Editorial Changes

This issue of JML, titled New Materialisms, is the first to be completed with its new editorial collective. In January 2022, Paula Marantz Cohen retired from her tenure as a co-editor of JML. Throughout the decades of her work as a JML editor, Paula reviewed submissions with diligence, integrity, and generosity. Without exception, her reviews were characterized by a commitment to supporting an author in the progress of their work. She never imposed her ideas onto an article or favored an article because it may have coincided with one her areas of expertise. At each step, Paula worked hard to ensure that JML was a place where authors can extend their visions beyond professed meanings of texts and beyond widely accepted critiques of authors.

As a result of her editorial work, JML has published many scholars at the early stages of their career. Indeed, Paula was indispensable in making JML a welcoming and generative publication space for scholars at any point in their career. The generosity and rigor of her editorial work is to be found in every aspect of JML—from the many published articles exploring the intersections between feminisms and modernism, to the numerous issues she organized and introduced, to the lively editorial board conversations that are an essential part of our work as editors.

In her introduction to JML 29.2, “Making Corrections,” Paula speaks about the unexpected coherences that emerge in general issues. Where one may expect to find coherence around groups of articles addressing the same topic, one instead discovers that the coherence is precisely situated in the differences among the essays. She wonders about the reason for this: a happy accident; something to do with her editorial imagination?

The articles Paula has helped publish vary widely in subject matter and style. But they are joined in their opening up of our conventional ways of understanding a text, a methodology, and sets of concepts. We are grateful to Paula for the innumerable ways her editorial imagination and practice enriched and shaped JML into the lively publication that it is.

NEW ADDITIONS

Three former JML advisory editors have been promoted to co-editor:

Caren Irr is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of three monographs—most recently Toward the Geopolitical Novel: American Fiction in the 21st Century (Columbia UP, 2013). She has also edited five collections. Her latest books, Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity and Adorno’s Minima Moralia in the 21st Century: Fascism, Work and Ecology, both appeared in late 2021.

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as director of the Latino Studies Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) from 2002 to 2012. He is the author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (2009), which won honorable mention at the 2009 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latino and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, and most recently of The White Trash Menace and Hemispheric Fiction (2020). His essays have appeared in American Literary History, Atlantic Studies, Modern Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Textual Practice. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Schomburg Foundation, Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Research Fellowship, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the UB Humanities Institute, and the UIUC Humanities Research Institute. His most recent book manuscript, tentatively titled Neobugarron: Latina/o American Sexual Practice in the Age of Neoliberalism, is forthcoming.

Robert T. Tally Jr. is professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (2022); Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013); and, as editor, Spatial Literary Studies (2020), Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018); and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017). Tally is also the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series.

These new editors join Robert Caserio, Penn State University; Janet Lyon, Penn State University; Daniel T. O’Hara, Temple University; Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania; and Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University.