Erin Kappeler

Candidate statement

I joined the MSA as a graduate student in 2011 and have been an active member through the years as a VAP, adjunct instructor, and TT faculty member. MSA has been both a stimulating professional home and a sometimes alienating, hierarchical, and white space, as is the norm for an academic organization. The Membership and Elections Chair is charged with recruiting a diverse membership and coordinating publicity and communication, among other duties. My goal as M&E Chair is to ensure that diversity is understood to encompass identity, working conditions and locations, and scholarly approaches and interests, and to recruit a diverse membership in part by continuing the work of making participation materially possible for graduate students, contingent faculty, and scholars without institutional affiliations and resources. I would also like to see MSA establish and strengthen ties with labor organizers, with area studies and comparative literature organizations (ACLA, NAIS, SALA), and with organizations devoted to the study of adjacent/overlapping periods (INCS, NAVSA, C19) in order to continue to de-center white and western artists in our ongoing explorations of what modernism was and what modernist studies will look like in the coming years. These issues are central to my scholarship, which explores how poetic forms were racialized inside and outside the academy in the early twentieth century. My publications include articles on free verse as a settler colonial tool (Literature Compass); on the canonization of Walt Whitman (edited volume Critical Rhythm); and on the New Poetry as a white racial formation (Modernism/modernity).