Poe Studies Association Updates

From Philip Phillips, PSA President

The Poe Studies Association held its annual business meeting at the Twenty-Sixth American Literature Association Conference at the Westin Copley Place, Boston, on May 21, 2015. At the opening of the meeting, the officers and members joined me in thanking Barbara Cantalupo and Richard Kopley for their outstanding service to the PSA as cochairs of the recent Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in New York City.

Poe and Hawthorne in Japan: I am pleased to announce that the PSA Executive Committee voted unanimously to hold our next International Conference in Kyoto, Japan, in partnership with Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society will not join us as a partner this time, but some of its members may participate in the conference. Richard Kopley and I will represent the Poe Studies Association on the Program Committee and work closely with Sandy Hughes, President-Elect of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and representatives of the Poe Society of Japan and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society of Japan. The conference will take place June 21–24, 2018. Please mark these dates on your calendars and stay tuned for more details about the international conference.

Honorary Membership is the highest award offered by the PSA to its members for distinguished and sustained service to the association and the advancement of Poe studies. I am pleased to announce that Carole Shaffer-Koros (Emerita, Kean University) and Heyward Ehrlich (Rutgers University) were nominated by the PSA Executive Committee and elected by the PSA membership as Honorary Members for 2015. In addition, both Harry Lee Poe (Union University) and Shoko Itoh (Hiroshima University) were nominated for Honorary Membership during the business meeting, and their names have been offered to the PSA membership for a vote.

I would like to thank Jana Argersinger and Richard Kopley for agreeing to serve on the PSA Nominating Committee for the upcoming PSA elections (2016–). I would also like to express my gratitude to Richard Kopley, Susan Scheckel, and Les Harrison for serving on the Gargano and Quinn Awards Committee, charged with compiling a short list of recommendations with a publication date of 2014 to be voted on by the PSA Executive Committee. The Executive Committee plans to complete both processes by the end of the calendar year so that the results can be announced at MLA. When you renew your membership in the PSA, please consider joining me in making a contribution (of any amount) to the James Gargano Award Fund and/or the Patrick Quinn Award Fund to help the PSA ensure that these awards can continue to be presented to those scholars who produce distinguished work on Poe, in keeping with the intention of those benefactors who established the funds.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks for the opportunity to have served as President of the Poe Studies Association during such an exciting time in the history of our organization. I remain committed to our association and look forward to working closely with our officers and members in the years to come. I hope to see many of you in Kyoto in 2018.

From Paul Lewis, PSA Vice President

Fig 1.

PSA Officers, past and present (left to right): Richard Kopley, Travis Montgomery, Paul Lewis, Carole Shaffer-Koros, Philip Edward Phillips, William E. Engel, and John Gruesser.

For the PSA’s guaranteed panel for MLA 2017, I’ve had the following idea. Decades of historicist research have done much to situate Poe in relation to antebellum culture broadly defined to include politics, publishing, literature, and social life. While no panel can cover all of this, reading Adam C. Bradford’s interestingly counterintuitive study of Poe and Whitman makes me think that it’s time for a panel on Poe and his contemporaries, with papers that deal with Poe and a single other antebellum author. The CFP will be available on the MLA site and sent through PSA listserv in January 2016.

From Carole Shaffer-Koros, PSA Treasurer

Currently we have 304 PSA members, with many joining to participate in the February NYC conference...