Candidates: MSA Elections 2022

Standing for: 2nd Vice President

    • Octavio R. González
    • Name: Octavio R. González
    • Candidate Statement:
      I have been an active member in the MSA since a master’s and doctoral student in 2007, and the MSA conference is my main professional convention. I’ve chaired panels and seminars, and have organized panels, and been invited to join roundtables, including the panel on anti-racism and decolonizing modernist studies. I’ve also been an active mentor in the mentorship program begun last summer, and will continue to do so. As a recently tenured professor, I am looking to give back to the modernist studies community by serving in a more administrative and leadership role. And, as my participation in the panel on decolonizing modernist studies shows, I’m dedicated to amplifying efforts to diversify the MSA. All too often, modernist studies still seems like a majority-white discipline, and there are many opportunities to be had by collaborating with other organizations (such as American Studies Association and Latin American Studies Association, to name but two) to help cross-pollinate the constituencies of MSA and other modernist standard-bearers. Some of these cross-pollinations also include subculture and sexuality studies, one of my core research specialties. My publications in modernism include my 2020 monograph, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the 20C Novel (Refiguring Modernism Series, Pennsylvania State UP); essays on Isherwood and Rhys in Modern Fiction Studies and ARIEL, respectively, and essays on Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Passing (LA Review of Books/Avidly); on literary character and queer formalism in ASAP/Journal and its open-access platform, ASAPJ. I'm also a reviewer for Modernism/Modernity, JML, and numerous other journals.
    • Jennifer Mitchell
    • Name: Jennifer Mitchell
    • Candidate Statement:
      When asked about my research, I usually talk about the intersection of (mostly) modernist literature and sexology and I (likely) mention masochism. And yet, somehow over the last few years I began to think about my scholarship in modernism as deeply embedded in and connected to collaboration. My commitment to collaborative work is, in many ways, why I’m running for second vice president of MSA. I think best when I think with other people and I work best when I work with other people. As part of the MSA board, I look forward to continuing efforts to diversify the association and its conference; to rethinking the structural status quo in favor of new possibilities; to reimagining MSA’s role in professionalization and development both within the academy and outside of it; and to facilitating and sustaining difficult but necessary conversations about precarity and labor, about accessibility and equity, and about mentorship and support. Again, this is not something I plan to undertake alone, but instead by working with the board, the members of the association more broadly, and the affiliated organizations and other localized collectives that have done incredible work, especially during this year’s “Between the Acts” virtual conference.
    • Yan (Amy) Tang
    • Name: Yan (Amy) Tang
    • Candidate Statement:
      Since I joined MSA in 2015, I have organized and participated in various MSA conference panels and seminars. My research interests in modernism mainly lie in the politics of literary form’s visceral dynamism, ecology and emotions, and theoretical intersections between affect and ideology. My most recent work, “Modernism, Critical Theory, and Affect Theory Avant La Lettre” (published in the essay collection Modernism, Theory and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation), calls for a closer examination of the interplay between the affective and the political in modernist works and critical discourse. My essay “The Politics of Naming,” published as part of the M/m print plus responses to the essay cluster “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” examines along similar lines modernist scholars’ ethical responsibility of pushing the field towards increasing diversity of both scholarship and membership. My experience with MSA-related organizational work and research is also deeply connected with my commitment to advocating for a stronger presence of BIPOC scholars, scholars with disabilities, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other marginalized groups of scholars at MSA conferences.

Standing for: Program Chair

    • Pardis Dabashi
    • Name: Pardis Dabashi
    • Candidate Statement:
      I would be honored to serve as Program Chair for the Modernist Studies Association. I believe I’m especially well-suited to perform this service, first, because of my extensive involvement with organizing intellectual experiences for both students and faculty, and second, because of the two tracks that my scholarship has taken. Organizational work I’ve done thus far includes but isn’t limited to the significant work I’ve put into collaborating with my colleagues to build up the cinema and media studies minor at my current institution—working with faculty, students, and administrators to design a curricular infrastructure, create classes, get them approved, and teach them. In addition, prior to the loss of institutional funds due to the pandemic, I worked with my colleagues to pitch a successful proposal for a Reno MSA. My strong publication record in modernist studies is backed by a strong record, too, in the study of the labor crisis in the academic humanities, in pieces for PMLA and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In my work for the MSA and in collaboration with local organizing committees, I will keep a firm eye on fostering material support structures for vulnerable members of our academic community, as we continue to navigate the effects of the pandemic and the casualization of labor. My notable publications in modernist studies include the following. More can be found on my CV. “Cosmopolitan Secrets: The Racialist Affordances of Equivocation in Henry James’s The American.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 66.4 (Winter 2020): 620-649. “Helga Crane’s Camera Obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s Face, and the Modernist Longing for Plot.” Invited contribution to a special issue on “The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformations.” Guest-edited by John Frow, Melissa Hardie, and Vanessa Smith. Textual Practice 34.12 (2020): 2069-2089. “‘too soon too soon too soon’: Continuity, Blame, and the Limits of the Present in As I Lay Dying.” Arizona Quarterly 75.4 (Winter 2019): 107-130. “The Compsons Were Here: Indexicality, the Actuality, and the Crisis of Meaning in The Sound and the Fury,” Modernism/modernity 24.3 (September 2017): 527-548. Co-editor, with Sarah Gleeson-White. The New William Faulkner Studies (in production; forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, August 2022)
    • Erica Gene Delsandro
    • Name: Erica Gene Delsandro
    • Candidate Statement:
      My collaborative work both within and outside of MSA is teaching me how to imagine beyond the outdated and unproductive hierarchies that continue to support and maintain the profession. Through my involvement in both the International Virginia Woolf Society (IVWS) and Feminist inter/Modernist Studies (FiMA), I have been attempting to develop more collaborative approaches to and structures for our professional labors, and I am eager to bring my newly gained perspectives to the organization and execution of MSA’s yearly conference. I believe the conference, as a form, offers us yet unrealized affordances. As the Program Chair, I will be eager to build upon what has been effective for MSA while innovating toward greater access, inclusion, and equity. In coordination with conference organizers and with attention to regional possibilities: I will prioritize access for graduate students, contingent/underfunded faculty, and alt-ac colleagues; I will advocate for the centering of under-represented scholars within the conference structure and program; and I will lead with a commitment to community and coalition building. In other words, I look forward to thinking generously about how to best serve all of our members, fostering an annual professional event that is socially welcoming, intellectually challenging, and culturally attentive.
    • Melissa Dinsman
    • Name: Melissa Dinsman
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am an Assistant Professor of English and author of Modernism at the Microphone. My research focuses on WWII women writers, the politics of the domestic, and information networks. A long-time member of MSA, I have published in Modernism/modernity, and contributed to the Print Plus’s “In These Times” series. I frequently present at the annual conference, have organized two panels, and run one seminar. Currently, I am finishing up a three-year term as co-President of the Space Between Society where I help run the annual conferences, including developing the conference program, and, during COVID, overseeing the pivot to online. As Program Chair, I want to continue promoting the mentorship work that MSA has increasingly been investing in. I see this as a central part of the society’s mission and as Program Chair would work to promote mentorship workshops at the conference as well as outside of it. Another issue facing many of us, but especially precarious scholars, is a lack of funding to attend conferences, which has increased due to the pandemic. As Program Chair, I want to work on creating a hybrid model to allow more scholars the opportunity to participate in the annual conference while also not losing the in-person environment that many of us love. Further information can be found here: https://www.york.cuny.edu/portal_college/mdinsman.

Standing for: Treasurer

    • Matthew Eatough
    • Name: Matthew Eatough
    • Candidate Statement:
      I have been an active member of the MSA since 2008, over which span I have attended numerous MSA conferences, organized panels and seminars, and acted as a member of the steering committee for the cancelled 2020 conference in Brooklyn. My scholarship focuses on finance, economics, and their connections to various postcolonial modernisms across Europe, Africa, and beyond. I have pursued these intersections in a number of different contexts, from world-systems analyses of Anglo-Irish modernism and studies of how business planning methodologies have influenced African science fiction to, more recently, examinations of how nonprofit culture institutes have financed translations of neomodernist fiction for small-press publishers. At Baruch College, I have served for the past 5 years as chair of the Global Studies program (among other administrative posts). This commitment to globalizing the teaching and study of modernism has been reflected in my work with the MSA, which has sought to introduce spaces for conversations about non-Western modernisms (in the form of panels, seminars, and roundtables). It is also a commitment that I would hope to bring with me to my work as Treasurer for the MSA. Relevant Publications: ---. “Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.1 (2012): 69-94. ---. “Philology Contra Modernism: Translating Izibongo in Johannesburg,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Volume 3, Cycle 3 (August 20, 2018). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/philology-contra ---. “The Critic as Modernist: Es'kia Mphahlele's Cold War Literary Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 50.3 (2019): 136-156. ---. “How a Canon Is Formed: Censorship, Modernism, and the US Reception of Irish and South African Literature.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23.1 (2020): 120-43