Vote for the Graduate Representative here.
Graduate Student Representative
Maeve Carey-Kozlark
Maeve Carey-Kozlark (they/she) is a PhD student in Historical Musicology at NYU where they study sounds of dissent under conditions of memory, migration, and displacement, particularly among Irish-Americans in labor and leftist circles during the early-mid 20th century. They will be presenting a project examining the introduction of the banjo to Irish traditional music by way of return migration at this years ACIS in San Jose, and are currently authoring a related chapter on the material culture of folk instruments for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion on Folk Music, slated for publication next year.
Prior to attending NYU, Maeve earned a dual BA in Music and Society, Culture, & Thought from Bennington College where their thesis work centered around processes of decolonizing music and sound archives. Outside of their research practice, Maeve is an avid Irish-language learner and session musician on flute and tin whistle, frequenting ceilis, contra dances, and pop-up Gaeltachts in New York whenever the opportunity arises.
Tiffany Thompson
Tiffany Thompson (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Boston College. Her research interests include women and gender, migrations and diasporas, and civil rights and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Still in the early stages of dissertation research, she is working on a project about the dislocation of working-class Belfast families because of the street violence and riots that characterized the early years of the Troubles (1969-1975). As a doctoral candidate at Boston College, Tiffany currently serves as the president of both the Graduate History Alliance and Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences in order to advocate on behalf of her fellow graduate students. She is also involved in planning two major graduate student conferences, one for Irish Studies and one for history, and edits the history department graduate student research blog. The needs of graduate students lie at the heart of her work on campus and in the wider academic world, and she is excited about the prospect of serving her graduate student colleagues by representing them on the ACIS Executive Committee.
Megan McAlister
Dia duit! My name is Megan Milburn-McAlister and I am thrilled to be considered for the Graduate Student Representative position. I worked in corporate and non-profit communications prior to taking an extended maternity leave. I started graduate school at the University of St. Thomas (TX) William J. Flynn Center for Irish Studies last year, and I am really enjoying the experience. I am primarily remote and live outside of Portland, Oregon. I have served as a board member on two early education boards and I have a lot of experience in community building that I think would be beneficial to the executive committee. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to meeting everyone in San Jose in June!
J. Hollis Harris
Hollis is a second-year Ph.D. candidate at Northern Illinois University (NIU), working under the guidance of Dr. Sean Farrell. He earned an M.A. there, and B.A.s in History and Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He studies nationalist political culture in early-twentieth-century Irish America. Hollis’ in-progress dissertation uses the 1899 reunification of Clan-na-Gael as a framework for exploring what Irish Americans thought about the world they lived in, the various imagined worlds they wished to bring into reality through their activism, and how those historically dynamic concepts informed the national identities they constructed for themselves. This portrait of Irish American nationalism features an examination of political activists’ ideas about global imperialism, the environment, death, masculinity, and early-twentieth-century racial theory. Hollis is also the current President of NIU’s History Graduate Student Association (HGSA), which aims to provide members opportunities for open intellectual exchange and collective workshopping of one another’s research. To that end, he is the Organizing Chair of this year’s HGSA Conference, where graduate students from NIU and other institutions from across the United States and the world present their research in a critical but supportive environment modeled on the regional conferences of the American Conference for Irish Studies.