American Historical Association Convention, January 2001

This last year, I organized two sessions for the American Historical Association Convention in Boston in January. The first was submitted to and approved by the AHA Program Committee and thus co sponsored by the American Historical Association. It was also the only session at AHA to be written up by the local press. The Boston Herald devoted a full page article to it.

The session was as follows:

ACIS Convention, New York, June 2001

I organized four sessions for this Convention:

We co-sponsored a proposal with Ruth Ann Harris of Boston College and Tyler Anbinder of George Washington University that was not accepted by the Program Committee. Members of the proposed panel did not wish to appear only as an affiliate session.

We organized a panel to appear as an affiliate session featuring, again, young scholars: Laura McNeill, recent PhD from BC, Timothy O’Neill, who teaches at Central Michigan, and Stephen Small, recent PhD from Oxford. It is listed below.

TG4 (Telefis na nGaeilge) is now online.

(see e-mail)

b. By-Laws (Sean Moran, chair)

Not present; no report.

c. Book Prize Review (David Miller, chair)

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:

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 recommend that, 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:

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:

Motion: To contribute $1000 to the 13^th Graduate Irish Studies Conference at Boston College.

Moved: Meagher; Miller, second.

Motion passed unanimously.