Candidates: MSA Elections 2023

Standing for: 2nd Vice President

    • Melissa Bradshaw
    • Name: Melissa Bradshaw
    • Candidate Statement:
      Senior Lecturer, English, Loyola University Chicago MSA has been my primary conference for over two decades, a source of professional and intellectual support, inspiration, and friendship. As second vice president I would bring to the association a career-long commitment to a robust, interdisciplinary understanding of modernism. I would also bring the perspective of a contingent faculty member who has sustained a vigorous research program without formal institutional support. MSA has played an important role in my flourishing on the margins of the academy, keeping me grounded in an intellectual community of peers and mentors. Importantly, it has changed the way I approach my scholarship, pushing me to explore new modalities for my research through workshops and a tuition scholarship to a week-long Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I credit my current project, an NEH-Mellon funded digital critical edition of Amy Lowell’s letters almost entirely to the association. I have been heartened to see MSA’s efforts to diversify its membership, including concerted efforts to reach out both to scholars struggling with precarity, and to scholars whose careers have not followed traditional academic paths. I look forward to developing programming and workshops that help a broader group of early 20th century scholars see MSA as an intellectual home. As a resourceful administrator and a careful shepherd of resources, I would be a valuable board member during this critical moment for MSA, as we work to stay afloat in a challenging post pandemic financial situation and elevant in a shifting academic landscape. Website and Sample publications: melissabradshaw.org “Miss Lowell Regrets,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus (October 12, 2022), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/bradshaw-miss-lowell-regrets Amy Lowell: Diva Poet. Ashgate Press, December 2011. Winner of the MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars, 2011. “Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity.” Women Making Modernism. Ed. Erica Delsandro. University Press of Florida, 2020, 157-173. “The Apotheosis of Edith”: Artifice and Noblesse Oblige in Cecil Beaton’s Portraits of the Sitwell Siblings.” The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell. Ed. Allan Pero and Gyllian Phillips. University Press of Florida, 2017, 54-74
    • Amanda Golden
    • Name: Amanda Golden
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Professor of English, New York Institute of Technology As Second Vice President, I would take an active role in shaping the Modernist Studies Association’s future as a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive organization. I bring experience as co-chair of the local organizing committee for the 2023 Brooklyn Conference, postponed from 2020. I also served on the Book Prize Committee for Editions, Anthologies, and Collections in 2021 and on the Program Committee three times. Since 2004, I have been a frequent presenter and organizer of sessions at MSA conferences. My scholarship as an Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology has focused on modernism and twentieth-century literature. In 2020, I published the monograph Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets. I am currently co-editing The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a new, scholarly, annotated edition of Plath’s Collected Poems, with Karen V. Kukil, for Faber & Faber (2025) and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additionally, I have held leadership and advisory roles in modernist organizations. I am Vice President of the International Virginia Woolf Society (2021-3), on the International Advisory Board of the Modernist Archives and Publishing Project (MAPP), and on the Editorial Board of Bloomsbury Academic’s Modernist Archives Series. Website: Agoldenphd.com Publications: Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets. Monograph. Routledge, 2020 (hardcover); 2022 (paperback). Editor, Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities Cluster, Feminist Modernist Studies 1.3 (October 2018). The issue was among those for which the journal received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best New Journal. “Textbook Greek: Thoby Stephen in Jacob’s Room.” Woolf Studies Annual 23 (2017): 83-108. “John Berryman at Midcentury: Annotating Ezra Pound and Teaching Modernism.” Modernism/modernity 21.2 (Apr. 2014): 507-28.

Standing for: Contingent Faculty Representative

    • Megan Minarich
    • Name: Megan Minarich
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Director of the Writing Studio & Tutoring Services and Affiliated Faculty in Cinema & Media Arts, Vanderbilt University I have been an MSA member since 2008 and have participated in eight MSA conferences. Although primarily an Americanist, I also research and publish on British modernism. Disciplinarily, I work in both English and film studies; my scholarship centers around American modernist literature, visual culture, and early through classical Hollywood cinema. My current in-progress book manuscript focuses on representations of women’s reproductive choice in Hollywood cinema between 1915 and 1968, and I have published on modernist cinema, feminism, and reproductive rights. I am an active modernist scholar and educator who has never been on the tenure track. As Contingent Faculty Representative, my goals are threefold: 1. Act as a voice for my fellow contingent, non-TT modernists and continue to foster inclusion of their contributions and viewpoints 2. Increase awareness of non-TT scholars and their work both inside and outside of the MSA conference 3. Expand avenues of structural and financial support for non-TT scholars I believe that when the MSA is actively inclusive of contingent and non-TT faculty, especially during this prolonged time of widespread precarity worsened by the pandemic, this inclusivity benefits not only these vital members of the MSA, but all members and our field as a whole. Publications list: “Abortion’s Coded Visibility: The Failed Censorship and Box Office Success of Leave Her to Heaven.” Feminist Media Histories (November 2020: Vol. 6, No. 4), Embodiment II: Habitation issue. “#DistractinglySexy: The ‘Trouble with Girls’ in Men in White (1934) and the Need for Narrative Possibility” Feminist Modernist Studies (October 2019: Vol. 2, No. 3). Part of Special Conference Cluster: Modernist #MeToo and the Working Woman essay cluster. “Arnold Bennett’s Moving Pictures: Early Filmic Vision in Anna of the Five Towns.” Studies in the Novel (Fall 2019: Vol. 51, No. 3
    • Kate Schnur
    • Name: Kate Schnur
    • Candidate Statement:
      Adjunct Assistant Professor, CUNY Queens College Kate Schnur has been an active member of the MSA Contingent Faculty Caucus since its inception. She was one the organizers of two of the Caucus’s workshops devoted to labor solidarity and advocacy for contingent faculty: the first of which took place as a part of the Between the Acts digital caucus in the spring of 2022 and the second in MSA Portland this past fall. These two workshops produced the Advocacy Handbook now available on the MSA website. Her research focuses on how modernist literature draws upon contemporaneous medical theories of gender and sexuality. Her current book project, Knowledge Problems: Sex and Treatment in Modernist Genre studies how modernist authors’ experimentation with genre is dictated by their engagements with medical knowledge and theories of treatment, particularly those pertaining to pregnant and sexualized bodies. As an adjunct faculty member, she is invested in maintaining the caucus’s devotion to supporting the labor of contingent faculty as researchers and teachers within the spaces of MSA and their home institutions. Publications: “Mechanical Labor and Fleshy Births: Maternal Resistance in Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams,” William Carlos Williams Review, 37:1 (January 2020) “The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster: Medicine, the Fantastic Body, and Ideological Abuse in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder,” The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, ed. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares, Routledge, 2019. ‘“I Found Another to Admire’: The Thing of the Female Body in William Carlos Williams’ Medical Narratives,” William Carlos Williams Review 33: 1-2, January 2017
    • Emily Schuck
    • Name: Emily Schuck
    • Candidate Statement:
      Adjunct Instructor, University of La Verne; ABD, Claremont Graduate University As an adjunct instructor for nearly a decade while balancing demands as a PhD candidate, I understand the struggles that face contingent faculty, and how they intersect with graduate-student instructors. Throughout my academic career, I have experienced supportive and detrimental environments for contingent faculty and how these structures affect performance of our demographic. Providing support for this population promises to be rewarding work; direct infrastructure is needed to diversify the scholarly community and offer strength to one of the most vulnerable demographics in our field. As the contingent faculty representative, I will build and expand on previous work: the contingent faculty caucus, a panel/workshop at the conference, a spring remote event, and updating the advocacy handbook; all would be focused on practical skills and tools—running a successful writing group, encouraging networking groups year-round, working to increase financial access through internal funding, and resources for approaching institutional departments for additional funding. I will increase outreach through social media and direct communication to university departments. Addressing precarity benefits the overall quality of research and teaching across the discipline. My experiences—from adjunct faculty and graduate-student instructor to program administrator and fundraiser—make me an ideal candidate for the CFR at MSA.

Standing for: Membership and Elections Chair

    • Rochelle Rives
    • Name: Rochelle Rives
    • Candidate Statement:
      Professor, Department of English, Borough of Manhattan Community College/City University I am Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. My second book, The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression is forthcoming in Spring 2024 from the Studies in Modernism Series at Johns Hopkins University Press. My first book,Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject (Palgrave 2012) has galvanized a renewed interest in the politics and aesthetics of “impersonality” in modernist studies, and my work on faces, modern expression, and physiognomy has appeared in PMLA, Journal of Modern Literature, and Criticism. My other professional interests (besides teaching) include faculty (especially mid-career) mentoring, as well as tenure and promotion mentoring. I currently mentor a cohort of new lecturers across CUNY on both professional and pedagogical development. As a newly appointed member of the board of directors of the CUNY Research Foundation and the Faculty Advisory Committee to that board, I am very interested in the meaning of “research” for faculty at community colleges and at high teaching load institutions. I hope this experience regarding faculty engagement (and my knowledge of the barriers to it) to the MSA Board
    • Karen Weingarten
    • Name: Karen Weingarten
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York I’m running as the Membership and Elections Chair because I value how the Modernist Studies Association has increasingly paid attention to labor conditions and how they intersect with academic research in modernism and twentieth-century studies increasingly, I see the MSA Conference creating spaces for new (and critical) conversations about the adjunctification of the university, the influence of prestige in academia, and teaching twentieth-century literature, while continuing to be a place where new ideas about modernism/ modernist studies are shared. Most recently, I’ve presented on panels at the MSA about adjunct labor and modernist maternity. The connections I made on the latter panel led us to organize a special issue for a journal. I’d like to see the MSA and its annual conference continue to be a resource for engaging the most pressing issues of our profession and bringing modernist and twentieth-century scholars in dialogue. I would bring to the position my administrative experience chairing my large department, and my increasing involvement with my faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress. As the Elections Chair, I promise to be fair, transparent, and communicative, and in my role as Membership Chair, I hope to continue bringing attention to exciting new work in the field through the organization’s social media and listserv.
    • Aimee Wilson
    • Name: Aimee Wilson
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Professor, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas I am Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. I have been a member of the Modernist Studies Association since 2008. My research applies feminist and queer lenses to literary depictions of pregnancy, birth control, abortion, and other reproductive topics. I have also written about harassment and sexual abuse as it relates to modernism. My essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Genre, and The Space Between journal, among other venues. My research focus and my position in a WGSS department keep issues of inequity at the forefront of my mind at all times. I acknowledge the fact that sexism, racism, ableism, antisemitism, colonialism, and precarity create patterns of systemic oppression, and that these patterns structure academia. If elected, I would use this awareness to guide my approach to the Membership and Elections Chair position. My goal would be to continue and expand the MSA’s efforts to diversify the membership and to foster conversations about ways to improve the diversity – broadly understood – of our membership. Relevant publications: Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939. SUNY Press. In production. Anticipated publication Dec. 2023. “We Need a Movement, Not Just a Moment: Modernism and Me Too.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus special issue on “#MeToo, Eliot, & Modernist Scholarship,” edited by Megan Quigley, vol. 5, cycle 2, 2020. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. “Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies special issue on “Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism,” edited by Anne Fernald, vol. 59, no. 2, 2013, pp. 440-60