Candidates: SLSA 2020 Election

Standing for: Member-at-Large (to serve Fall 2020-2022)

    • Elizabeth Donaldson
    • Name: Elizabeth Donaldson
    • Candidate Statement:

      I am pleased to be nominated for member-at-large of SLSA. I have been a member since 1997, when I was a graduate student studying nature writing and American literature at SUNY, Stony Brook. Now my research focuses on feminist disability studies of mental health, and I direct the medical humanities minor at the New York Institute of Technology. I have published on LSD-inspired disability-immersion experiences of schizophrenia, mental illness in graphic medicine and comics, antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs, and physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre. As the member-at-large for SLSA I would like to advocate for disability issues in the SLSA community and at our annual conference, in order to foster greater participation and better access for our members.

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    • David Parisi
    • Name: David Parisi
    • Candidate Statement:

      I am an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston who researches the intersections of touch, science, and media technology. I have been an active member of SLSA since I first attended the 2012 conference. During this time, I have organized 4 panel streams around the theme of reconfiguring sensations, frequently recruiting panelists from outside of the organization. By serving as a Member-at-Large, I hope to gain a better understanding of the organization’s goals and mission while also helping to shape the fields and modes of intellectual engagement represented at the annual conferences.

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Standing for: Second Vice-President (to serve Fall 2020-2022 and in turn as First Vice-President and then President:

    • Rajani Sudan
    • Name: Rajani Sudan
    • Candidate Statement:

      I began attending the annual SLSA conference as an assistant professor, back in the days when it was SLS. My impression then and now is of a society that fosters innovative scholarship, intellectual rigor, and truly transdisciplinary approaches. I hope to see the society continue to grow from this position, and the recent efforts to not only include but also engage artistic production make me particularly optimistic that it will do so. My work as co-editor of Configurations has made me especially aware of new trends in transdisciplinary scholarship, and our editorial team is constantly working to improve and refine the journal. My own interests are primarily historical, but I don’t believe that history exists merely as a repository for anecdote and chronology, as Thomas Kuhn famously argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, my approach is interdisciplinary, sometimes collaborative, but always seeking to identify the anomalies that both establish and break with historical continuum. As such, I am working on the connections between 18th- and 19th-C colonial infrastructure and the language of digital technology. I strongly believe that race, class, gender, and sexuality deeply inform STS, and to that end I want to work to see diversity reflected in the society’s members as well as in its governance.

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    • Dan Vandersommers
    • Name: Dan Vandersommers
    • Candidate Statement:

      I am a Teaching Assistant Professor at Ball State University. Previously, I have been an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Philadelphia and an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal History at McMaster University. I have also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi and Kenyon College. My work sits at the intersection of environmental history, cultural history, and animal studies. My first book is a coedited volume titled Zoo Studies: A New Humanities, which was published by McGill-Queens University Press in July 2019. My next book (my dissertation turned monograph) is titled Humanism Encaged: Popular Zoology and the American Zoo is under contract with the University Press of Kansas. Not only have I published widely, but I have also taught 2,500 students in very different, yet all quite diverse, university environments.

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