Candidates: MSA Special Election 2023

Standing for: Vice Program Chair

    • Scott Challener
    • Name: Scott Challener
    • Candidate Statement:
      Scott Challener Assistant Professor, English and Foreign Languages, Hampton University After graduating from Rutgers, I worked for two years at William & Mary as a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and English. I currently serve as acting Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Hampton University. In both positions, I've helped to plan a range of events, including visiting talks with scholars and poet-scholars and events featuring celebrated actors. At W&M, I collaborated with graduate workers to expand the Union and served as a faculty lead on a university-wide initiative to diversify the curriculum. I also collaborated with librarians to build the University's first Latinx Special Collection. At Hampton, I serve as managing editor of the Hampton Renaissance, a student-run journal of the arts. I've participated in the MSA annual conference on-and-off again since 2012. My scholarly work on modernism ranges from writing on Oliverio Girondo, Langston Hughes, and Jack Spicer to forthcoming work on teaching the Mexican Revolution in the American Lit survey and Wallace Stevens and racemaking. I am a 2023 Virginia Humanities HBCU Scholars Fellow. I value openness and curiosity. All together, I think my experiences will make me an effective Vice Program Chair. You can learn more about my work here https://hcommons.org/members/schallen/ and follow me on Twitter @ScottChallener.
    • Matthew Levay
    • Name: Matthew Levay
    • Candidate Statement:
      Matthew Levay Associate Professor of English, Idaho State University MSA Chicago (2005) was my first conference, and the organization has been my intellectual home ever since. Given my position at a rural, regional public university, I know how vital the annual conference is for fostering community in challenging and isolating times. I would be honored to serve as the Vice Program Chair, and to help make the conference as inclusive, accessible, safe, and invigorating an experience as it can be, particularly for scholars from underrepresented groups. In recent years I’ve worked to shepherd modernist scholarship toward publication; I am Co-Editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and I sit on the PMLA Advisory Committee. I am also committed to supporting graduate students, both locally (as my department’s DGS, I host a virtual roundtable series on professionalization and access-oriented institutions) and beyond (I led a workshop on “Reimagining the Dissertation” at the MLA Virtual Summit on the Future of Doctoral Education). My research centers on modernism and popular forms (genre fiction, comics, periodicals), and I am committed to an annual conference that is: fundamentally interdisciplinary; deeply engaged with scholarship on race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability; and dedicated to access and representation for modernists in diverse positions across the globe. Website matthewlevay.com Representative Publications “Little Tommy Lost and the Anachronistic Comic,” in Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture, ed. Jonathan Najarian (University Press of Mississippi, scheduled for publication in January 2024) “Modernism in Comics,” essay cluster edited for Modernism/modernity Print Plus (scheduled for publication in Summer/Fall 2023) Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge University Press, 2019) “Modernism’s Opposite: John Galsworthy and the Novel Series,” Modernism/modernity 26.3 (September 2019): 543-562
    • Ella Ophir
    • Name: Ella Ophir
    • Candidate Statement:
      Ella Ophir Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan I have been a member of the MSA since 1999, have attended ten of the conferences, and have organized two panels, one seminar, and one roundtable. I have a good sense of the Association’s history and culture, at least from the perspective of a regular conference-goer and reader of Modernism/modernity and M/m Print Plus. I have some experience (though it has been a while) serving on local organizing committees for conferences hosted at the University of Saskatchewan, one in 2008 (on orality and writing) and, in 2012, the International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Duties for both included vetting submissions and organizing panels, as well as logistics and coordination. Major administrative experience includes serving as Chair of my department’s Undergraduate Committee since July 2019 (my term concludes at the end of June 2024), and as member, then Chair, of the College of Arts & Science Academic Programs Committee (BA, BFA, BMus), which reviews all proposals for new courses and programs, and program changes, for those three degree types. I would be pleased to make a more direct contribution to the organization and conference that has been so central to my writing and teaching, as major source of connections, ideas, and inspiration over the years. I will be on sabbatical July to December 2024, so the timing is right too, for what would be my first conference as Program Chair.