Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. Professor Diane Negra discusses her most recent scholarship which investigates Irish identity in the United States. She begins with the election of John F. Kennedy with a sense of hopefulness which progressed through the 1980s and 1990s with an explosion of interest in all things Irish. But beginning in the 2000s, Professor Negra locates a growing sense of dread as images of skulls and death begin to dominate Irish American pride. An outgrowth of shirking economic opportunity and a destabilized racial climate, white identity politics began to co-opt Irishness for conservative and polarizing aims. Exploring these cultural trends and beginning a conversation around them, is an important step in making conscious the troubling shift in what it means to be Irish in America.