Congratulations to Dr Keira V. Williams, Mitchell Institute Fellow: Religion, Arts and Peacebuilding and Sabbatical Fellow 2024-25 on her recent success.

Keira won the 2025 Peggy O'Brien Biennial Book Prize from the Irish Association for American Studies for her third book, Why Any Woman: Feminism and Popular Culture in the Late Twentieth-Century South (University of Georgia Press, 2023).

Named in honour of one of the founders of the Irish Association for American Studies, the biennial prize of 500Euro is awarded for the best monograph published in American Studies.  Peggy O’Brien is a scholar and poet and is the author of four collections of poems: Sudden Thaw, Frog Spotting, Trusting Ice and most recently Tongues.  She is also the editor of the Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry and the author of the critical study Writing Lough Derg: from William Carleton to Seamus Heaney.  She spent half her teaching career at Trinity College Dublin and the other half at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Keira has also been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for 2025, which grants her a period of leave for one year to work on Mighty Man and the Southern Beats, her book about Charlie's Place, a Black nightclub in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that hosted famous African American performers of the mid-twentieth century. 

Inside the club, white supremacist patriarchal rules did not apply, and a subculture centered on music, dance, and defiance of Cold War racial, gendered, and sexual conformity thrived in the late 1940s. To those in power, this community represented multiple threats to traditional hierarchies—so much so that the Ku Klux Klan attacked in August of 1950.

Mighty Man and the Southern Beats tells the story of the development of this rebellious subculture on the postwar Carolina coast, using Charlie’s Place as a case study.

The BA/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships are intended to enable established scholars, needing relief from teaching and administration, to have the time to bring to completion a significant piece of research, through sustained period of leave for one year.