The American Conference for Irish Studies, with the generous financial support of the Charitable Irish Society, is delighted to announce the inaugural winner of the Catherine Shannon Prize, a new award named in honor of Catherine Shannon, Professor Emeritus at Westfield State University

The prize will be awarded to Melissa DeLury, a graduate of St. Anselm College (New Hampshire) and Trinity College Dublin, currently pursuing a PhD in Education at George Mason University.  Ms. DeLury will use the prize to attend our annual conference, which this year is being held at the University of Colorado Denver from 21-31 May.

Ms. DeLury is an experienced researcher and educator.  She is the recipient of both the Fulbright-Nehru Research Grant and Critical Language Enhancement Award in 2017-2018 and a Cosmos Scholars Grant in 2024-25. Her work has already been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society and the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis.  Ms DeLury’s PhD dissertation and focuses on the role of history education in facilitating peace in postcolonial settings like Ireland and explores how the thirty-year period of violence known as “The Troubles” (1968-1998) is taught in three different school types in Northern Ireland (state/controlled, Catholic, and integrated).  Drawing on eighteen months of field work (classroom observations, interviews and critical ethnographic study), she explores how teachers engage students and additional resources to build students’ understanding of the Troubles, believing that teachers play a critical role in reconciling societal divisions through history education.  Her presentation at our annual conference will draw on this body of research.

We see Melissa DeLury’s work as an excellent tribute to the work of Prof. Catherine Shannon, who had a long career as an innovative historian and educator with an active interest in contemporary Northern Ireland.