman Articles 1. From Academy Street to Academia On the thirtieth of June, 1993, I took a bus to Cork from Cahir, my hometown in Tipperary, to collect the results of my first year exams at UCC. During that year I had develo... Read More...
The Populist Turn in American Politics: A Review-Essay of Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon Julie Sheridan Articles, Reviews Peter Kivisto. The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016. Emerald Publishing, 2017. It is a truism of recent political discourse that the United States has become a more polarized nation... Read More...
Undecided: Nixon, Trump, and the Risks of Counting on the Silent Majority Sarah Thelen Articles In the midst of what might well be the most significant election in US history, it’s more than a little surreal to be (a) an American abroad, (b) an historian, and (c) a Nixon scholar. I know I’m not the only o... Read More...
American Wakes and the Global Troubles: U.S. Collapse Fiction and the Irish Future Dorothea Gail Articles 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...
What a Difference a Word Makes: Reconsidering Language in Huckleberry Finn Clair A. Sheehan Articles 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...
“[N]ow There Ought to Be a Watchman”: Curfews and Race in U.S. Literature Sarah Cullen Articles 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...
Kindred Spirits: Solidarity Between the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Ireland Jessica Militante Articles 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...
Moses Roper, The First Fugitive Slave Lecturer in Ireland, 1838 Fionnghuala Sweeney and Bruce Baker Articles 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...
A Backward Glance: My Quarter Century in the IAAS Philip McGowan Articles 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...
(Dis)Connections: Civil Rights and Discrimination in America and Northern Ireland Melissa L. Baird Articles 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...
Reading Transatlantically in the Era of Trump Dolores Resano Articles 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...
But It Is Your Problem Kimberly Reyes Articles 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...
Two Roads Diverged Sue Norton Articles 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...
Lonely, But Not Alone: Studying America in Ireland in the Time of COVID-19 Kelsie Donnelly Articles 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...
Some Comments on Irish American Studies Lee M. Jenkins Articles 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...
The Shock of Recognition: Reading American Fiction in Celtic Tiger Ireland Adam Kelly Articles 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...
From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic Dara Downey Articles 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...
On Becoming an Americanist Kevin Power Articles 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...
The Long Civil Rights Narrative of Show Me a Hero Mikkel Jensen Articles Despite the important civil rights legal victories of the 1960s (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968), residential segregation remains a fact of life in... Read More...
A Conflict-Laden Consensus: Is the U.S. a One-Party System in Disguise? Olga Thierbach-McLean Articles With Donald Trump as U.S. President and leader of the Republican Party, the ideological divide between American conservatives and liberals seems greater than ever before. From healthcare to environmental policy... Read More...
The Underground Frontier: Norman Mailer’s An American Dream Kevin Power Articles earning to know dread is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in drea... Read More...
“To Be Murdered”: Simulations of Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Violence in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood Steffen Wöll Articles “This is the Real World”: Introduction We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT. Ch... Read More...
Liminal Spaces and Contested Narratives in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh Articles The IAAS W. A. Emmerson Lecture 2019 Both Juan Rulfo and George Saunders evoke the power of a literary text to challenge received narratives of the past and articulate new and empowering perspectives on the pr... Read More...
“The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here”: Writing American Identity in Liberia, 1830–1850 Carmel Lambert Articles In the early winter of 1821, a ship called the Nautilus sailed from Richmond, Virginia, to West Africa. Aboard were thirty-three “free people of colour,” one of whom was a teenager, Hilary Teage. He was ninetee... Read More...
Race and Protest in New Orleans: Streetcar Integration in the Nineteenth Century Hilary McLaughlin-Stonham Articles At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans expanded the city’s streetcar service and, for the use of black patrons, incorporated Star cars into the new routes. Though Star cars could be used by both black an... Read More...
Hawthorne’s “Dangerous Soul” and Jacksonian Individualism: Artistic Isolation in Fanshawe and “The Artist of the Beautiful” James Hussey Articles In his seminal American Renaissance, Frances Otto Matthiessen points to the development by Nathaniel Hawthorne of tragic elements of character, noting his exploration of the “subterranean history of the America... Read More...
Ego Pluribus Unum: How One Man, Speaking for Many, Changed Hip-Hop Andrew Duncan Articles “King of the Assholes, drama queen, Red Bull’d 12-year old, Next Chappelle, strangely relatable Megaman,” Black supremacist, hypocrite, poet, social commentator, superstar: the list of titles and labels ascribe... Read More...
“Before You Come Alive, Life Is Nothing; It’s Up to You to Give It a Meaning”: Making Meaning in James Sallis’ Death Will Have Your Eyes Kelsie Donnelly Articles Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “efore you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning” (Existentialism and Human Emotions 49), this essay will examine the methods for constructing ... Read More...
The Viewer Society: ‘New Panopticism’, Surveillance, and the Body in Dave Eggers’ The Circle Jennifer Gouck Articles Winner of the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we live in a viewer society” (219). This essay seeks to examine the w... Read More...
Empty Constructs: The Postmodern Haunted House in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves Seán Travers Articles Special Mention in the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize According to Dale Bailey, “since Poe first described the House of Usher in 1839, the motif of the haunted house has assumed an enduring role in the ... Read More...
“His soul is marching on”: Suppressing John Brown in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Elizabeth Abele Articles The trail across the sky retraces periodically, for as a universal force, outside of history, Brown is an archetype or prototype, a meteor that recurs comet-like. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (123) In The Pres... Read More...
Vision as Creation and Alternative: The Role of the Author Function in Marilynne Robinson’s Plural Text Gospels of Gilead Daniel Muhlestein Articles And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; Joel 2:28... Read More...
The Nature of the Horizon: Genealogy in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Adrianna Smith Articles The structural and literary symbolism of the horizon/horizontality is one of the most powerful and versatile devices in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004). From an organizational perspective, Robinson car... Read More...
Unaffected: Marilynne Robinson’s Postmodern Sentimentalism Lisa Mendelman Articles The opening lines to Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping famously locate the novel in two literary genealogies. Evoking the opener of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and invoking the Biblical figure of com... Read More...
“The Empty Mirror”: Selfhood and the Utility of Language in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Andrew Cunning Articles We remain unknown to ourselves. Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3. Nietzsche places this declaration right at the beginning of his Genealogy of Morals (1887) as an unequivocal statement of fact. It ... Read More...
Those Same Trees: Narrative Sequence and Simultaneity in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels Rachel Sykes Articles In 2014, the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, completed a trilogy of books set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. The Pulitzer-prize-winning Gilead (2004) first tells the story... Read More...
Democracy, and Other Fictions: On the Politics of Robinson’s Non-Fiction Tim Jelfs Articles Since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), Marilynne Robinson has built up a large body of non-fiction that sits beside, and in dialogue with, her fiction. Even before her environmentalist p... Read More...
(Sub)merged Worlds in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Kelsie Donnelly Articles Special Mention in the 2016 W.T.M Riches Essay Prize This essay explores the (sub)merged worlds depicted in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (1980). Applying psychoanalytic conceptualisations of trauma,... Read More...
Thirty-Six-Point Perpetua: John Updike’s Personal Essays in the Later Years Sue Norton and Laurence W. Mazzeno Articles Laurence W. Mazzeno (Alvernia University) Sue Norton (Dublin Institute of Technology) Posterity In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young... Read More...
Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize: Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five Ciarán Kavanagh Articles Ciarán Kavanagh University College Cork In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Susanne Vees-Gulani proffers a systematic analysis of the exp... Read More...
Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s Rachael Alexander Articles Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s Rachael Alexander University of Strathclyde Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively un... Read More...
“No such thing as a ‘Canadian'”: Memory, Place, and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Stories Kate Smyth Articles “No such thing as a ‘Canadian’”: Memory, Place, and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Stories Kate Smyth Trinity College Dublin Introduction In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir storie... Read More...
“To Make For Myself a Person”: Immigrant Identities in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers Katie Ahern Articles “To Make For Myself a Person”: Immigrant Identities in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers Katie Ahern University College Cork Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and be... Read More...
The Poetics of the Sentence: Examining Gordon Lish’s Literary Legacy Tim Groenland Articles The Poetics of the Sentence: Examining Gordon Lish’s Literary Legacy Tim Groenland Trinity College Dublin In September 2008, Gary Lutz, author of several collections of short fiction, delivered a lectu... Read More...
“She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita Laura Rose Byrne Articles “She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita. Laura Rose Byrne Trinity College Dublin In a 1967 interview with his former student and future an... Read More...
WTM Riches Essay Prizewinner: The Search for a Mother in Toni Morrison’s Paradise Sarah Cullen Articles The WTM Riches Essay Prize was established in 2004 to recognise and reward high-quality work being done by younger scholars in many of the areas that are covered by the term “American Studies,” including histor... Read More...
Last Vegas? Philip McGowan Articles Last Vegas? Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast) This article, and the research out of which it springs, has a number of points of origin; it may also have more than one point of conclusion even as it... Read More...
ALAN GRAHAM MEMORIAL LECTURE: Politics and Principle: Jimmy Carter in the Civil Rights Era Robert A. Strong Articles ALAN GRAHAM MEMORIAL LECTURE Politics and Principle: Jimmy Carter in the Civil Rights Era Robert A. Strong Washington and Lee University April 25, 2014 To listen to the lecture click here There is a f... Read More...
“This is said on tiptoe”: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy Áine Mahon Articles “This is said on tiptoe”: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy Áine Mahon University College Dublin Introduction So we are here, knowing they are “gone to burning hell”, she with a lie on her lips,... Read More...
“E Unibus Pluram”: David Foster Wallace and the Voices of a Fragmented Nation Clare Hayes-Brady Articles “E Unibus Pluram”: the short story and the voices of a fragmented nation. Ignite article, IJAS online 2 One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De... Read More...
“Emily Grimes is me”: Anxiety, Feminism, and the Masculinity Crisis in Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade Jennifer Daly Articles “Emily Grimes is me”: Anxiety, Feminism, and the Masculinity Crisis in Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade Jennifer Daly Trinity College Dublin In 1975, Richard Yates published what was widely considered... Read More...
Real Journeys of the Imagination: Carson McCullers and Ireland Rebecca Pelan Articles Real Journeys of the Imagination: Carson McCullers and Ireland Rebecca Pelan University College Dublin American author Carson McCullers visited Ireland three times. The first two visits were to the ancestral... Read More...
Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009) Louise Walsh Articles Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009): Compiled and introduced by Louise Walsh
What if the Government Schooling Campaigns (1820s-1920s) to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place? Michael C. Coleman Articles What if the Government Schooling Campaigns to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place?
Crooning, Catering, and Changing Careers: Anne Tyler’s and Don Cherry’s Bands (and Bonds) of Gold Cecilia Donohue Articles Crooning, Catering, and Changing Careers: Anne Tyler’s and Don Cherry’s Bands (and Bonds) of Gold
[R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise Gillian Groszewski Articles [R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise: Robert Lowell’s Elegiac Poetry
David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline Adam Kelly Articles David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline
“Tierra entre medio”: Borderlands of Knowledge in the Art of Frida Kahlo Melanie Otto Articles “Tierra entre medio”: Borderlands of Knowledge in the Art of Frida Kahlo
Rubbish: Don DeLillo’s Wastelands Margaret Robson Articles DeLillo’s Underworld is one of the most celebrated of all modern American novels, and perhaps the most complex. This complexity is a product of its extraordinarily precise yet oblique chronological structure, which, in its attempt to account for the entire second-half of the twentieth-century, has challenged all its readers, confused many of them, and alienated some.
“I Wish I had Some Indian Blood”: Hemingway’s Primitivism and the Ojibwa Pimadaziwin Paradigm Peter Rooney Articles “I Wish I had Some Indian Blood”: Hemingway’s Primitivism and the Ojibwa Pimadaziwin Paradigm
Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary Hannah Durkin Articles “Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary”: Racial Representation and Artistic Experimentation in Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s Stormy Weather Performance
Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’ Alex Runchman Articles Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’
Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass Nathanael O'Reilly Articles Nathanael O'Reilly Critics often describe Walt Whitman as America’s national poet, and many have concerned themselves with how Whitman came to hold such a position in American and global culture; however, fe... Read More...
“If there is such a literature”: Thoughts on Teaching American Literature in Ireland / Irish Literature in America Peggy O'Brien Articles “If there is such a literature”: Thoughts on Teaching American Literature in Ireland / Irish Literature in America
Invented Irishness: The Americanization of Irish Identity in the Works of Joseph O’Connor Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh Articles Invented Irishness: The Americanization of Irish Identity in the Works of Joseph O’Connor
“Irish by descent”? Marianne Moore’s American-Irish Inheritance Tara Stubbs Articles “Irish by descent”? Marianne Moore’s American-Irish Inheritance
“Why Don’t You Write About America?” Victoria Kennefick Articles Frank O'Connor's Representations of Relations between Ireland and America
Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years Johannah Duffy Articles Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years
