Aaren Pastor

Candidate statement

I entered graduate school as a modernist and will leave graduate school a modernist, mostly because of the sartorial inspiration that a gathering of modernist studies scholars brings. As I progress towards dissertation completion, the anxiety about “the market” that has been expressed at recent MSAs by graduate students resonates with me. If elected to the position of Grad Studies Representative, I would be interested in exploring how MSA cultivates the development of, and support for, graduate students, especially at our annual yearly conference (for instance, the pre-conference workshop on graduate life and the pub night at MSA 2019). As a dual-title PhD candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State, I bring a set of interdisciplinary methods and approaches to my dissertation, which uses the example of Georgian-Armenian mystic G.I.Gurdjieff’s system of ideas, called The Work, to trace out the explorations of selfhood undertaken by his followers and detractors, among them Jean Toomer and Katherine Mansfield. This dissertation contributes to the renewed conversation in modernist studies about the relationship between modernism and religion, spirituality, and the occult, as well as interest in the construction of alternative intellectual histories. I have been an active member of Penn State’s Modernist Studies Workshop since 2016 and have worked to bring at least two modernist scholars a year to campus for lectures and seminars. I have been awarded grants to pursue research on Ernest Hemingway and Jean Toomer and was awarded an MSA travel conference grant in 2019. Currently, I have a piece on Katherine Mansfield and Māori animism under review for a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies and have published in Feminist Review.