Sean Weidman

Candidate statement

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire

Statement of Qualifications
My teaching and research generally orbit global Anglomodernist literatures, empire and anti/coloniality, affect and coterie power, and the politics of welcoming; but my work as a teacher-scholar-administrator has always been inextricable from precarity and contingency. After earning a PhD in English from Penn State in 2021, I served for a year as a postdoc/lecturer, and then another year as a one-year SLAC VAP, and now as a term-limited VAP at a public regional university. Like many of MSA’s contingent workers, my pedagogy, scholarship, and service- labors have never not been encircled by overlapping regimes of extraction, exploitation, and extinction. We are all of us contingent now, increasingly linked by the adjunctified, corporatized, neoliberal alignments of US higher education, but some of us are more insecure than others. My hope in this position, as an advocate for my contingent colleagues and peers—we forced insecure who increasingly represent the MSA’s largest group of teachers, scholars, and practitioners—is to bring another precarious aperture to bear on the future of modernist studies, and to insist that our leaders support fragile lives and labors as seriously, with an equitable view of resources and
material access, as we treat our privileged and secure.

Abbreviated List of Publications
“‘A Necessity of Smallness’: Dorothy Day’s Modernist Hospitality.” Twentieth- Century
Literature. (Forthcoming, Summer 2025)

“Modernism and Gender at the Limits of Stylometry.” Co-authored with Aaren Pastor. Digital
Humanities Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 4, 2022.

“Suspended Affect and Harlem Renaissance Poetics.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 28, no. 4,
2022, pp. 637-659.

“Of Hospitality and Hosting: Tracing Colonial Haunting in W.B. Yeats.” English Literary
History, vol. 85, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1025-1063.