C19: the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2015 Candidate Biographies and Statements

C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2015 Candidate Biographies and Statements

Candidates for Chair of the Nominations Committee:

Stephanie Foote is Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on Henry James, queer print culture, regional fiction, realism, and other topics in late nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is the author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth- Century American Literature (2001) and The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism (2014). With Elizabeth Mazzolini, she edited Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012), and with Stephanie LeMenager, she founded and currently edits Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her current work is in the environmental humanities with a focus on garbage and waste in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the working title of her current project is The Art of Things: Narrative and Waste.

Stacey Margolis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997. Focusing on the nineteenth-century public sphere, her first book, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Duke, 2005), explored questions of individual agency and responsibility. Her second book, Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines how literature helped theorize public opinion in the age before polling. Her essays have appeared in NOVEL, PMLA, Arizona Quarterly, and ELH. She is currently at work on a book on intergenerational ethics.

Candidates for Members of the Nominations Committee (Elect 2):

Faith Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature and culture with particular attention to poetry. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Iowa. She is the author of To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (U Mass 2012) and, with Cristanne Miller, the coeditor of Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (U Mass 2005). She has published articles on the poetry of Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and George Moses Horton, among others. She is currently at work on a book project focusing on poetic parodies and regional poetry culture in the mid-nineteenth century.

Glenn Hendler is Professor and Chair of English at Fordham University, where he has also served as director of the American Studies Program. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Theory at Northwestern University, and has taught in the past at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Western Ontario. Hendler is the author of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth- Century American Literature (2001) and the co-editor of three books: Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (with Mary Chapman, 1999), an edition of Walt Whitman's temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (with Christopher Castiglia, 2007), and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Bruce Burgett, 2007; second edition, 2014), as well as an interactive website for research and pedagogy tied to Keywords (keywords.nyupress.org). His current research on representations of collective public violence and the affective life of the state is exemplified in a recent piece titled "Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots," in Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson, eds., Unsettled States: 19th-Century American Literary Studies.

Gretchen Murphy is Professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin. She received her PhD at the University of Washington, and before moving to Texas, she also spent six years teaching and earning tenure at the University of Minnesota- Morris, a small public liberal arts college in a rural part of the state. She is author of Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Duke UP, 2005) and Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and Problem of the Color Line (NYUP, 2010). Her research areas include American women writers, political and diplomatic history and literature, hemispheric American Studies, empire and postcolonial studies, and critical race studies. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study hemispheric American history and to help provide library programming on Louisa May Alcott in Austin, TX.

Ivy Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches nineteenth-century American literature and cultural studies. He received his Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale University and has research interests in democracy and citizenship; poetry and poetics; and transnationalism and diaspora. He is the author of Specters of Democracy (2011) and editor of a number of volumes including most recently, with Dana Luciano, Unsettled States (2014).