Voting has now closed. New elected members will be announced at the National meeting in February, 2025.
Vice President
Sarah Townsend
I am an Associate Professor of English and co-founder of the Irish Studies program at the University of New Mexico. My investment in Irish Studies has been shaped by the accidents of birth and transnational migration – I am the adopted Korean granddaughter of Irish immigrants to the United States – and by two decades of scholarship and teaching in the field. My research focuses on modern and contemporary Irish literature, especially issues of genre, as well as on race and the transnational formation of Irish identity. I am the author of Irish Drama and Coming of Age in the Periphery (under contract with Edinburgh UP), co-editor of The Irish Bildungsroman (with Gregory Castle and Matthew Reznicek, forthcoming from Syracuse UP), and I have held residential fellowships at Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame. My teaching and advising was recognized by the UNM New Teacher of the Year Award in 2021. I have gained a variety of administrative and service
experience that prepares me to lead ACIS. I am currently Faculty Fellow for Strategic Graduate Recruitment at UNM, where I focus on the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minority students, and I serve on my university’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and the BIPOC Caucus of our faculty union. I am an outgoing member of the MLA Irish Forum Executive Committee, Past President of ACIS-West, and I have served on the ACIS Conduct Review
Committee, the diversity statement task force, and a variety of book and prize committees.
I am running for office in the hopes of making our organization a more inclusive space where all students, scholars, and teachers feel equally at home and find the professional support they need. My approach to leadership centers on those at the margins of our organization, field, and academia at large, including historically excluded groups, contingent and precarious faculty, graduate students and early career scholars, and anyone who feels intellectually isolated in their place of work or study. These are the members who most need the intellectual opportunities and professional camaraderie that ACIS fosters. They are also, I very much believe, crucial to our ongoing relevance and survival
as an organization.
Ours is a warm and tightly knit field where friendships and professional relationships flourish. While these attributes make Irish Studies a happy community for many, it can be difficult for those newer to ACIS to navigate the organization and to vocalize their suggestions or objections. We need consistent, usable, and clearly communicated structures and policies that make room for the contributions and concerns of all members, but especially those who have not yet formed the relationships upon which so much of Irish Studies relies. I want to take on the task of attending to
the bureaucratic (and boring to some!) details that govern how our organization functions. As someone who has worked in various capacities to make academic and professional organizations more inclusive, I am keenly aware that unless policies and procedures are consistent and transparent, they end to reinforce the usual hierarchies and to protect the most powerful. I want to make sure that ACIS’s inner workings serve everyone, especially the least powerful and least connected in our organization.
I am energized by the productive conversations about the future of our field that we have had over the past few years, which have yielded promising ideas about how our organization and field can address the changing dynamics of and threats to our profession and the academy. It is time to act on our ideas and to generate more of them. I want to build on the steps taken by previous ACIS leadership, including the establishment of the Diversity Statement and Committee, the Code of Conduct, and the Graduate Caucus. My goals include establishing user-friendly avenues for members to register concerns and propose ideas, creating a safety committee to reinforce our code of conduct at conferences, establishing independently operated affinity groups to connect likeminded scholars, funding a bursary to further our goal of diversifying our conferences and supporting our most precarious members, revisiting our social media presence so that challenging discussions are more productive and respectful, and issuing open calls for volunteer roles in our organization. I also very much want to hear your ideas, especially if you are early in your career and/or if you have built your professional life differently from—perhaps more creatively than—the traditional academic paths. Yours is the perspective we so very much need.
History Representative
Jay Roszman
Jay Roszman is a lecturer in Nineteenth Century Irish History at University College Cork where he was appointed in 2018. He completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of the late David W. Miller, and his dissertation was awarded the Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished Dissertation in 2015. His first book, Outrage in the Age of Reform: Irish Agrarian Violence, Imperial Insecurity, and British Governing Policy 1830-1845 was published with Cambridge University Press in 2022; and, he has published on themes related to agrarian violence, politics, and Irish engagement with British imperialism across the long nineteenth century. He has been an active member of ACIS since 2013.
Ann Humphrey
Ann Humphrey wrote their PhD in history at Trinity College Dublin under the direction of Seán Duffy, Professor of Medieval Irish and Insular History. They currently teach at Kean University and Ocean County College.
Literature Representative
Cóilín Parsons
Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University, where he also holds the Sonneborn Chair for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Indian Ocean Studies. He has served on the MLA Delegate Assembly as Irish Literature representative. His books include The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford, 2016), Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture (edited, Cambridge, 2024), and Science, Technology, and Modern Irish Literature (edited with Kathryn A. Conrad and Julie McCormick Weng, Syracuse, 2019). He is a co-editor of the new Bloomsbury Academic series, Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies, and serves on the boards of several book series and journals.
Matthew Brown
I am an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and my scholarship primarily focuses on modern and contemporary Irish fiction and film. I have been part of the ACIS for many years and have helped to organize both a regional and national conference in New England. I would love to serve as a representative within ACIS and many thanks for considering me!
Arts Representative
Zan Cammack
Dr. Zan Cammack is a lecturer at Utah Valley University whose research examines Irish culture and modernism through material and sonic histories, as seen in her book Ireland’s Gramophones (Clemson UP, 2021). Cammack also engages in public-facing scholarship as co-host of The Thing About Austen, integrating academic research with creative approaches to the arts. Her ongoing research focuses on the artistic interplay between poetry and music in her digital humanities project, “Seeing Wilde Songs,” which examines Charles T. Griffes’s musical interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s works.
Social Science Representative
Emmanuel Destenay
Emmanuel Destenay received his PhD in Contemporary History from Sorbonne University in 2014. He held Research Fellowships at Oxford University (2011-2012), Stanford University (2015), and University College Dublin (2016-2019). He is the author of Shadows from the Trenches. Veterans of the Great War and the Irish Revolution (1918-1923), Divergent Destinies. Conscription, US Intervention and the Transformation of Ireland (1914-1918), and America’s French Orphans: Mobilization, Humanitarniansim, and the Protection of France, 1914-1921.
WGSS Representative
Shirley Lau Wong
Shirley Lau Wong is an assistant professor in the English department at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her monograph, Poetics of the Local: Globalization, Place, and Contemporary Irish Poetry, was published with SUNY Press in 2023 and awarded the ACIS Rhodes Prize.
Irish Language Representative
Síle Ní Choincheannain
Síle Ní Choincheannain is an Education Lecturer with Irish language expertise at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She spent time lecturing at the University of Limerick, and two years (2017-2019) in Canada as an Irish Canadian University Fellow at the University of Ottawa. Síle also spent the academic year 2013-2014 on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Montana. She has experience working on Raidió na Gaeltachta and TG4. Her current research deals with modern Irish historical fiction, the role of women in this genre, teaching and learning in language immersion schools, and the O’Curry Irish College in Co. Clare.
Graduate Student Representative
Kaitlynn McShea
Kaitlynn McShea is a third-year PhD student in English Literature at Ball State University. Her dissertation work focuses on Irish women playwrights during the Irish Free State Period. In her free time, she is always interested in discussing the work of W. B. Yeats.
Hannah Thieryung
Hannah Thieryung is a second year Master’s student in the University of South Florida Department of History. At USF, Hannah is President of Irish Culture and Language Club and has been an active participant in growing its community presence in the Tampa Bay area. Hannah’s research interests focus on nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American theater, public history, and theater history.