The American conference for Irish Studies is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Ann Owens Weekes Prize & the Maureen Murphy Postgraduate Prize.

Shinjini Chattopadhyay

Samantha Haddad

The Ann Owen Weekes Prize is awarded to a graduate student whose paper presented at ACIS 2021, best captured the essence of Irish Women’s Studies and/or Intersectional Studies, and who was best able to show the link between their paper and their continuing work in their particular area of research interest. The prize was established in honor of Ann Owen Weekes, a trailblazer in the filed and the author of a ground-breaking critical study of Irish women writers: An Uncharted Tradition.

This year’s Ann Owen Weekes Prize was awarded to Shinjini Chattopadhyay of the University of Notre Dame for her paper “Towards a New Cosmopolitanism: Stranger Fetishism in the Works of Twenty-first Century Migrant Writers of Color in  Ireland.” Chattopadhyay will receive an award of $500 and will be recognized at the ACIS 2022 meeting in Athens, GA. Additionally, Samantha Haddad of New York University was awarded an Honorable Mention for her paper “‘Dark Beauties and Spicy Roses’: Race, Gender, and Cultural Production in the Rose of Tralee Pageant.”

Máire McCafferty

Ciara McAllister

The Maureen Murphy Postgraduate Prize is awarded to a graduate student who has presented at the most recent national conference for an exemplary presentation.

The 2021 Maureen Murphy Postgraduate Prize was co-awarded to Máire McCafferty of University College Dublin for her paper “Oideachas Eagsúil don Aos Óg? Coláisti Samhraidh na Gaeilge, 1904-30,”  and Ciara McAllister of Queen’s University Belfast for her paper “The Precarity of Home on the Belfast Stage: Representing Gender, Class, and Space in John Boyd’s The Flats?” 

Both scholars will receive a monetary prize and recognition at the 2022 ACIS National Meeting in Athens, GA.