President Curtin called the meeting to order at 1:53 pm.
1.Announcements.
President Curtin announced that the next ACIS conference will be hosted byMarquette University with Michael Gillespie as conference organizer and John Harrington as conference committee chair.The call for papers will be in the next Newsletter.
2003:University of St. Thomas.
2.Book Awards Presentation
Robert Rhodes Prize for the Best Book in Literary Studies
Christopher J. Wheatley, Beneath Ierne's Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth
Century (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).
Michael J. Durkan Prize for the Best Book on Irish Language and Culture
Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester:St. Jerome Publishing, 1999).
James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for the Best Book on Irish History or Social Studies
Cormac O Grada, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
The Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book
Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999)
3.President’s Report
The Executive Committee agreed to a contribution for 13th Grad Student Conference. The highest category of growth in membership has been in graduate student membership.
Members were encouraged to check their membership status to be certain that they are current.
The President reminded the membership of the 2001-2 regional meeting sites.
David Miller thanked the organizers for an excellent conference.
The President thanked Jesse Lord Johnson, the co-organizer of the conference; Sean, Dan, and Carolyn; and the executive committee for their support, with particular thanks for Michael Gillespie for his hard work and support. She also thanked James Doan, the Newsletter editor; the subcommittees; and the ACIS membership as a whole.
4.Treasurer’s Report (given by K. Conrad).
The membership was reminded that that the Treasurer should be contacted for address changes and other membership status information.The new Treasurer's contact information will be online shortly.
Most of the expenditures from officers were related to full membership mailings:bylaw change, conference, elections, and renewals.
A number of people are not current according to our membership lists.Those who do not update their memberships by the end of the conference will be dropped this summer from the membership rolls.If any conference participants need to pay heir membership or just need to check the status of their membership, the registration table has that information.
5.Committee Reports
A.Elections (Michael Gillespie, chair). [See Officers, http://www.acisweb.com/officers.html]
277 voted in the elections. The Chair expressed his congratulations to the winners and thanks to all those who run.He also thanked the slating committee for their work.
Motion:to accept the Election Report.
Moved, seconded;motion approved unanimously.
B.By-Laws Review (Sean Moran, chair; absence).No report; the committee's tenure is at an end.
1.By-law revision proposal (Robert Mahony).
Currently, members of ACIS may nominate any member for elective office (Vice-President and discipline representatives) in the organization, but these nominations are made formally to a committee which then chooses only two candidates from the names submitted.The members of this committee are selected by the outgoing ACIS president, with the approval of the ACIS executive board, and chaired by the Vice-President (the incoming ACIS President); but their actions are not transparent (that is, they are not performed in open session and minutes of their meetings are not made available), nor are they accountable to the members of ACIS.
It is proposed to change this procedure and allow free elections in ACIS.Because the committee procedure is outlined in the ACIS by-laws, and the by-laws may only be changed by a postal vote of the entire ACIS membership, our proposal at the moment is that the 2001 Business Meeting approve the motion for such a vote to take place.
Section V, paragraph C of the by-laws, as currently phrased, reads:
‘A committee chaired by the Vice-President, nominated by the President, and appointed by the Executive Committee will invite members to submit names from which it will select candidates for office.The committee will then send ballots to members, announce the results to the Executive Committee and the membership, and depost the ballots in the ACIS archives.’ [Emphases added]
The new phrasing proposed is:
‘Candidates for office in ACIS must meet two criteria:each must be a member of ACIS in good standing and each must be nominated by at least five other members in good standing.A committee chaired by the Vice-President, nominated by the President and appointed by the Executive Committee will invite members to nominate candidates for office, set deadlines for meeting the criteria for candidacy, send ballots to members, receive and count the ballots, announce the results to the Executive Committee and the membership, and deposit the ballots in the ACIS archives.’
Moved; seconded.
Discussion:
Friendly amendments to the final paragraph were suggested and approved.The text was revised to read:
‘Candidates for office in ACIS must meet two criteria only:each must be a member of ACIS in good standing and each must be nominated by at least five other members in good standing.Any candidate who meets those criteria will have his/her name appear on the ballot.A committee chaired by the Vice-President, nominated by the President and appointed by the Executive Committee will invite members to nominate candidates for office, send ballots to members, announce the results to the Executive Committee and the membership, and deposit the ballots in the ACIS archives.’
Concerns: A comment was made that the reason we have a nominations committee is a concern about continuity and the wellbeing of ACIS.Stewardship is appropriate in such a context, both in terms of officers and committees. Another member commented that one of the purposes of the nominations committee is to cajole people into candidacy.Is the motion limiting the power of the nominations committee to cajole?Miller replied that it was not. Another member noted that we rarely have enough nominees for each position; getting two is difficult.The current proposal will make it more difficult to run. An officer noted that there is at least one person on the nominations committee who has been chosen by the membership to oversee the elections and has been endorsed by a majority of the membership.As the amendment now stands, five people have that power.We run the risk of diluting the process.Lowery asked how often we have had more than two candidates nominated?Curtin replied that it has happened, particularly in the disciplines. Lowery expressed concern about the nominations committee recruiting candidates who don't want to win and might.Johnston suggested that the proposal might open the process up and ensure that, with five people on the committee, the nominee has support.Another member suggested that the slating committee is comprised of experienced members; there may be a chilling effect on those willing to run were a 5-person nominating commitee.
Vote:To submit the By-law Revision Proposal to the membership.
11 for; 46 against; 4 abstentions.The motion failed.
C.Book Prize Review (David Miller, chair).The report, with friendly amendments (included below), was unanimously approved by the Executive Committee.
The Durkan Prize for the best book on literature
The Donnelly Prize for the best book in history or social science
The Murphy Prize for a distinguished book in any field
During the past several years two new prizes have been endowed: The Rhodes prize, which was designated by the donor for "literature," and the Dalsimer prize for a dissertation in any field. A decision was made to redefine the Durkan prize as an award for the best book on "language or culture" with an understanding that "culture" in this instance referred to non-literary artistic forms (painting, music, film, etc.). It was in the context of these changes that the Executive Committee deemed it opportune to review the entire prize system to determine whether it might be revised in ways which would better contribute to the organization's objectives.
One further piece of background to this report is the fact that in the current academic year a decision was made by the Vice President to ask disciplinary representatives themselves to serve as chairs of this year's prize committees. Therefore five of the six members of this committee are simultaneously engaged in the process of selecting winners of particular prizes. This has lent a certain existential urgency to our deliberations.
1. The problem of multiple submissions.
For many years there was no explicit rule barring submission of a book to more than one committee. However, many participants in the process felt that it was unreasonable for an author to win two prizes from ACIS for the same book, and before announcing winners it was customary for committee chairs to consult to avoid double awards. In 1999 a decision was made to inform publishers that a given book might be submitted to only one committee, though this was a (sensible) executive response to a growing problem, not a formal policy.
In practice double submission usually involved a book submitted to both a disciplinary committee (Donnelly, Durkan or Rhodes) and the first book committee (Murphy). Our committee also considered whether multiple submissions for more than one disciplinary prize ought to be allowed. We have decided to recommend a formal policy that in any given year a book should be eligible for submission to only one disciplinary committee, but first books would be eligible for submission also to the Murphy committee. However, we recommend, that no more than one prize be awarded to any given book. In sections 2 and 3, below, we explain these decisions and set out how they should be implemented.
2. Disciplinary prizes and interdisciplinarity.
ACIS has always taken pride in its multidisciplinary composition and interdisciplinary objectives. The three disciplinary prizes reflect the multidisciplinary composition of the organization, though some have raised the question whether a system based on disciplinary committees can serve our interdisciplinary objectives by giving fair treatment to interdisciplinary works. The advent of the Rhodes prize and the separation of "literature" and "culture" into two separate prizes (Rhodes and Durkan) raised the practical issue of which committee should receive works in interdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies. It was also pointed out that authors identifying with cultural studies might well cross boundaries between the disciplines represented by the Rhodes and Durkan committees on the one hand and the Donnelly committee on the other.
Following considerable discussion our committee decided to recommend that the three disciplinary prizes continue to be described as they appear in this year's announcement (Donnelly: history or social science; Rhodes: literature; Durkan: language or culture), and that the following language appear on the announcement:
"No book may compete for more than one of the three disciplinary prizes (Donnelly, Durkan, Rhodes). In deciding which committee should receive the submission, authors and nominators should be guided by what academic audience the book addresses. Books addressed primarily to historians and/or social scientists should go to the Donnelly committee. Books addressed primarily to literary scholars should go to the Rhodes committee. Books which are addressed to students of language or culture (including especially the visual and performing arts) should go to the Durkan committee. Books addressed to an interdisciplinary audience (e.g. works in cultural studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies) may be submitted to any of the three committees. The disciplinary committee chairs in consultation with each other may choose to reassign any book to a different prize competition in the interests of disciplinary comparability among the contenders for each prize."
The committee's recommendation assumes that what makes interdisciplinary work truly innovative (and therefore prizeworthy) is an author's ability to persuade members of one discipline that appropriating methods and knowledge from another discipline can lead to new and exciting insights. We opted for a procedure that allows the author of a cross-disciplinary work the freedom to choose which disciplinary audience is likely to be most impressed with her/his work. (The final sentence in the above paragraph is intended merely to protect the author from a publisher who makes an unwise choice.) As all interdisciplinary innovation is subject to carping criticism from at least one of the disciplines being bridged, this procedure should avoid setting a higher bar for interdisciplinary work than for more conventional work by requiring that the former be judged outstanding by members of two or more disciplines.
3. The first book (Murphy) prize
There has been some ambiguity as to what constitutes a first book. Essentially, we believe the prize should go to an author for his or her first scholarly monograph (or collection of original scholarly essays). Edited works and text books should not be admitted to the competition, and, conversely, the publication of such a work does not disqualify a subsequently published first monograph from consideration for this prize.
The multi-disciplinary character of the pool of entries can create some difficulties over comparability. The committee considered the possibility of creating a system in which first books published in one of the disciplinary groups represented in the Donnelly, Durkan and Rhodes prizes over a three-year period would be considered separately by a Murphy committee specially constituted for that disciplinary group; under this system books in each of the three groups would be eligible for prizes once in every three-year cycle. The committee ultimately decided not to recommend such a system both because it might be administratively unwieldy and because it would create delays which might be limit the value of the prize to a junior scholar seeking tenure.
We think that requiring the nominator to choose between submitting a first book to the Murphy committee or to one of the disciplinary committees creates an unfair "lottery" situation. We recommend that submission of a first book to both a disciplinary committee and the Murphy committee be allowed. However, we believe that no book should win more than one prize; the purpose of our prize system ought to be to recognize a variety of scholarly work and a number of colleagues in our field, not to heap honors on one person. Therefore, we recommendthat, if the same book is chosen by the Murphy committee and one of the other three committees, the President and the two chairs should be constituted as an ad hoc committee to decide which prize will be awarded to the book in question. The other committee would then be empowered to choose a different winner for its prize. This explicit policy would only formalize an informal practice which existed for a number of years before the recent decision to prohibit double submissions.
To implement this recommendation our prize announcement should the following at the end of the language recommended in section 2:
"An author's first scholarly monograph (or collection of original essays) may be submitted to the Murphy prize committee in addition to one of the three disciplinary committees."
4. Securing submissions
One issue which occupied a good deal of our committee's attention was the relatively sparse submissions this year compared to previous years, and committee members, in their roles as prize committee chairs, are working to secure additional submissions at the time that this report is being prepared.
The committee feels very strongly that it is essential that the best works being published in Irish studies be in contention for our prizes. The awarding of a prize not only sends a message of commendation to one of our professional colleagues, but also sends a powerful message to the academic world about ACIS and its standards. If we award a prize to a book which is manifestly inferior to a book published in the same year that is regarded by members of its discipline as a towering achievement we will look silly.
There used to be a process by which a number of publishers were notified of the prizes directly and those known to have eligible books received follow-up communication if they failed to nominate books. This year apparently there was no centrally-organized publicity other than notices in the newsletter and on the webpage until the prize committee chair suddenly realized in March that they had received almost no books. We recommend that in future years the following steps be taken:
a. A list of publishers who regularly publish academic books of Irish interest should be maintained. To that end, members of this committee, who are contructing such lists on their own this year, will happily contribute those lists. The editor of Irish Literary Supplement should be asked to maintain a list of all publishers who submit books for review. We should maintain the list in electronic form with email addresses wherever available. Each year the list should be sent out for revisions early in the fall to both discipline representatives and prize committee chairs.
b. The President (or by delegation the Vice President) should send out paper and/or electronic flyers at the same time that the announcement of the prizes is displayed in the newsletter and on the webpage.
c. It is clear that merely sending out flyers is not enough. Someone must follow up proactively by letter, email, or phone to those publishers who are known to have relevant books on their lists. The logical person to do this is probably the prize committee chair, who should have received the revised list of publishers late in the fall and is the best judge of which publishers are likely to have books which would fall in his committee's jurisdiction.
d. The Executive Committee should, at least on an experimental basis, appropriate funds to place advertisements in several major professional journals and newsletter.
e. Some analogous steps need to be taken with respect to the Dalsimer prize, though the contact persons there are dissertation advisors rather than publishers.
Motion: to accept the report.Moved, seconded.
Motion approved unanimously.
5.New Business.
Motion to adjourn passed.Meeting adjourned at 2:53.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathryn Conrad