Contributors
- Contributors
Sophia Forster … is Assistant Professor of English at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where she teaches American literature of all historical periods. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the topic of labor, which she has previously examined in an article on William Dean Howells’s historicist realism published in Modern Fiction Studies. She is currently studying the role that Nathaniel Hawthorne plays in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s construction of authorial identity in the early postbellum period.
Zach Hutchins … is Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University, where he teaches courses in early American literature and culture. Essays by Hutchins on Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and other nineteenth-century writers have been published in ELH, Leviathan, Early American Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Literature; Oxford University Press will publish his first book, Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England, in 2014. Hutchins is also the proud father of five energetic children who have already authored mischief of Barnum-esque proportions.
Paul Thifault … earned his Ph.D. in English at Fordham University in 2012. He is now Assistant Professor of English at Lindsey Wilson College, where he teaches courses in American literature and critical theory. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and race in early American literature. His current book project uncovers the interdependent relationship between [End Page 177] transatlantic anti-Catholicism and the evolution of the “Indian” figure in colonial and antebellum writings.
Year in Conferences Contributors
MLA
Daniel Barlow … is a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of English and the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American cultural history, especially literature and music. His articles appear or are forthcoming in MELUS, the Society for Ethnomusicology Graduate Student News, and The Southern Literary Journal.
Amanda Blair Runyan … is a doctoral candidate studying American literature at Northeastern University.
Jane Van Slembrouck … is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Fordham University, where she teaches courses in literature and culture. Her dissertation concerns disability, illness, and personal sincerity in nineteenth-century culture.
Arielle Zibrak … recently received her PhD in English from Boston University. Her work focuses on subversive aesthetics in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel. She is currently a full-time Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University. [End Page 178]
Senior Advisor: Scott E. Moore … recently earned his PhD in English from Brandeis University. His dissertation examines the failure of meritocracy in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, and his work has appeared in ATQ.
ALA
Cristina D’amico … is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. She currently holds a SSHRC-Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her dissertation addresses the intimate link between disinheritance and political property right in nineteenth-century American literature.
Rickie-Ann Legleitner … is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of South Dakota. She specializes in American literature from 1850–1950, focusing on women’s literature, the bildungsroman, and minority studies. Her research reflects a broader interest in the relationship among identity formation, space, language, and cultural notions of artistic value.
Kelli Purcell O’brien … is a PhD student in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Memphis. She is preparing for her comprehensive exams and plans to write a dissertation examining fashion, consumer culture, and female sexuality in American novels of the 1890’s and 1900’s. She is a member of several literary societies and is in the writing process of a book chapter on Kate Chopin and an article on diversity in higher education.
Amanda Stuckey … is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include early American literature and cultural history, hemispheric American studies, and representations of the body in [End Page 179] American fiction. Her dissertation focuses on the complicity of genre and generic conventions in representations of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American literature.
David Tagnani … is a PhD candidate at Washington State University, where he studies the relationship between mysticism and materialism in American nature...
