Candidates: MSA 2020 ELECTION

Standing for: 2nd Vice President

    • Name: Amy Clukey
    • Candidate Statement:
      As second vice president, I would continue the efforts of our current president and board to diversify MSA, make the conference more accessible, and respond to the challenges posed to our work by the job market, shrinking budgets, and attacks on the humanities. I would also strive to make the conference more welcoming for marginalized scholars, graduate students, early career scholars, non-tenure track scholars, “alt-ac” scholars, and scholars from a wider range of institutions, such as community colleges, liberal arts colleges, directional universities, and university presses. With Jonathan Goldman, I am co-organizing a stream, “Teaching Modernism and Activism in an Age of White Supremacy” for MSA Brooklyn. I have also worked for many years within the Society for the Study of Southern Literature to create inclusive spaces and acknowledge the many forms of labor we now undertake as scholars, writers, teachers, etc. These issues are complex and there are no simple solutions. However, there are concrete actions MSA might be able to implement fairly quickly to meet the needs of its membership, including 1) assembling a standing committee on race and inclusion, 2) developing a caucus for emerging scholars that has the power to undertake its own initiatives and visibility on social media and the conference program, 3) increasing transparency within the organization, especially between the board and the membership at large, 4) hosting sessions with the membership to discuss the state of the organization and the field, 5) lowering registration rates for non-tenure track scholars and, if feasible, eliminating registration fees for graduate students, 6) collaborating with other academic organizations on sessions, 7) making the board more representative of the membership; and 8) working to make the conference as accessible and as affordable as possible, particularly with regard to the cost of hotels and host cities. My CV and publications can be found online at https://louisville.academia.edu/AmyClukey and https://louisville.edu/english/people/current-faculty-new/amy-clukey.

Standing for: Contingent Faculty Representative

    • Name: Emily Bloom
    • Candidate Statement:
      I recognize that people work in contingent positions for a variety of reasons and that there is no single experience of job precarity; however, scholars in contingent positions face common challenges and professional organizations like the Modernist Studies Association are in a unique position to support these members. I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, but I have spent time on many different branches of the academic system both on and off the tenure track, in visiting and adjunct positions, as well as working for the last three years in a staff position supporting postdoctoral fellows. I have benefitted greatly from my involvement with the MSA, winning the First Book Prize while in a one-year visiting position and receiving an MSA Research Travel Grant at a time when I had no institutional research funding. Job scarcity is the number one issue affecting our profession right now and needs to be at the forefront of all of our decisions as a professional organization. Supporting contingent faculty is something very tangible that the MSA can do to help address the current job crisis. The introduction of a Board position for contingent faculty is a step in the right direction, and, if elected to the Board, I would use this position to push that the MSA provide job and publication mentorship, financial support towards research travel and conference attendance, and political advocacy for contingent faculty.
    • Name: John Hoffmann
    • Candidate Statement:
      John Hoffmann has held academic positions that have prepared him to represent a range of contingent faculty. Since receiving his PhD in 2018, he has adjuncted at the University of Marburg, worked on contracts with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and he currently holds a three-year post-doctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation, which will commence in September. His articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, diacritics, and Film History, and he has an article forthcoming in New Literary History, “The Volk against Fascism: Socialist Realism and the Aesthetics of Expressionism.” In addition to organizing panels for two MSA conferences, he has twice received MSA research grants. If modernist studies is to survive, and thrive, amid the dearth of tenure-track jobs, it will require supporting contingent faculty who wish to devote their careers to modernism. To that end, the contingent faculty representative must lead a conversation about how precariousness affects our discipline––not just as a fact of the market, but as an intellectual challenge. Roundtables like “Modernism after Expansion” or “Contingent Modernism” would be a start. The representative must also encourage conference participation among contingent faculty, whether by advocating for travel grants or reduced fees.
    • Name: Megan Minarich
    • Candidate Statement:
      I have been a member of MSA since 2008. I have participated in six of the annual MSA conferences since that time through both the seminar and traditional panel formats. My training is as an Americanist, although I have also published on Arnold Bennett and 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: I examine how film’s visual rhetoric shapes and is shaped by narrative theory as well as legal, scientific, and feminist discourses. I also have an article on the film Leave Her to Heaven’s censorship history under review with Feminist Media Histories. Beyond my individual scholarship, my ability to work with colleagues from other institutions is demonstrated by my current collaborative, multi-institutional research study on STEM tutor metacognition as well as my service to the Southeastern Writing Center Association as At-Large Representative and Awards Chair. In addition to these credentials, I am an active modernist scholar and educator who has never been on the tenure track. Since obtaining my doctoral degree in 2014, I have held the positions of lecturer, Mellon postdoctoral fellow, and writing and tutoring center assistant director, none of which are tenure track faculty positions. Yet, during this time, I have forwarded an active scholarly agenda relative to both my disciplinary training as well as my peer learning research. As Contingent Faculty Representative, my goals are threefold: 1) Act as a voice for my fellow contingent, non-TT modernists: I will represent other contingent scholars from 2- and 4-year institutions and relay their needs and concerns to MSA leadership. I will focus on helping the MSA be inclusive of these unique viewpoints. 2) Increase awareness of non-TT scholars and their work: I have found too often that colleagues erroneously assume those with non-TT positions do not actively work to further their own scholarship via conferences and publications. I challenge this view, and I will work to make non-TT modernists’ disciplinary work and teaching more visible. 3) Increase support for non-TT scholars and their work: While visibility is crucial for contingent and non-TT colleagues, we need support, both structural and financial, to continue our work as modernists. I personally benefitted from the MSA’s travel grant in 2018; this grant helped offset personal out-of-pocket conference expenses. I will advocate for more avenues of support. I believe that when the MSA is actively inclusive of contingent and non-TT faculty, especially during this time of widespread precarity, this inclusivity benefits not only these members of the MSA, but all members and our field as a whole. “Arnold Bennett’s Moving Pictures: Early Filmic Vision in Anna of the Five Towns.” Studies in the Novel (Fall 2019: Vol. 51, No. 3). “#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. “Coding Abortion: The Production Code Administration, Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and the Visual Rhetoric of Choice.” (Under Review with Feminist Media Histories, selected for special issue on Embodiment)

Standing for: Graduate Student Representative

    • Name: Aaren Pastor
    • Candidate Statement:
      I entered graduate school as a modernist and will leave graduate school a modernist, mostly because of the sartorial inspiration that a gathering of modernist studies scholars brings. As I progress towards dissertation completion, the anxiety about “the market” that has been expressed at recent MSAs by graduate students resonates with me. If elected to the position of Grad Studies Representative, I would be interested in exploring how MSA cultivates the development of, and support for, graduate students, especially at our annual yearly conference (for instance, the pre-conference workshop on graduate life and the pub night at MSA 2019). As a dual-title PhD candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State, I bring a set of interdisciplinary methods and approaches to my dissertation, which uses the example of Georgian-Armenian mystic G.I.Gurdjieff’s system of ideas, called The Work, to trace out the explorations of selfhood undertaken by his followers and detractors, among them Jean Toomer and Katherine Mansfield. This dissertation contributes to the renewed conversation in modernist studies about the relationship between modernism and religion, spirituality, and the occult, as well as interest in the construction of alternative intellectual histories. I have been an active member of Penn State’s Modernist Studies Workshop since 2016 and have worked to bring at least two modernist scholars a year to campus for lectures and seminars. I have been awarded grants to pursue research on Ernest Hemingway and Jean Toomer and was awarded an MSA travel conference grant in 2019. Currently, I have a piece on Katherine Mansfield and Māori animism under review for a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies and have published in Feminist Review.
    • Name: Annie Strausa
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am a second year Ph.D. student in English Literature based primarily at the University of Bristol. My current project examines sensory and affective features of twentieth century women’s writing. Focusing on Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison and Gloria Naylor, this is rooted in modernist concerns and contexts because it casts Naylor as an inheritor of female modernisms. Naylor’s writing, it also argues, opens up important new ways of understanding race-gender relations in modernist writing by white women. If accepted, I will present some of my ideas to the MSA community as part of a panel at Brooklyn 2020 in October. This demonstrates my commitment to Modernist Studies and to the MSA. However, in its expansion of modernism’s perimeters, my work also coheres with the MSA’s dedication to inclusivity and internationalism. These values largely inform my vision for the Graduate Student Representative role too. My main aim in this position will be to raise the profile of the MSA as a body that can benefit students. Via increased social media activity and by reaching out directly to universities, I will establish a supportive student network. As well as increasing effective dissemination of information about MSA events and publications to students, through this I will organise training days and reading groups tailored to student needs. I am especially keen to organise online work-in-progress sessions. In doing so, I will help other committee members to expand the MSA community and move modernist studies forward. My experience of managing social media, mailing lists, conferences and reading groups for the ‘Gender and Sexuality’ research cluster (attached to my funding body) will ensure success in this.
    • Name: David Young
    • Candidate Statement:
      I envision this position with the Modernist Studies Association as one that advocates for graduate student members of the organization. I would like to see the MSA make a commitment to more graduate student inclusion—especially those from underrepresented communities and small programs—at the annual conference including doing away with “panels composed entirely of graduate students are less likely to be accepted” language in CFPs, more graduate student focused seminars/workshops on the profession and modernism’s role in the profession, and how to engage in more public facing scholarship. I would, however, prefer to hear from other graduate student members of MSA to discover what they want and need from the organization, taking those requests to the board, and begin to implement those deemed viable at future conference or through electronic means, including a graduate student portal of some kind on MSA websites. I have participated in MSA seminars in Pittsburgh, Pasadena, and Columbus and am currently working on a dissertation that explores modernist authors engagement with fascist thought. I also continue to use modernist texts in my classrooms, incorporating them in literature and composition course to help students understand modernism’s lasting importance on contemporary culture. I have served on several committees at my graduate institution, including VP of the English Graduate Organization, in which I acted as a liaison between faculty and graduate students, including attending monthly faculty meetings.

Standing for: Membership and Elections Chair

    • Name: 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).
    • Name: Sunny Stalter-Pace
    • Candidate Statement:
      I have been a member of MSA since 2004. I’ve attended the annual conference nine times, both in the United States and internationally. Social media back channels have been an invaluable contribution to my professional development during the years when I’ve been unable to attend. I hope to foster membership and engagement among all scholars of modernism. I am particularly interested in listening to graduate students, adjunct/contingent/precarious faculty, and scholars of color. My research and teaching focus on American theater and popular performance, but my most productive scholarly conversations have taken place with MSA members who work across a wide variety of genres, national and transnational traditions, and disciplines.

Standing for: Program Chair

    • Name: 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.