Editor’s Note

One of the pleasures of being the Legacy editor is welcoming esteemed colleagues to the journal’s editorial team. For the past six months I have had the honor of working with our new coeditor, Jennifer Putzi of the College of William and Mary. In fact, what I am doing here is welcoming Jenny back to the masthead, for she has a long history of service to the journal: most recently a Legacy board member, she is also our former book-review editor and a former consultant reader. Jenny brings a wealth of experience and accomplishment to her new role. As many of you know, her most recent book, The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard (U of Iowa P, 2012), coedited with Elizabeth Stockton, won honorable mention for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers’ 2015 Edition Award, which recognizes excellence in recovery scholarship. Jenny is a creative and insightful colleague whom I am deeply grateful to have as part of the Legacy editorial staff.

At the same time that I am thrilled to welcome Jenny to our ranks, I must announce the departure of coeditor Theresa Strouth Gaul. Theresa has served Legacy as a coeditor for eight years, meaning that she helped to make editorial decisions about—and worked closely with at least fifty authors whose work appeared in—sixteen separate issues of the journal. She has been such a stalwart and committed part of our team that it is hard for me to imagine the journal without her. As coeditor, Theresa made indispensable contributions to our collective efforts in publishing rigorous and innovative scholarship that shapes the field, particularly through her dedication to the project of recovering women’s cultural production. Her high standards for quality of research and argument have pushed us and our contributors to be greater than we were. As part of our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary issue, in 2009, she also contributed an original essay, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy’s Future” (26.2), which helped us to articulate the journal’s future direction and has had a remarkable impact on the field, inspiring innovative efforts to increase the use of recovered texts in the classroom. Her initiative, creativity, and unusually sharp intelligence will be deeply missed, but she has made an indelible mark on Legacy and on the work of all of our authors who have worked with her.

In other transitions, we welcome Lorrayne Carroll of University of Southern Maine to our editorial board, and we appreciate Joycelyn Moody for signing on to serve on the board for another three years. As her term closed at the end of 2015, we thank Tamara Harvey for her excellent service on the board; it is emblematic of Tamara’s generosity and commitment to Legacy that she was willing to serve on the review committee for our ssaww Conference 2015 Best Paper Contest, even though that work was performed after the expiration of her term. I will also take this opportunity to thank the others who helped to judge these papers: Lorrayne Carroll, Meredith Goldsmith, Desiree Henderson, Catherine Keyser, and Laura Korobkin. Thanks go to all of these people, along with the superb Legacy editorial staff, for their hard work and cooperation that help the journal to thrive.