Amy Clukey

Candidate statement

As second vice president, I would continue the efforts of our current president and board to diversify MSA, make the conference more accessible, and respond to the challenges posed to our work by the job market, shrinking budgets, and attacks on the humanities. I would also strive to make the conference more welcoming for marginalized scholars, graduate students, early career scholars, non-tenure track scholars, “alt-ac” scholars, and scholars from a wider range of institutions, such as community colleges, liberal arts colleges, directional universities, and university presses. With Jonathan Goldman, I am co-organizing a stream, “Teaching Modernism and Activism in an Age of White Supremacy” for MSA Brooklyn. I have also worked for many years within the Society for the Study of Southern Literature to create inclusive spaces and acknowledge the many forms of labor we now undertake as scholars, writers, teachers, etc. These issues are complex and there are no simple solutions. However, there are concrete actions MSA might be able to implement fairly quickly to meet the needs of its membership, including 1) assembling a standing committee on race and inclusion, 2) developing a caucus for emerging scholars that has the power to undertake its own initiatives and visibility on social media and the conference program, 3) increasing transparency within the organization, especially between the board and the membership at large, 4) hosting sessions with the membership to discuss the state of the organization and the field, 5) lowering registration rates for non-tenure track scholars and, if feasible, eliminating registration fees for graduate students, 6) collaborating with other academic organizations on sessions, 7) making the board more representative of the membership; and 8) working to make the conference as accessible and as affordable as possible, particularly with regard to the cost of hotels and host cities. My CV and publications can be found online at https://louisville.academia.edu/AmyClukey and https://louisville.edu/english/people/current-faculty-new/amy-clukey.