CAIS/ACEI Keynotes 2025

Garrett Carr​
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.

Cormac Moore
Cormac Moore is an historian-in-residence with Dublin City Council and a columnist with the Irish News. Dr. Moore has published widely on Irish history, including the books, Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland (Merrion Press, 2019), The Irish Soccer Split (Cork University Press, 2015), and The GAA V Douglas Hyde: The Removal of Ireland’s First President as GAA Patron (The Collins Press, 2012). His next books are due to be published in 2025: Laois: The Irish Revolution, 1912-1923 by Four Courts Press, as part of its county-by-county series on the Irish Revolution; and The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission by Irish Academic Press.

Anna Teekell
​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.​
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For more information on the 2025 CAIS/ACEI conference, click here