John Hoffmann

Candidate statement

John Hoffmann has held academic positions that have prepared him to represent a range of contingent faculty. Since receiving his PhD in 2018, he has adjuncted at the University of Marburg, worked on contracts with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and he currently holds a three-year post-doctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation, which will commence in September. His articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, diacritics, and Film History, and he has an article forthcoming in New Literary History, “The Volk against Fascism: Socialist Realism and the Aesthetics of Expressionism.” In addition to organizing panels for two MSA conferences, he has twice received MSA research grants. If modernist studies is to survive, and thrive, amid the dearth of tenure-track jobs, it will require supporting contingent faculty who wish to devote their careers to modernism. To that end, the contingent faculty representative must lead a conversation about how precariousness affects our discipline––not just as a fact of the market, but as an intellectual challenge. Roundtables like “Modernism after Expansion” or “Contingent Modernism” would be a start. The representative must also encourage conference participation among
contingent faculty, whether by advocating for travel grants or reduced fees.