With a few exceptions, the study of Irish-America has been biased by a focus on Irish-Americans in urban settings east of the Mississippi, a bias that has resulted in a rather warped interpretation of the whole Irish-American experience. This project serves to counter this bias by providing scholars with an online collection of primary sources (literary, cultural, and historical texts) and scholarly materials (researched essays, bibliographies, biographies, and histories) exploring the significant contributions of the Irish to the American West.

The heart of the Irish-American West project is the electronic text archive consisting of rare and out-of-print works of Irish-American writing from western America including, but not necessarily limited to, works of fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, biography, nonfiction, and commentary. The electronic text collection provides the basis and subject matter for the specifically research-orientated component of the project, a peer-reviewed e-journal devoted to investigating the texts archived in the collection. Essays published in the journal are "hyper-linked" to the primary texts housed in the archive with the result that readers are provided immediate access to the scholar's primary source material. The project thus provides readers with both first-hand experience (through the primary texts) and scholarly insight (through the research-based articles) into the story of the Irish-American West.

The texts in the collection have been encoded in XML and are fully searchable via the sites PHP driven search interface. In most cases the texts are accompanied by introductions, translations, biographies and scholarly bibliographies. Where appropriate, materials in the collection are hyper linked to other resources outside of the collection.

The Irish-American West project was initiated in 2002 and provided seed money through a grant of the Stanford Humanities Lab of Stanford University. The project continues to grow and is always interested in feedback and contributions (both scholarly and financial). If you would like to contribute to the efforts of the project, please contact the project custodian, Matthew Jockers.

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