American Conference for Irish Studies
The 31st Annual Meeting of the ACIS Western Regional Meeting
“Ireland: Memory and Monument”
Rapid City, South Dakota
Sponsored by the University of South Dakota
Submissions due July 1, 2015 to aciswest2015@gmail.com

We invite you to join us in Rapid City, South Dakota for the 31st annual ACIS-West conference. This interdisciplinary conference features a range of scholarly panels, lectures, readings, exhibits, and performances. We welcome papers on any aspect of Irish studies, including literature, theatre, film, dance, history, economics, sociology, music, religion, politics, language, culture, diaspora, conflict and border studies, the material and visual arts, and comparative studies. We particularly encourage papers and panels that explore the theme of “Ireland: Memory and Monument.” Topics may include, but are not limited to,

• Official forms of commemoration, like statues, plaques, monuments, parades, ceremonies, holidays, as well as their reappropriation
• Contested memorials and counter-memorials
• Buried or erased memories; modes of forgetting
• Private versus collective/public memory
• Memorialization and the sacred
• Geography and regional or local memory
• Literary and artistic commemorations
• Transnational memory (e.g. the Irish diaspora, immigrants to Ireland)
• The business of commemoration: tourism, financing, the media

We welcome not only papers that consider the question of the memorialization within Ireland, but also comparative work that addresses Irish intersections with the global circulation and preservation of memory.
The conference features keynote speaker David C. Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and keynote performer Donal O’Kelly, award-winning playwright and actor who will stage his play Fionnuala for conference participants.
Western South Dakota, home to some of the nation’s most famous and contested monuments and counter-monuments, provides a rich site in which to explore the preservation and politics of memory. Downtown Rapid City, founded during a gold rush in the 1870s, is steeped in history—statues of U.S. presidents grace every corner, and stories of the Lakota are told through commemorative plaques and statues—while also boasting a lively arts and music scene, restaurants, shopping, and nightlife. The conference will take place at the historic Hotel Alex Johnson, which appears on the National Register of Historic Places, has hosted six U.S. Presidents, and is also said to be haunted. The conference organizers invite you to explore Rapid City, “The Gateway to the Black Hills,” as well as its many nearby attractions, including Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park, the historic Black Hills 1880 Train, the city of Deadwood, the Badlands National Park, and the Devil’s Tower.
Please submit your proposal by July 1, 2015 to aciswest2015@gmail.com. Individual paper and panel submissions (3-4 participants) are welcome, as are proposals for live performances, dramatic readings, poster presentations, or exhibits. Individual proposals should be 250-500 words in length and include a brief biographical statement for the submitter (50 words). In the case of panel proposals, live performances, dramatic readings, posters, or exhibits, please submit a rationale (250-500 words), as well as biographical statements for each of the presenters. To recognize undergraduate research in Irish Studies, we will also organize a special undergraduate panel at the conference, and we encourage exceptional undergraduate students to submit individual paper proposals.
For more information, visit aciswest.wordpress.com/
Please direct any questions to Sarah L. Townsend, Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, Sarah.Townsend@usd.edu.
David Lloyd is a leading scholar of Irish literature and culture, colonialism, and nationalism. He is the author of Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987); Anomalous States (1993); Ireland After History (1999); Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity (2008); and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He has also co-published several other books, including The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1991), with Abdul JanMohamed; Culture and the State, co-authored with Paul Thomas (1997); The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (1997), with Lisa Lowe; and The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2008), edited with Peter D. O’Neill. Lloyd is also a poet and playwright, and he currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.
Donal O’Kelly is a playwright and actor. His award-winning solo plays include Catalpa, Bat The Father Rabbit The Son, Jimmy Joyced!, and Ailliliú Fionnuala. He has performed throughout Ireland, the UK, and North America, including New York’s Lincoln Center, Toronto’s Winter Garden, the Abbey Theatre, and the Peacock. His film roles include leading roles in Roddy Doyle’s The Van and in the acclaimed bilingual film Kings. He was a founder and artistic director of Dublin’s Calypso Productions, and is an associate director of the peace and justice organization Afri.