PAMLA 2014 Elections

The PAMLA 2014 Election ballot will be emailed on October 6 to all members who are current in dues for the 2014 calendar year.  Voting must be completed by midnight, October 20, 2014.  If you were expecting a ballot but did not receive an email, please contact [email protected].

Your PAMLA Executive Committee is the body that makes major decisions regarding PAMLA on a day-to-day basis, and that helps to plan the future of PAMLA so that we may continue to serve our members’ needs.  We really need your help in choosing the best officers possible. 

The Nominating Committee has come up with an excellent slate of potential officers.  You will vote for one candidate for 2nd VP, two for Executive Committee member, and one for Graduate Student Representative. The 2nd VP moves up automatically to 1st VP and then to President in consecutive years.  The two Executive Committee members who receive the most votes will each serve three-year terms. The Graduate Student Representative will serve a two-year term.

We’d like to thank and acknowledge the fine work of the Nominating Committee (Lorely French, Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi, Sabine Wilke), and most of all the willingness of our candidates to serve PAMLA.

Candidate statements appear below.

2^nd Vice-President Nominees

Andrea Gogröf is Professor in the interdisciplinary humanities department of Liberal Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Her teaching includes literature, philosophy, history, and film studies with a focus on Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity.  Her book is on Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wagner and Modernism. She has published articles on Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Peter Handke, Emile Zola and Michael Haneke. Currently she is working on aesthetic reflections of the latest surveillance methods in contemporary American, German, and French cultures with a special interest in films, blogs, and literary texts that reflect generational differences of attitudes and actions concerning media control, its demands for absolute transparency and the individual needs for and rights to privacy.

Andrea has been an enthusiastic member of PAMLA since 1998. She has chaired numerous panels and presented papers regularly. She served on the Executive Committee from 2003 to 2006. In 2002 and 2007 she was co-organizer of the annual PAMLA conferences at Western Washington University.

Ann Keniston is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she has taught since 2002. She holds a BA in English from the U. of Chicago, an MA in English/Creative Writing from New York U., and a PhD in English from Boston U. Her scholarly specialties include post-World War II American poetry and post-9/11 American literature; she is also a poet. She is the author of two monographs, the forthcoming Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry (Iowa, 2015) and Overheard Voices:  Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge, 2006), a poetry chapbook, November Wasps: Elegies (Finishing Line, 2013), and a collection of poems, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert Books, 2005).  She is also coeditor (with Jeffrey Gray) of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (McFarland, 2012) and (with Jeanne Follansbee Quinn) Literature after 9/11 (Routledge, 2008). She is at work on a new collection of poems, as well as a coedited essay collection and a new monograph on 21^st-century engaged American poetry. She lives in Reno with her husband and two teenaged sons.

A past presenter at and organizer of panels at PAMLA as well as many other regional and national conferences, she is eager to expand graduate student participation in PAMLA conferences, especially in western states that tend to be less involved. If elected, she also hopes to foster collaborations that build on existing PAMLA strengths (for example, in poetry and postcolonial studies) and to facilitate new areas of specialization (possibly including more interdisciplinary and/or creative panels) as well panels using different formats.

Executive Committee Nominees

Jane J. Lee is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, and is delighted to find herself on the West Coast and not too far from the lovely Pacific Northwest. Her research areas focus on Victorian literature and culture, with specific interests in Victorian reading theory and practice, education, print culture, and the development of literary criticism. In addition to book and manuscript review work in these areas, she has forthcoming articles on the interchanges between Victorian scientific and liberal theory. She is also working on a book manuscript about the role of reading in Victorian liberal discourses. She joined and has been a member of PAMLA since 2011, and has continued to be impressed by the collegiality and professionalism of the organization and its conferences. Then a graduate student, she felt welcomed into a vibrant intellectual community that provided generous feedback and encouragement—a productive and uplifting experience that has stayed with her and which she seeks to return. It is with great pleasure that she would serve on the Executive Committee, with both the maintenance and future development of PAMLA in mind.

Charles Hammond received his degrees (all in German) from Georgetown and the University of California, Irvine, respectively. He wrote his dissertation under the late Jens Rieckmann. He is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Tennessee at Martin, where the emphasis is on teaching. He has been teaching at UT Martin for 10 years, where he has built up a very successful one-man German program. He has been a member of PAMLA for the same amount of time and rarely missed the Convention despite his geographical distance from the West Coast. His primary research interests lie in the Austrian literature of the fin-de-siecle, esp. Kafka.

Lysa Rivera is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Chicano/a and African-American literatures. Her work has appeared in MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States, Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies, Science Fiction Studies and elsewhere. She is the 2012 recipient of the Pioneer Award, which recognizes excellence in science fiction scholarship, and is currently on the editorial board for Femspec, an interdisciplinary feminist journal devoted to the study and production of feminist speculative fiction in print and visual art. Dr. Rivera’s current research project focuses on the vibrant histories of Chicano/a and African American science fiction from the 1960s-1990s. She lives and works in Bellingham, Washington with her husband, their son, and two cats.  She has been active with PAMLA since 2004 and has chaired two panels, one of which (the Afrofuturism panels last year) was very well regarded and attended — people love that topic. 

Brigitte Prutti is Professor of German and Chair of the German Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her areas of teaching and research encompass 18th to 20th century German and Austrian literature and culture, the history of modern drama, gender studies, and contemporary German-language fiction. More recent publications include a book-length essay on the politics of fame in Thomas Bernhard, a monograph on the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer (Aisthesis 2013), and essays on contemporary literature. She has been an active PAMLA member since the 1990s and regularly presents papers at the annual PAMLA meetings. She has organized several sessions, among them a special panel on Literature and Religion, now a standing session.

Graduate Student Representative Nominees

Daniel Ante-Contreras is a fourth year PhD student in English at the University of California, Riverside. Focusing on 20th century American literature and culture, queer studies, and video game studies, Daniel’s current research involves analyzing how anxieties about technology and youth violence have informed discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries. He anticipates that his dissertation will analyze the way cultural production, especially since the 1980s, has been implicated in and responded to moral panics about adolescents in ways that attempt to construct visions of social futurity. This project would include chapters on the cultural lives of both school shootings and autism. Daniel has attended and presented at PAMLA in 2012 and 2013 and will again in 2014. Last year he started and served as the presiding officer of a PAMLA panel titled “Rethinking/Retheorizing Video Games,” which he is also presiding over for 2014’s conference.

Sarah Whitcomb Lozier is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation research is located at the cross-sections of contemporary literary, visual, performance, and digital arts, centering on the the multi-modality and multi-mediacy of language. She researches art that highlights and plays with the ways language can function as visual, aural, and/or oral material as in, for example, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetries, the use of text as image in late twentieth-century painting, and the interactivity and animation of text in electronic literature and “new media poetry.” Across these multi-disciplinary texts, she is concerned with the ways that denaturalizing our relationship to language as a discursive system of signifying signs allows us to represent and understand conflicting and changing notions of ourselves and our world. Throughout her graduate career, she has presented work at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, and has been participating in the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association (PAMLA) conference every year since 2011. She has a short digital publication entitled “Accessing the (In)Accessible: Considering Digital Databases and Archives,” that was produced as part of the Media Commons’s conversation around the continued presence of the digital divide, and a case study entitled “An #EpicFail #ftw: Changing Civic Discourse through #MyNYPD” that is forthcoming in MIT press’s 2015 Civic Media Reader. Her article entitled “Xenotext or Zoe-text?: Considering the Biopolitical Implications of Christian Bok’s Avant-Garde Poetry” that was presented at the 2013 PAMLA conference in San Diego is currently under review at Configurations.

 Over the 2014-2015 academic year, she is one of the graduate student coordinators of UCR’s Mellon-funded research group Critical Digital Humanities, a group dedicated to critical discussion and research around all issues related to the digital humanities. She is also a student research assistant for the Center for Art and Thought, and an assistant director of UCR’s University Writing Program.