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Contributors
Linda M. Grasso is professor of English and department chair at York College, City University of New York. She is the author of The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and of several essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. women’s literature and culture. Her book in progress, Georgia O’Keeffe, Feminism, and Fame, situates O’Keeffe in U.S. feminist history and explores what feminism means to O’Keeffe and her audiences over several generations.
Sara K. Howe is a PhD candidate in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation, “De/Compose, Shape-Shift, and Suture: Toward a Monstrous Rhetoric of Fan Compositions,” argues that fan compositions—fan fiction, vids, and other transformative works—are articulations of a monstrous rhetoric characterized by the dissolution of boundaries, intense affective engagement, decomposition, shape-shifting, and (re)animation. In addition to fan studies, her research interests include composition theory and pedagogy, feminist rhetorics, new media, and psychoanalytic theory.
Charles Johanningsmeier is professor and Jefferis Chair of American Literature at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published a number of essays on how American periodical readers interacted with various literary texts between 1880 and 1925. Currently he is researching the fan mail sent to Willa Cather during her lifetime, as well as how an analysis of American public library records in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers clues about the reception of realist and naturalist fictions.
Barbara Ryan teaches in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. She is working on a book-length study of how Lew Wallace’s [End Page 111] Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) rose to what has been called its “real though bizarre” stature. Although anchored in fan mail to Wallace, this study ranges widely to develop new analytical methods. Ryan’s earlier studies of fan mail include “One Reader, Two Votes,” in the History of Reading, volume 3, edited by Shafquat Towheed and Rosalind Crone, and “A Real Basis from which to Judge” in Reading Acts, edited by Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas.
Josh Stenberg is a PhD candidate in Chinese theater at Nanjing University and has taught at Nanjing Normal University. He is writing his dissertation on Sino-Indonesian performance and is the editor of Irina’s Hat: New Short Stories from China (2012) and the translator of two other volumes of contemporary Chinese fiction. [End Page 112]
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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Fans and the Objects of Their Devotion
