Greg Barnhisel

Candidate statement

Greg Barnhisel, Professor of English, Duquesne University, USA. I first encountered SHARP when I was writing my dissertation on the publishing history of modernist literature, in 1996, when I attended the Society’s fourth annual conference in Worcester, Massachusetts. My research was and remains on the intersection of 20th century literature and culture with the institutions that give them life: publishers, governments, journalism, NGOs, universities, foundations, and businesses. My career, however, took me down a different road—rhetoric and composition—for fifteen years, until I became SHARP’s MLA liaison in 2011. In 2015, I was appointed as one of the editors of Book History, and I continue to serve in that role. (If elected, I would recuse myself from any votes related to the journal.) I am also an editor of the U. of Massachusetts Press series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. As a SHARP board member, I would strive to promote publishing studies, contemporary book history, global book history outside the US and Western Europe, and diversity (ethnic, gender, geographical, linguistic, and economic) within our field. But I would also use my position to help SHARP recognize and support members who are caught up in the larger transformations higher education is experiencing in our age of neoliberalism and austerity: professional precarity, changes in and threats to traditional scholarly publishing models, “alt-ac” jobs, and academic positions that do not provide support for professional development such as research and travel.