About this prize
The Catherine Shannon Prize, funded by a generous donation from the Charitable Irish Society, awards $500 each year to an ACIS member to help offset the costs of attending our annual national conference. Scholars who receive little to no institutional funding for conferences are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to untenured faculty, graduate students, independent scholars without full-time employment, retired academics, and international scholars. Recipients must be members of ACIS at the time of the award.
Prof. Catherine Shannon studied at the University of Toronto, University College Dublin and U-Mass Amherst before pursuing a four-decade-long teaching career at Westfield State University of Massachusetts, where she started in 1967. During that time, she developed an innovative, multidisciplinary Irish American Studies Program that introduced students to Irish music, literature, and the Irish language, as well as Irish and British History. She was also a driving force behind the establishment, in 1987, of an Honors Program at Westfield State, and, as a study abroad advisor, she maintained her connections with Irish Studies, arranging for many Westfield students to study or undertake teaching internships in Ireland. From 1982 onwards, she organized the Symposium on Northern Ireland at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. These events, which brought Irish and British representatives together to discuss contemporary political issues, deepened Prof. Shannon’s connections to the Charitable Irish Society. She would go on to serve as the first-ever female President of the Society; she has been an active member since 1985.
Prize Committee
Chair: Lucy McDiarmid
Eligibility and Submission Instructions
The Catherine Shannon Prize is submitted by self-nomination only through the online form below. Scholars who receive little to no institutional funding for conferences are eligible to apply.
To apply, please submit a current CV as well as a 2-page letter explaining your current and past academic research, how your proposed paper presentation at our upcoming national conference fits with that larger work, and what you hope to gain in terms of feedback or professional development from attending our conference. Applicants can also include any information, if applicable, about other funding they have secured, applied for, or will apply for (institutional and external), as well as their rank/title and employment status.
Awardees may use the funds for any aspect of their travel to the national ACIS conference, including, but not limited to, transport, accommodation, and conference registration fees. The prize will be distributed at the conference. The deadline to apply for the 2027 Catherine Shannon Prize—to be used for travel to the 2027 ACIS National conference—is January 1, 2027. Late submissions will NOT be accepted.
For more information, contact the chair of the ACIS awards committee, ACIS vice president Sarah Townsend ([email protected]).