Candidates: MSA Elections 2021 Ballot

Standing for: 2nd Vice President

    • Judith Brown
    • Name: Judith Brown
    • Candidate Statement:
      After a year of pandemic isolation, I’m very much interested in serving the MSA as 2nd vice president, contributing to the current board’s efforts to diversify its membership, and reducing or eliminating any obstacles to participation. Ongoing challenges face the MSA in addition to the zoom-fatigue created by covid-19, including the precarious nature of academic employment for graduate students and those with NTT positions. The executive team must find effective ways to hear from its constituencies, continue to strategize ways to mitigate their challenges, and to foster an innovative range of intellectual work. I’m committed to building on the MSA’s programming (such as the On or About series), and promoting an even stronger sense of inclusion and connection among its members. To that end, my priorities include developing a wider network of mentorship at all levels of the profession; ensuring material support for research and collaboration, especially for the MSA’s newest members; and empowering new and diverse voices in the organization through a campaign of personal messages and direct invitation. I’ve learned a great deal about management and recruitment since I first organized an MSA panel (2004), and in my 18 years at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I’ve served in a number of administrative roles, mentored graduate students, directed our undergraduate program, and organized an international symposium in India. I’ve also served as a reviewer for university presses, journals, and national fellowship organizations in both Canada and the US. My current interdisciplinary scholarship on global modernism has required me to cross borders, humble myself, and listen to unfamiliar voices. It engages colonial and postcolonial scholarship, in addition to the visual culture, aesthetic theory, and gender and sexuality studies that informed my first book. My essays have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, PMLA, ELH, Modernist Cultures, and collections such as A Handbook of Modernism Studies (ed. Rabaté) and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (eds. Walkowitz and Hayot). My c.v. is attached.
    • Octavio González
    • Name: Octavio González
    • Candidate Statement:
      As Second Vice President, I would support the ongoing efforts to diversify the Modernist Studies Association, at the level of programming, membership, and annual conference. For example, I support current 2nd VP Amy Clukey’s development, with Jonathan Goldman, of the stream dedicated to decolonizing modernist teaching (“Teaching Modernism and Activism in an Age of White Supremacy”). I’m also dedicated to continuing efforts to diversify the membership and conference, in terms of affordability and accessibility. One way to do this is to expand our dialogue with other leading associations, such as American Studies, to better align our programming schedules with theirs. Such coordination would allow scholars from more diverse fields to attend MSA’s conference, and also allow current members to be “brand ambassadors” of Modernism to those allied conferences. Another important effort I support is affordability for the annual conference, which the Pandemic has shown can be programmed in less carbon-intensive ways, such as teleconference opportunities. In order to support the ongoing decolonization and increased relevance of modernist studies, the Association must continue to expand access for graduate students, members of other Associations, and to scholars of color who may not consider the climate of modernist studies warm enough or diverse enough to make them feel welcome. In short, I will double the efforts of the Executive Board to advance the plans to expand and mobilize our Association, to do greater work to enable modernist studies to evolve and re-center itself on the diverse constituencies that make up the future of our field. My CV is available at https://wellesley.academia.edu/OctavioGonzalez/CurriculumVitae and publications are available at https://octaviogonzalez.academia.edu/
    • Louise Hornby
    • Name: Louise Hornby
    • Candidate Statement:
      If elected to be Second Vice-President, I would take the opportunity to devise ways that the MSA might reshape its work in the wake of catastrophe. I propose we think seriously about the following questions: whom does the organization serve and for whom is it useful? What good might the MSA do for scholars inside and outside the academy? How might the MSA attract scholars working in literatures not written in English or disciplines other than literary studies? These questions all point to the same answer: money. The MSA needs to become a public source of scholarly funding. Given the bleak realities of the academic job market and the dearth of jobs in modernist studies, we have to call into question the presumed instrumental role of the professional organization in forging networks and shaping the field. Rather than authorizing academic hierarchies, the MSA might reorient itself to follow and support the work of its members, present and future. After all, you don’t need a scholarly association to work on modernism, but you do need financial support (for research, symposia, and conference participation) in order to impact and diversify the field. Many scholars do not have access to university-based funding, which means that much important work remains unheard or undone. By providing significant funding for new scholars and new avenues of study, the MSA could come closer to meeting its long-standing goals of increasing diversity, interdisciplinarity, and international participation. My primary commitment to the association will be to work to raise these funds. I have been a member of the MSA since I was in graduate school, and I have participated in and organized panels and seminars for the annual conference, which has provided a critical sounding-board for my own work. My goal is to ensure that the MSA can serve its members similarly, no matter their work status, scholarly tradition, national literature field, or interdisciplinary archive. https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/hornby-louise/ Relevant Publications: “On the Verge of Tears,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Visualities Forum, Volume 5, Cycle 1 (2020); “Downwrong: The Pose of Tiredness,” Modern Fiction Studies Special Issue on Modernism and Disability, 65, no. 1 (2019), pp. 207-227; “Film’s Atmospheric Setting,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Cluster on Modernist Setting, vol. 3, cycle 1, (2018); Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Standing for: Chair, Interdisciplinary Approaches

    • Peter Lurie
    • Name: Peter Lurie
    • Candidate Statement:
      Dr Lurie is a long-standing member of the MSA, overseeing and contributing to film-and-literature panels. He is a genuinely interdisciplinary scholar of modernism, moving back and forth between literary and visual texts, especially photography, cinema, and more recently digital media. His first book, Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination, about the “film idea” in Faulkner’s modernism, became foundational for a wave of scholarship about Faulkner and visual culture. His second book, American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film, examines the ways film and literature provide oblique glimpses into America’s racial history and its evasions. Lurie’s current book project is Black Evanescence: Seeing Racial Difference from the Slave Narrative to Digital Media, is about the relations among Black visual and literary cultures. It’s a broad-sweeping project that begins with Frederick Douglass; discusses the visual aspect of literary modernism as it attends race; traces the long “film century” of Hollywood's mis-representation of Blackness; describes the 2009 film Precious and its protagonist’s own dual sense of vision across the digital divide; and ends with a distant reading of race and culture in contemporary cinema and public art. Dr Lurie is also an active member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a member of the MLA’s Screen Arts and Culture Forum Executive Committee. Four relevant publications: • Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination Johns Hopkins UP 2003. • American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film Oxford UP 2017. • “Richard Linklater [Special Section].” Film Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, pp. 34–72. Includes Lurie, “Digital Déjà vu: Cinephilia, Loss, and Medial Integrity in Linklater’s Before Trilogy.” Film Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, pp. 60–66 • “History’s Dark Markings: Faulkner and Film’s Racial Representation.” In: Matthews JT, ed. The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge University Press; 2015: 29-43.
    • Justus Nieland
    • Name: Justus Nieland
    • Candidate Statement:
      My scholarship and teaching in modernist studies have long been interdisciplinary. My first book, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Illinois, 2008), was a revisionist account of modernist affect in film and literary history, the visual arts, and performance studies. My most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minnesota, 2020) explores the film and media experiments of midcentury designers as part of a sweeping technical agenda of happiness during the Cold War. Bringing together modernist studies, film history, design and architectural history, and media studies, Happiness by Design turns to the designer as a privileged figure of interdisciplinary media practice, when tidy disciplinary boundaries were challenged by the postwar vogue for “communication.” My recent co-edited issue of Post45, “Midcentury Design Cultures,” extends some of the interdisciplinary impulses of Happiness by Design. My essay, “Container Culture,” describes the role of modernist design in the packaging empire and corporate humanism of the Container Corporation of America, offering a media history of the cardboard box. I am also co-editor of the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press, and wrote the David Lynch volume for that series.
    • Sunny Stalter-Pace
    • Name: Sunny Stalter-Pace
    • Candidate Statement:
      I have belonged to the Modernist Studies Association since 2004. I have attended the annual conference nine times, both in the United States and internationally. I would be honored to give back to this organization. Interdisciplinarity is the bedrock of my research, as well as my institutional and professional service. I was the longtime programmer of a film series at Auburn’s art museum, choosing movies in conjunction with their exhibits and inviting academic guest speakers to introduce them. I served as book review editor for Transfers, a mobility studies journal that draws on disciplines from social sciences to fine arts. In 2019, I received an SEC Visiting Faculty Travel Grant along with a colleague in Art History, which funded a meeting with fellow interdisciplinary modernist scholars at the University of Georgia. I want to foster conversation between the MSA and related scholarly and professional groups. Biographers International Organization, of which I am a member, would make an excellent partner for both member-focused and public-facing events. And in the era of modernism’s “global turn,” it is incumbent on me to engage with area studies organizations for non-Anglophone regions. I would also continue to plan conference activities at archives, exhibits, and other local sites. Relevant Publications: • Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance. Northwestern University Press, May 2020 • “The Precarity of Fluffy Ruffles: Reading a Progressive Era Comic Strip in the Age of #MeToo,” Feminist Modernist Studies 2.3 (2019): 314-322. • “Imitation Modernism: Gertrude Hoffman’s 'Russian' Ballets,” Modernism/modernity Print+ cluster, “Modernism on the World Stage” Volume 4, Cycle 3 (October 15, 2019). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/imitation-modernism • “Underground Theater: Theorizing Mobility through Modern Subway Dramas” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 5.3 (Winter 2015): 4-22.

Standing for: Chair, International Relations

    • Christos Hadjiyiannis
    • Name: Christos Hadjiyiannis
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus and Scientific Project Manager of a large, EU-funded project investigating the many afterlives of medieval arts and rituals, including in modern literature. I was previously Research Fellow in English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UT Austin and the Harry Ransom Research Center. My first book, Conservative Modernists (CUP, 2018), examined the different - sometimes surprising, sometimes contradictory - ways in which early modernist poetics are imbricated with Tory language and ideology. My current project, provisionally entitled Modern Martyrs, mounts the first examination of female martyrdom in British and North American modern literature from 1900 to date in the light of late antique and Byzantine hagiographical texts (written in Greek or Latin and dating from 100CE to 1500CE) that thematise the suffering of Christian women. I have published widely on modernism and, with Rachel Potter, I am editing The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics. I have organised several conferences and workshops and I am committed to helping the MSA in its mission to include in its workings and activities modernists living and working outside the centre. https://netmar.cy/about/people/dr-christos-hadjiyiannis/
    • John Hoffmann
    • Name: John Hoffmann
    • Candidate Statement:
      Since receiving my PhD in 2018, I have held appointments at the University of Konstanz and the Philipps-Universität, Marburg; and at conferences and invited talks in Germany, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, and this coming fall in Athens, I’ve developed a professional network in Europe that I would look forward to incorporating into the MSA. I would also be able to introduce new disciplinary blood into modernist studies by bringing in scholars from film and media studies, my current institutional home. Furthermore, with funding from the German Research Foundation, I will be hosting a conference in Marburg in the summer of 2023, which would prepare me well for organizing a future MSA conference outside the United States. Finally, although I do not currently hold a tenured position, I am working through the ranks of the German system, a process that often requires years of competitive grant writing before joining the professoriate. I see my rank as an opportunity to work with other members of the MSA board, especially the Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Representatives, to help emerging scholars who are interested in entering the European system. I am confident I could serve out my term if elected.