ACIS/BCPS Conference
2025 ACIS-BCPS CONFERENCE
FEBRUARY 23-26, 2025 | DESOTO SAVANNAH, SAVANNAH, GA
The Program Committee for the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) and the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference (BCPS) cordially invites the electronic submission of proposals for papers, panels, and other relevant presentations.
Hosted in the DeSoto Hotel on Liberty Street in the Historic District of Savannah, Georgia, USA, the conference opens on Sunday, February 23, and closes on Wednesday, February 26, 2025. Submissions should engage with (or be adjacent to) the conference’s theme, “Tradition + Innovation” / “Traidisiún + Nuálaíocht.” Fáiltíonn an chomhdháil roimh aighneachtaí i nGaeilge.
While many former colonial possessions and their diasporic communities have navigated—and continue to navigate—a range of traditional identities and practices while also generating and advancing innovation, it can be argued that Ireland and the global Irish are exemplars for this negotiation with history.
Ireland’s centuries of history as a colonized country have informed its tradition-innovation calculus. Being able to promote itself as the European Union’s sole English-speaking (and common law) member nation has helped the Republic attract biopharmaceutical, information technology, and other cutting-edge companies. However, the English language as a significant asset for innovation emerged from a radical decline in the use of Gaeilge, the Irish language, a key component of Irish tradition. Central to this falling-off was a colonial innovation: the National School initiative, articulated in the Stanley Letter of 1831.
But Ireland is not alone in negotiating the legacies of its colonial past. Other former colonies wrestle with the push and pull of maintaining a connection, however tenuous, with a past that is ever more idealized and a future that is ever more precarious. While Ireland may certainly serve as a model for walking such a tightrope, it is not alone in its reconciliation of a complicated history with the real need to create a unique national space within the global community.
Many disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are possible when addressing the potential futures currently being created by former colonies of the European powers. How tradition can and should inform the foregoing is but one of many questions relevant to the tradition-innovation dynamic. Others include, but are not limited to, the following:
- When seen as authoritative, has tradition stymied innovation?
- When seen as threadbare, has tradition spurred innovation?
- Has innovation become tradition?
- Has the economic stress of maintaining tradition necessitated innovation?
- Has fear of tradition precipitated innovation?
- Has innovation depended on tradition?
- Has innovation compromised or canceled tradition?
- Has innovation caused certain traditions to revisit their mutual relationship?
- Has being Irish abroad, in innovation-heavy economies, induced nostalgia for tradition?
- Have certain tradition-disrupting innovations, introduced in past centuries, become essential features of the Irish scene?
- as the promotion of Irish culture as tradition-rich eclipsed a narrative about the country as innovative?
- For other British Empire countries, what consequences resulted from Irish innovation in response to traditional colonial power structures?
- Does innovation in the Global North compromise the potential futures of the Global South?
In 2022, Ireland’s Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, spoke, perhaps, for every nation-state whose development was hindered by the European colonial project, when he wrote, “The future health of our national economy rests on our ability to innovate to respond to change. Innovation . . . will help us to take the radical actions required to build a sustainable planet and move towards a digital society."
SUBMISSIONS
ACIS members
may submit proposals atacisweb.org/conferences/acis-national-conference-2025/.
BCPS presenters
may submit proposals atbcpsconference.org/submissions.html.
DEADLINES
Deadline for proposal submissions: December 30, 2024.
Notification of acceptance: completed by January 15, 2025.
REGISTRATION
includes access to all sessions, one lunch, and two receptions
Regular Registration: $260.00
Graduate Student / Retiree: $180.00
CONTACT / QUESTIONS
Email to contact@acis-bcps2025.net
FOR MORE INFORMATION, SEE THE CONFERENCE SITE:
acis-bcps2025.net
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Brendan Howlin
Retired Labour Party Leader
TD for the Wexford constituency from 1987 until his retirement in 2024. He previously served as Leader of the Labour Party from 2016 to 2020, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform from 2011 to 2016, Leas-Cheann Comhairle from 2007 to 2011, Deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1997 to 2002, Minister for the Environment from 1994 to 1997, and Minister for Health from 1993 to 1994. He was a Senator from 1983 to 1987, after being nominated by the Taoiseach.
Veronica Campbell
President, South East Technological University
Professor Campbell has held several senior leadership roles in Trinity College Dublin, including Dean of Graduate Studies and Bursar & Director of Strategic Innovation; in the latter role from 2015 to 2021 Prof Campbell oversaw the commencement of a €300M capital project portfolio in the university. She currently serves on the Board of the Atlantic Institute, based in Oxford University, and was the inaugural chair of the Global Brain Health Institute of Trinity College and UCSF. She is a former President of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland (Biomedical Sciences Section).
Bob Harris
Warden of Skellig Michael
For over three decades, Bob Harris kept the lighthouse on one of the most remote, forbidding, and beautiful places on earth. His international best-seller, Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael is an outstanding piece of nature writing, garnering unanimous praise from critics.