Candidates: 2025 Modernist Studies Association Elections

Standing for: 2nd Vice President

    • Robert Higney
    • Name: Robert Higney
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Professor, Department of English, City College of New York, CUNY In the role of Second Vice President, I would focus on sustaining and growing the MSA’s annual conference, our international presence, and innovative interdisciplinary programming like the SIGs. I would like to continue the work done in recent years to support the involvement of scholars from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and positions in the profession—including graduate students—with the goal of keeping MSA the welcoming organization that I’ve known it to be since I attended my first conference in Montreal in 2009. I have been a frequent presenter and session organizer, and bring my experience as a member of the local committee for the Brooklyn conference in 2023, where I took the lead in assembling the conference’s book exhibit. At my home institution, the City College of New York, CUNY, I teach global modernism, the history of the novel, and contemporary fiction. In 2022, I published Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel (UVA Press); an essay on histories of close reading, “From the English School to the Archive,” recently appeared in symplokē. I’ve been successful in a variety of administrative roles: as deputy chair of my department, co-chair of our campus strategic planning process, on the executive committee of our Faculty Senate, and as director of a variety of departmental programs and advisor to student groups. My faculty page may be found here: https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/profiles/robert-higney
    • Jesse Wolfe
    • Name: Jesse Wolfe
    • Candidate Statement:
      A tenured professor at CSU Stanislaus, I have authored two books rooted in modernism— especially the Bloomsbury Group—that explore intimacy from Victorian through contemporary times. My first book argues that a crisis in intimate relations was a generative influence on modern philosophy and literature. Two forms of tension—between theories of sexual selfhood on the one hand, and attitudes toward social mores on the other hand—structure six major texts. Virginia Woolf and others articulate anti-essentialist accommodations to marriage and monogamy, whereas E. M. Forster and others articulate essentialist rejections of marriage. Funded by a nine-month full-time NEH grant, my second book examines how six contemporary novels complicate Jean Francois Lyotard’s claims about “incredulity toward metanarrative.” They are enriched, I argue, by an unarticulated attachment to the idea of historical progress. They see the fruits of progress as much in improved intimate relations as in an improved social order; they wonder whether such loves will be more common in the future; and, aware of their literary-historical roots, they respond to Bloomsburian precedents. On my home campus I am the organizer of a series, “Conversations with Authors and Artists,” in which I interview faculty about their creative and scholarly work. Publications “Bloomsbury, Friendship, and Love.” The Cambridge History of the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan. 6,000 words. Expected publication: October 2025. Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form after Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History. Bloomsbury Academic Press. January 2023. 258 pp. Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge UP. July 2011. 272 pp. “The Sane Woman in the Attic: Sexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs Dalloway.” Modern Fiction Studies 51:1 (Spring 2005): 34-59.

Standing for: Contingent Faculty Representative

    • Elysia Balavage
    • Name: Elysia Balavage
    • Candidate Statement:
      Anisfield-Wolf Fellow, Case Western Reserve University Candidate Statement: One way or another, precarity is going to haunt most of us into the rather indefinite future. As someone who has been a contingent faculty member for the past six years, my career bifurcated between three years as a lecturer at UNC-Greensboro and another three as a Case Western Reserve University teaching fellow, I understand the persistent needs of precarious laborers. Balancing high teaching loads, research, administrative work, short-term contracts, and (dare I say) mental and emotional health is an exercise in compulsory dexterity. I am committed to advocating for contingent faculty, as my talks on both the “New Precarity” panel at MSA 2024 and the CCIS-sponsored Zoom roundtable, “The New Precarity: A Manifesto in the Making” demonstrate. I am also no stranger to coordinating and creating content such as guest lectures, panels, and seminars. For MSA conferences, I have organized two panels and one peer seminar over the past few years. At my current institution, I have arranged guest lectures for the campus community, facilitated symposia, and participated on university committees. As it stands, most of the MSA membership are also members of the precariat, and I’d be grateful to represent us. There is certainly no shortage of work to do. Publications: “Class and Consumption: George Orwell and the Desecration of Bread in The Road to Wigan Pier.” English Studies, 106.2 (January 2025), 168–184. “‘Nothingness in All Directions’: Modernism, Sci-Fi, and Radiant Space.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, Volume 6, Cycle 3 (16 May 2022). “Divinity and Nihilism in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision.” The Review of English Studies, 73.310 (June 2022), 568-581. “Illumination, Transformation, and Nihilism: T. S. Eliot’s Empty Spaces.” Journal of Modern Literature, 44.3 (Spring 2021), 35-48.
    • Nissa Cannon
    • Name: Nissa Cannon
    • Candidate Statement:
      I hold a position of privileged precarity—I have a measure of job security at a prestigious institution, but am denied many of the benefits and participation in shared governance of a tenure-line faculty member. I would be honored to use this relative privilege to advocate for contingent scholars within the MSA, supporting the many manifestations contingency takes (in fact, the current Contingent Faculty Representative and I have organized a workshop on just this topic of better understanding and advocating for contingency’s heterogeneous forms that we hope to lead at this autumn’s MSA). I have been a member of the MSA since 2014, and an active participant in the Contingent Faculty Caucus since its foundation. My own research focuses on modernist mobility and material culture. I am currently writing a book on transatlantic literature and the interwar infrastructure of expatriation, and my scholarship has appeared in publications including Modernism/modernity’s Print+, Cultural History, and ELN (see nissaren.wordpress.com for details). I am the book reviews editor for the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and a member of the Hemingway Review blog’s advisory board, and welcome the opportunity to serve the profession as part of the MSA board.
    • Sean Weidman
    • Name: Sean Weidman
    • Candidate Statement:
      Visiting Assistant Professor Department of English University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire Statement of Qualifications My teaching and research generally orbit global Anglomodernist literatures, empire and anti/coloniality, affect and coterie power, and the politics of welcoming; but my work as a teacher-scholar-administrator has always been inextricable from precarity and contingency. After earning a PhD in English from Penn State in 2021, I served for a year as a postdoc/lecturer, and then another year as a one-year SLAC VAP, and now as a term-limited VAP at a public regional university. Like many of MSA’s contingent workers, my pedagogy, scholarship, and service- labors have never not been encircled by overlapping regimes of extraction, exploitation, and extinction. We are all of us contingent now, increasingly linked by the adjunctified, corporatized, neoliberal alignments of US higher education, but some of us are more insecure than others. My hope in this position, as an advocate for my contingent colleagues and peers—we forced insecure who increasingly represent the MSA’s largest group of teachers, scholars, and practitioners—is to bring another precarious aperture to bear on the future of modernist studies, and to insist that our leaders support fragile lives and labors as seriously, with an equitable view of resources and material access, as we treat our privileged and secure. Abbreviated List of Publications “‘A Necessity of Smallness’: Dorothy Day’s Modernist Hospitality.” Twentieth- Century Literature. (Forthcoming, Summer 2025) “Modernism and Gender at the Limits of Stylometry.” Co-authored with Aaren Pastor. Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 4, 2022. “Suspended Affect and Harlem Renaissance Poetics.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 28, no. 4, 2022, pp. 637-659. “Of Hospitality and Hosting: Tracing Colonial Haunting in W.B. Yeats.” English Literary History, vol. 85, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1025-1063.

Standing for: Treasurer

    • Jordan Brower
    • Name: Jordan Brower
    • Candidate Statement:
      I’m currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where I teach film and media studies. I’ve belonged to the MSA since 2013, when, as a graduate student, I attended the annual conference hosted by the University of Sussex. There, I presented the earliest version of arguments central to my dissertation and, thus, to my first book, Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System (Cambridge UP, 2024). The MSA has provided me with occasions to develop ideas with people who have become some of my most trusted intellectual correspondents, most recently through the Film Studies special interest group.Even as I have begun work on the contemporary film and television industries in the United States, my orientation remains rooted in modernist studies. For instance, my forthcoming essay “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” argues that the producer-distributor devised a corporate strategy in part based on films self-consciously presented as inheritors of the modernist bildungsroman. I could not have conceived such an argument without the institutional support of the MSA, and I would be grateful for the chance to pay down my debts, however partially.
    • John Hoffman
    • Name: John Hoffman
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Chapman University. My first book Modernism, Aesthetics and Anthropology was published by Cambridge University Press earlier this year, and I've published articles in Modernism/modernity, Film History, New Literary History and elsewhere. I’m the founder and co-organizer, with Hayley O'Malley, of the Film Studies SIG at the MSA, which is now over 100 members strong and growing. Through my work for the SIG, I've collaborated with the board on conference programming and served on the peer-review committee for the past two conferences. Recently, we've teamed up with the Grad Student Rep to create a mentoring program for graduate students under the auspices of the SIGs. Besides these activities for the MSA, I was principal investigator for a large, multi-year grant from the German Research Foundation, which prepared me well for the o'ice of treasurer. Budget oversight, personnel management, and attention to procedural detail in the Kafkaesque world of a German university were all part of my daily routine for the duration of the three- year grant. During that time, I also learned the ropes of working with accounting departments and other institutional actors such as conference hotels and vendors.
    • Stephanie Tavera
    • Name: Stephanie Tavera
    • Candidate Statement:
      Assistant Professor of English, Texas A&M University, Kingsville [Note: I am up for tenure this year, on August 1st, 2025.] Statement: I am what my colleagues at TAMUK (my home institution) call a “foundation builder”: I rebooted our Women’s and Gender Studies program. I launched our new Science & Cultural Studies program. I applied for – and secured – grant funding for both programs. I also launched an annual First-Author’s Celebration Roundtable at the Society for Utopian Studies conference, which has now become an annually featured colloquium in the Utopian Studies journal. While I have individually contributed to my fields of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women’s literature, medical humanities, and feminist disability studies through monographs, book editions, and scholarship, I also strongly believe in collaborating with others to creating safe spaces for students and colleagues to do the work. Often, creating those spaces means securing funding and managing budgets. I currently oversee two NEH-federal passthrough grants, funded by Humanities Texas and the Teagle Foundation. In addition to managing the budgets for these grants, and the academic programs they support, I have also twice organized the Society for Utopian Studies conference (once in Austin, TX, and once in Tulum, MX), and worked with the Treasurer to manage the conference budget, for which I broke-even or came in underbudget. Relevant Publications: (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture Series. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. [Specifically, chapters 4 & 5/the conclusion.] Co-authored introduction and co-edited, with K. Allison Hammer. The Plays of Angelina Weld Grimké. Wayne State University Press, 2028. Under contract. Chapter 6: “Save Me from the Waltz: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Trauma Cultures of Expat Paris.” American Writers in Paris: Then and Now. Ed. Ferdâ Asya. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. [Also, check out: Episode 177: Zelda Fitzgerald – Save Me the Waltz with Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast, hosted and produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. January 30, 2024. Listen here on Apple Podcasts. Transcript available here.] “The Rest of Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Expatriation, and the Tradition of Public Trauma Cultures.” Conversations: A Publication of the Margaret Fuller Society 6.1 (2025), https://margaretfullersociety.org/newsletter/. Accepted. [This covers material from Fuller to Edith Wharton to Djuna Barnes.] “Speculative Genealogies: Global Infertility and the Biopolitics of the Fertility Dystopia.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 40.1/2 (2023): 108-133. Website: https://tamuk.academia.edu/StephaniePeeblesTavera is up-to-date. (I haven’t updated my personal website, https://sptavera.com/, in two years, but it’s still there if you want to see it.)

Standing for: Vice Program Chair

    • Sarah Cornish
    • Name: Sarah Cornish
    • Candidate Statement:
      Professor of English and Department Chair, University of Northern Colorado Qualifications: In my capacity as the Director of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association and as a former board member of the Space Between Society, I have had the pleasure of developing conference programs from reviewing proposals for panels, workshops, seminars, and roundtables, soliciting participants for plenary panels, and vetting keynote speakers an visiting artists/authors. When designing conference programs, there are a few things I always keep at the forefront of scheduling decisions. It is important to me that 1) the program committee schedule panels and other activities in such a way that creates a throughline with attendees’ interests in mind, 2) if possible, that the program committee avoids inadvertently disenfranchising graduate students and early-career scholars by scheduling a panel of well-known scholars at the same time as less-well known scholars, and 3) that conference programs show a diverse, interdisciplinary, and inclusive selection of scholarship in modernist studies that highlights the range of field-changing work happening at every level of our profession. I value working collaboratively with the local organizers to ensure that a conference engages stakeholders across the organizing bodies as well as with the surrounding community. Publication Record: Please see my CV for my publication record, all of which is rooted in the study of culture and politics in the interwar and WWII period, and specifically on women writers and culture makers such as Elizabeth Hawes, Irmgard Keun, Marghanita Laski, and Mollie Panter- Downes.
    • Sookyoung Lee
    • Name: Sookyoung Lee
    • Candidate Statement:
      Associate Professor of English, St. Lawrence University I am running for the position of the Vice Program Chair of the Modernist Studies Association. As a member of the organizing committee of the MSA’s Special Interest Group on Modernism and the Environment, I help put together book discussions throughout the year and the roundtable and the workshop at the annual conference. The tasks involved in this role, including researching scholars’ works with collaborative endeavors in mind and recruiting scholars across a diversity of professional ranks and affiliations, provide a strong foundation for the Vice Program Chair’s work of coordinating and planning the program. My consistent engagement with the MSA community through attending and presenting work at the past three conferences, alongside my regular presentations at international associations for studies in modernism (SEM and MSIA), speaks to my familiarity with the field and the conference structure. The global and interdisciplinary perspective of my scholarship will be valuable for the review, assessment, and appropriate placement of submissions. My experience as a manuscript reviewer for the Edinburgh University Press directly translates to this work as well. Finally, my communication skills, particularly the generalist and public-facing orientation developed through my professional services on a university grant steering committee, will contribute to the effective composition and publicizing of the conference program. Thank you for your consideration.