Elizabeth Evans

Candidate statement

I am Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University, in Detroit. I’m the author of Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge 2019), which examines gendered identities and transitional spaces in texts by writers who are metropolitan and colonial, realist and experimental. I’m now completing a computational analysis of two centuries of British cultural geography across a corpus of 20,000 digitized novels. My current book project blends traditional literary and computational methodologies in its study of airplanes and aerial views. I have published (or have articles forthcoming) in Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, Literature Compass, and Cultural Analytics. I’m also the coeditor of Woolf and the City and Book Review Editor of the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. I have participated in nearly every MSA conference since 2002, when I was the graduate student coordinator for the meeting in Madison – the first of several conferences I’ve helped to organize. I have taught at a range of institutions, from large state universities to small branch campuses to private universities. Many of those years I was off the tenure track and shouldering a higher teaching load with more limited resources. I believe my background with varied universities and academic ranks have prepared me to better serve MSA’s diverse membership. MSA has recently made significant improvements toward recognizing and representing members working in precarity. As Program Chair, I would continue these efforts and work for better integration of members with diverse ranks and affiliations.