Advisory Board Elections 2011
To vote, current NAVSA members should send an e-mail to navsa@purdue.edu. All votes must be received by March 15, 2011. You may choose ONE person in “Canadian (Open Category)”; ONE person in “American (Open Category)”; and ONE person in “Disciplinary: Non-British/ Comparative Literature.” These Advisory Board position are for three-year terms. For the first time this year, we are also running a “Graduate-Student Representative” position on the Advisory Board: choose ONE of the candidates from "Graduate (North)" and ONE of the candidates from "Graduate (South)." This graduate-student position is for a one-year term.
Running unopposed, Meagan Timney, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Victoria, has been elected as NAVSA’s webmaster.
ADVISORY BOARD: CANADIAN
Cannon Schmitt, Professor of English at the University of Toronto and former Secretary-Treasurer of NAVSA, is the author of two books, Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and co-editor of Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Indiana University Press, 2008). His essays have appeared in in Victorian Studies, Representations, ELH, Genre, and elsewhere. At present he is at work on a new project tentatively titled "Victorian Oceans."
Deanna Kreisel received her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University and was graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia since 2006; before coming to UBC she taught at Warren Wilson College, Duke University, Mississippi State University, and Keene State College. Her first book, Economic Woman: Political Economy and Gender in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press in 2011; it explores the relationship among the economic demand function, collective fears of capitalist stagnation, and images of degraded or feminized sexuality in the novels of Eliot and Hardy. Part of the monograph appeared in Novel: A Forum in Fiction. Other publications include articles on George Eliot's Adam Bede in ELH; on Kipling and boredom in Representations; on Henry James and Wes Anderson in Mosaic; and others on Austen, Hardy, and Bram Stoker. She is currently at work on a new book project on concepts and configurations of interiority in the late Victorian and early Modernist periods, with a focus on architecture, psychology, and aesthetic theory. Deanna has been involved in governance at every academic position she has held since graduate school. In addition to the usual departmental committees, she also has served on the board of the President's Committee on the Status of Women and the Women's Studies Council at Keene State College, was an Arts and Sciences Faculty Senator at Mississippi State, and served on the Nineteenth-Century Studies Committee at UBC. Because she has held positions at such a wide variety of institutions -- small and large state schools, a small private liberal-arts work college, and large private Research One institutions -- she has a great breadth of understanding of the needs of different constituencies. She is also very excited at the prospect of serving the members of NAVSA, her favorite academic organization. As evidence of her deep commitment to all things Victorian, she notes that she has named her cats Alice and Harriet, without realizing at the time that they are both characters in Dombey and Son.
Arlene Young is Professor of English at the University of Manitoba where she specializes in Victorian literature and culture. She has been a member of NAVSA since it was established in 2002. She has also been a member of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada for seventeen years and she has served as Secretary-Treasurer, Conference Convenor, and President. She is currently on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Her publications include Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Macmillan/St. Martin’s 1999) and the Broadview Press editions of George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1998; reprinted 2002) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (2006). She has published articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture in Victorian Studies, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, Studies in the Novel, American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Gissing Journal, English Literature in Transition, CLUES, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Journal of Victorian Culture. She is currently working on a long-term project on middle-class women and work in Victorian literature and culture, which is nearing completion, and she is launching a new collaborative project on affect in literature which involves researchers in several disciplines at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto.
ADVISORY BOARD: AMERICAN
Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell UP, 1992) and How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (U Chicago P, 2004; winner of the Barbara Penny Kanner prize). She has edited an essay collection, Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure (U P of Virginia, 1993) and the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights (2009), and is the co-editor with Kelly Mays of the Norton Introduction to Literature (10th edition, 2010). Her more recent work in bibliography, publishing history, and digital humanities has guided an online project that focuses on the transatlantic nineteenth century, Collective Biographies of Women (http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu), part of the NINES consortium, in collaboration with Scholars’ Lab and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. She is currently Resident Fellow of IATH, developing digital tools to analyze narrative structure across archives of prosopography or other multiple versions of parallel narratives. With longstanding interests in the constructions of authorship, literary history, gender, and narrative—in particular, collective biography—her research and teaching have spanned nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Kenyon Review, American Literary History, and elsewhere. Portions of her current book-length study, “Revisiting Authors: House Museums and Transatlantic Literary Heritage,” are published in The Henry James Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. She has served as president of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (2005) and judge of both Perkins (Narrative) and Lowell (MLA) book prizes. In 2005 she co-organized the NAVSA Conference at the University of Virginia, and she served on the organizing committee of the Victorians Institute Conference held there in 2010. Other NAVSA participation includes leading a workshop at Purdue in 2006.
Daniel Hack is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of a book, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Virginia, 2005), and articles in such journals as Critical Inquiry, ELH, Novel, TLS, and Victorian Studies. His research and teaching center on the history of the novel and transatlantic print culture. He is currently writing a book called “The African Americanization of Victorian Literature, Douglass to Du Bois”; forthcoming work related to this project includes a piece on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Quest of the Silver Fleece as “the last Victorian novel” in the Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel and an essay on the African American reception of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in a volume on early African American print culture. On the backburner—or rather, on ice, the better to be served cold one day—is a project on revenge in the nineteenth-century novel.
Elizabeth Helsinger, Professor in the Departments of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, is the author of Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1973), Rural Scenes and National Representation (1997), and Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts (2008); co-author of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-83 (1983) and editor of The 'Writing' of Modern Life: the Etching Revival in Britain, France, and the U.S., 1850-1940 (2008); she has also published numerous essays on Victorian literature and art and is currently working on a book about poetry and song. She has served as chair of two departments (English and Visual Arts), is a long-time member of the governing board of the Smart Museum of Art, and a co-editor of Critical Inquiry.
ADVISORY BOARD: NON-BRITISH / COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Mary Ellis Gibson is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is past president of the Victorians Institute and, with Beverly Taylor, former editor of the Victorians Institute Journal. Her recent work focuses on the invention of English language literary culture in India during the long nineteenth century. Her anthology of Indian English poetry, Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913: A Critical Anthology, will make available for the first time reliable texts representing the scope of poetry written in English by writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities. The accompanying monograph, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, recreates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance experienced by these poet, and it argues that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Both volumes are forthcoming from Ohio University Press in March 2011. Gibson's work on Victorian and modernist poetry also includes History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments (Ohio State UP) and Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Cornell UP). With Britta Martens she is editing a special issue of Victorian Poetry to commemorate the bicentenary of Robert Browning's birth. Her small press, Celo Knob Press, specializes in broadsides and chapbooks.
Sharon Marcus's scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century British and French culture. Her special areas of interest include the novel; literary and critical theory; urban and architectural studies; feminist and queer approaches to gender and sexuality; comparative drama; and the history of transnational theatrical celebrity. She is a professor of English at Columbia U. With undergraduate and graduate degrees in comparative literature, she is committed to teaching and writing across disciplines and across national and linguistic borders. She has published several essays on comparative topics and methods, and has written two books: Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999), which received Honorable Mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literary studies, and the prizewinning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007). She has served on the selection committee for the MLA Scaglione Prize, on the Executive Committee for the MLA Division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, and was recently elected to the advisory board of the American Comparative Literature Association.
Meredith L. McGill is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers U and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (2003), a study of 19thC American resistance to tighten control over intellectual property that focuses on the writing and careers of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She has edited a collection of essays, The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008) in which British Romanticists, Victorianists, and Americanists model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame. She is currently working on a study of the circulation of poetry in the antebellum United States. Her research interests include the history of the book in American culture, American poetry and poetics, intellectual property in law and culture, literary theory, new media and the history of media shift.
ADVISORY BOARD: GRADUATE-STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE (NORTH)
Rebecca Soares
My name is Rebecca Soares and I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am ABD, having defended my proposal in December, and am currently working on the first chapter of my dissertation which considers the ways in which the discourse of spiritualism and the supernatural allowed British and American writers of the nineteenth century to imagine the creation and maintenance of a vibrant transatlantic literary community. My other interests include transatlantic nineteenth-century literature, the Victorian periodical press, and theories of reading and authorship. I was the recipient of the 2010 VanArsdel Prize for best graduate student paper given by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and my article, “Literary Graftings: Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reader,” will be coming out this Spring in Victorian Periodical Review. I attended NAVSA this past November in Montreal where I presented a paper titled “Serial Readers & Readerly Detectives: The Paper Trail of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret” and hope to attend the 2011 conference in Nashville as either a panelist or an audience member. Since the 2012 conference is being hosted by my home institution, I am certain that I will remain involved with NAVSA regardless of the results of this election. Thank you for your time and consideration!
Elizabeth Macaluso
My name is Elizabeth D. Macaluso and I am a first-year Ph.D. candidate in English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY. I am completing my first year of course work and putting together book lists for my comprehensive exams while thinking about my dissertation topic. My main field of research is 19th-century English Literature (Victorian and Late Victorian); my subfields of research are the intersections between colonial and post-colonial theory and Late Victorian novels as well as the "New Woman" in Late Victorian fiction. I became a NAVSA member in 2010. I do not anticipate any financial or travel restrictions that would impede my attendance at the NAVSA conference in Nashville. It's an easy flight from New York City to Nashville.
Ken Crowell
My name is Ken Crowell and I am a PhD candidate in English at Purdue University. My work is focused on the nineteenth-century long, lyric poem and the Victorian novel. My dissertation, “Indispensable Latest Addenda”: Matters of Fact and the Materiality of the Poetic in the Nineteenth Century, examines the “narrative” of narrative, suggesting that while the Victorian realist novel remains at the core of our disciplinary practice, critical understanding of the novel has hitherto largely ignored the possibility that the superstructure supporting Realism (and thus the modern, mass-media subject) has been the lyric utterance. I have presented excerpts of this work at both last fall’s NAVSA 2010 in Montreal and NAVSA 2008 at Yale. A longer version of 2008’s paper appears in the current issue of Victorian Poetry as "Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato: Comedic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form." I have also presented papers on the Modernist Novel, seriality and Dickensian narrative structure, and I will be presenting on Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata” and the politics of Victorian sonnet form at this year’s British Women Writers Conference in Columbus. Currently I serve as an Editorial Graduate Research Assistant for the journal Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net; I am the administrator for NAVSA’s graduate student listserv; and, at the moment, for some reason I find myself compelled to wade through Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi (for anyone that wondered, I don’t suggest it). I will certainly be attending NAVSA 2011: Performance and Play in some capacity, as Nashville is just a jump from St. Louis where I am currently writing and doing research, and I would appreciate the opportunity to do so as Advisory Board graduate-student representative. Therefore, please consider me as a candidate for the position and I hope to see you next fall at Vanderbilt.
ADVISORY BOARD: GRADUATE-STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE (SOUTH)
Heather Bowlby
My name is Heather Bowlby, and I'm a fourth-year PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. My research interests focus on Victorian poetry, women writers, visual and material cultures, and digital humanities, and my dissertation explores what I argue is a crucial relationship between the development of photography as a contested art form and the changing status of women poets as "artists" in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. I have held a digital humanities fellowship at the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) group for the past two years, and under the support of this organization, I am working to create a digital critical edition of Julia Margaret Cameron's unique photographically illustrated edition of Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1874-75). I have presented papers based on my work with this project at the 2010 Victorians Institute conference and at the 2011 Modern Language Association convention. Likewise, I have discussed other parts of my dissertation in papers presented at the 2009 Victorians Institute conference (on Emily Dickinson's complex relationship to her only known photograph) and the 2010 Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle international conference (on Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's creation of "virtual" space in her poetry). In addition to these professional activities, I have assumed an active role in various governance activities during my time at the University of Virginia: I was the chair of the 2010 Department of English graduate conference, and I am currently the Vice President of the Graduate English Student Association, a nineteenth-century area representative for the graduate students in my department, and a representative on the university-wide Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council. Last year, I also gained valuable experience by serving as conference assistant for the 2010 Mellon-funded "The Shape of Things to Come" digital humanities conference and as program coordinator for the 2010 Victorians Institute conference, both of which were held at my university. Although I have not yet had the pleasure of attending a NAVSA conference, I eagerly await the opportunity to do so at this year's conference, and I do not foresee any difficulty in participating. I would relish the opportunity to represent the graduate students of NAVSA in an official position, and if elected, I believe that my experience in organizational leadership would help me to advocate effectively for the interests of graduate students within this organization and in Victorian studies more broadly. Thank you for your consideration.
Nicole Lobdell
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Georgia, studying 19th-century British literature (Romantic and Victorian) with research interests in investigating the intersections between the British novel, evolutionary and hard sciences, and economy. In 2008, I presented papers at NAVSA (on Punch and railway mania) and BWWC (on slang and counterfeit money in “Goblin Market”). In 2009, I attended the BAVS-NAVSA joint conference as a participant in the “Evolution for Victorians” discussion group. In 2010, I was scheduled to present on Dickens and Darwin at NAVSA in Montreal but an unforeseen scheduling conflict prevented me from attending. At UGA, I’ve helped to bring nineteenth-century scholars to campus as invited speakers, and I’ve organized two one-day conferences for undergraduates in the UGA English department. The position of graduate representative to the Advisory Board is a great opportunity, and if elected I would like to encourage more focused, unified, and visible roles for graduate students in NAVSA and the larger field of Victorian studies. With NAVSA 2011 in Nashville (an easy drive up the road from the University of Georgia in Athens), I do not anticipate any financial or travel restrictions.
Jessica Queener
My name is Jessica Queener, and I am in my fifth year of the Doctoral program in English at West Virginia University. I am now a Doctoral candidate holding a dissertation fellowship, and am currently researching the use of humor and satire in constructions of British subjectivity, especially as it emerges in depictions of the British Empire. I have presented papers at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, the British Women Writers Conference, and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. I served a term as assistant editor for the journal Victorian Poetry, and have also twice held an appointment as a research assistant. In 2008 I was awarded the department prize for excellence in teaching. Service opportunities are something I've always enjoyed, and I've been working to expand the presence of our English Graduate Student Organization (EGO) in our University and our region for the last few years. Several years ago I and my colleague organized WVU's first regional colloquium for graduate students in English, and I have continued to work with the subsequent organizers to build the event more each year. I have been elected twice as President of EGO, and during that time I started new fundraisers (including, not surprisingly, a massive book sale), community service initiatives, and social events. In addition to EGO, I have served as the PhD representative on the department's graduate programming committee. I have also represented the department at the level of the university in various capacities. In each of these positions I've always worked to give voice to the concerns of my peers, and I would be honored to use my experience as a leader and organizer to represent the graduate students of NAVSA.