Welcome to Issue 13 of IJAS Online, the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies.
We open this editorial by noting the sad passing of William (Bill) T. Martin Riches, who made a significant contribution to developing American Studies in Ireland over the course of a long career. Bill, who passed away in June 2024, was the author of The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance (1997), among other well-regarded works. He joined Ulster Polytechnic in 1973 and taught there (through its absorption into the University of Ulster) until almost the end of the century. He was a key member of the Irish Association of American Studies in its early years and supported countless students along the way; his former students recall the passion of his lectures on the civil rights movement (which he had participated in while at the University of Tennessee in the 1960s), his exhaustive knowledge, and his commitment to teaching and to supporting his students (in one vivid example, current IAAS Treasurer Nerys Young recalls him delivering orange juice and flu medicine to her when she was ill during her undergraduate degree).
When the IAAS launched its early career essay prize, it was deemed fitting to make the award in his name. Indeed, the essay by Janice Lynne Deitner included in this issue was awarded the W.T.M. Riches Prize of the Irish Association for American Studies for 2019 and subsequently revised for publication, a path followed by several other emerging Americanist scholars during the journals recent history. We are pleased to be able to continue this connection with Bill’s legacy.
The articles and reviews in this issue were published on a rolling basis throughout 2024. The issue opens with Rosannah Gosser’s “Writing the tide”: Decolonial resurgence and Native continuance in Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter,” which draws on scholarship on Native responses to colonialism and conditions of precarity to elucidate the poetic strategies found in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s debut collection. The poet, Gosser argues, uses the resources of Native orality to deploy Native continuance as a “poetic mode,” ultimately seeking to catalyse a decolonial relationship with her audience that aims to “redefin[e] the Marshall Islands beyond the damaging confines of American hegemony.”
Janice Deitner’s essay reads H.P. Lovecraft in tandem with Nathaniel Hawthorne, tracing affinities between the ambiguous position of New England in the stories of both authors in order to show how the former revises the latter. In “A dismal throng of vague spectres”: Reading Knowledge and Identity in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” Through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Deitner argues that Lovecraft “extends Hawthorne’s themes and plot” in order to generate a cosmic, posthuman vision that looks beyond “stifling American identities.”
This issue also includes reviews of several recent monographs presenting new research in American Studies. Included here are reviews by Jack Heeney of Mary Burke’s Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History, by Dearbhaile Houston of Kata Fama and Jorie Lagerwey’s edited collection Single Lives: Modern Women in Literature, Culture and Film, by Sarah Curry of Robin M. Morris’s Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right, by Zach Hutchins of Jonathan A. Cook’s Neither Believer Nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville’s Shorter Fiction and Poetry, and by Andrew Taylor of Kelly Ross’s Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature.
Readers of IJAS Online are encouraged to submit articles for consideration and to send ideas for reviews and other items to the editors. All suggestions will be considered. Readers are of course also invited to consider joining the Irish Association for American Studies, which is responsible for maintaining and funding the journal as well as for supporting early career scholars through the W.T.M. Riches Prize and similar initiatives.
This issue of IJAS Online was edited by Tim Groenland and Fionnghuala Sweeney (Co-Editors-in-Chief) as well as Reviews Editor Keira Williams. Our thanks to the peer reviewers whose expertise and advice informs the articles here. As always, the journal remains committed to publishing articles, interviews, and reviews on American Studies, broadly defined, which means publishing on all aspects of American life and culture, including literature, film, history, social studies, geography, music, art, architecture, and more.
We hope you enjoy Issue 13, 2024.
