The Eileen Allen Scholarship is awarded to support a student enrolled in Celtic Studies at the University of St. Michael’s College to attend the Yearly Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. It is available to all students in the Celtic Studies Program.
Value: 1-2 award available. $600 – $1200
The award can be used towards registration cost (TBA) and/or accommodation costs.
Deadline: Tuesday March 11th at 5 p.m. EST
2025 Yearly Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies will take place June 11th-13th, 2025, in Toronto and will be a co-hosted affair between York University and St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. The conference is entitled “Boundaries, Borders, and Frontiers in Irish Studies”.
Our confirmed keynote speakers are Prof Katy Hayward, Dr Garrett Carr, and Dr Anna Teekell. A short biography of each can be found below:
Anna Teekell is an Associate Professor of English at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, USA. Originally from Louisiana, Dr. Teekell has degrees from Rhodes College, Trinity College Dublin, and Washington University. She teaches 19th and 20th century British and Irish literature, as well as core writing courses with topics such as gothic fiction, detective fiction, and Irish literature. Dr. Teekell’s scholarly focus is modern Irish literature and as she argues, the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland may now be physically invisible, but its apparition in a variety of literary genres allows readers to locate the border, its pasts, and its futures. Drawing from the interdisciplinary field of Borderland Studies, her forthcoming book BorderLines: A Literary Map of the Irish Border, brings critical insights from history, political science, and ecology together with close readings of novels, poems, plays, and creative nonfiction written about the Irish border. It establishes the concept of the borderland as a “third space,” neither Irish nor British, Southern or Northern, but a liminal territory of its own, which is mappable through an identifiable set of literary tropes and concerns.
Garrett Carr is a writer, map-maker, and Senior Lecturer based at the Seamus Heaney Centre in the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. Dr. Carr grew up in County Donegal near Ireland’s border and much of his work focuses on the region, most notably his widely-reviewed and praised portrait of its history, people and culture The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (2017) which was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He also charted unofficial and previously unmapped paths and bridges crossing the border, a process that was the subject of a BBC radio documentary, Charting the Border. Dr. Carr is also co-directing Ireland’s Border Culture project, with funding from the HEA North-South Research Programme, to research and create an annotated digital archive of literary and visual art representations of Ireland’s border culture, 1921 – 2024. He is also a frequent contributor to TV programmes and international press outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. His most recent work, a novel The Boy From the Sea, will be published in Feburary 2025 in UK and Ireland by Picador and then in April in North America by Knopf.
Katy Hayward is a political sociologist and Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Education, and Social Work at the Queen’s University, Belfast, where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for International Borders Research. She has written and presented widely on the topics of Brexit, the 1998 Agreement and the Irish border to media, policy, civic and academic audiences worldwide. She is the author of What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Irish Border? (2021), the co-author of Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday (2021) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Island (2017). Prof. Hayward has also co-authored many research reports, including recently on the impact of Brexit on Irish regions, presented written and oral evidence before numerous parliamentary committees in the UK, Ireland and EU, and had opinion pieces published in Politico, Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Irish Times among other outlets. Prof. Hayward was elected a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy in 2023 and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2020. She is a trustee of the British-Irish Association, an organization dedicated to promoting good relations between the governments and peoples of the UK and Ireland.
More info on the conference can be found on the CAIS website: https://www.canadianirishstudies.org/