Executive Director
Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Craig Svonkin grew up Southern California, where he received his B.A. from USC, his M.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He is a writer of flash fiction and prose poetry fragments, a Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and a dedicated fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s meta-museum discussed in Craig’s essay “If Only L.A. Had a Soul: Spirituality and Wonder at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.” He has had the pleasure of serving as PAMLA’s Executive Director since March 2009.
Craig’s published essays include “Postmodern Documentary: The Return of the Magus on Video” (2016), “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney” (2012), “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering” (2010), “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” (2011), “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self’” (2008), and “Melville and the Bible: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, Multivocalism, & Plurality” (2001).
Craig is the co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (2023) with Steven Gould Axelrod. He has also co-authored “Introduction: The Metafamily” (2018, with Steven Gould Axelrod), “A New Parliament of Fouls: The 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Lissa Paul and Kate Pendlebury), “Old Guard→Avant-Garde→ Kindergarde: The 2014 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Lissa Paul and Donelle Ruwe), “Outside the Inside the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Michael Joseph and Donelle Ruwe) and New Directions in American Literary Scholarship: 1980-2002 (with Emory Elliott), and co-edited the symposium “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books” (with Charles Hatfield) and the special issue of Pacific Coast Philology (volume 53, no. 2, Fall 2018) on “The Metafamily” (with Steven Gould Axelrod).
Please email Craig Svonkin with any questions or suggestions about PAMLA: [email protected] (or feel free to call: 626-354-7526).
Information Director
Sonia Christensen, Independent Scholar
Sonia Christensen holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Columbia in the City of New York. Her work has been published in New Pop Lit, Confrontation Magazine, and First Stop Fiction, as well as in other independent magazines. In addition to serving as PAMLA’s Assistant Director, she works as a Social Media Specialist at Lauritzen Gardens in Omaha and is currently working on a novel called My Beautiful Future.
Communications Director
David John Boyd, University of Glasgow
David John Boyd is the Communications Director of PAMLA. He received his B.A. in English Literature and European History at Metropolitan State University of Denver (2011), his M.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Glasgow (2012), and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Text/Image Studies) from the University of Glasgow (2019). David has been a member of PAMLA since 2012 and became the Assistant Director of PAMLA in 2017 until 2022. David is also a post-doctoral research fellow of the Stirling Maxwell Centre at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses include affect theory, historical representation and adaptation in film, film-philosophy and global screen cultures. His recent works include ReFocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Edinburgh University Press, January 2025), The Comics Art of Frank Quitely: From Glasgow to Gotham (Leuven University Press, forthcoming 2025), Deleuze and Global Animation: Estranged Images (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026), and he is also a co-editor for the Journal of Chinese Cinema regarding obscure women film-workers in Chinese cinema (Routledge, forthcoming 2027). He has also published on the philosophies of history, gender, queerness, embodiment and temporality within transnational film and visual culture.
Registration Co-Chair
Andrew Howe, La Sierra University
Andrew Howe earned his PhD in 2005 from the University of California, Riverside, where he was fortunate enough to work with amazing professors, notably Steven Axelrod and Katherine Kinney. During that time, he was ushered into the world of conferencing at PAMLA. Prior, he earned his bachelor’s degree at La Sierra University, where for the last twenty years he has taught in its history department. He has also served as director of La Sierra’s honors program and edited the institution’s centennial history book. Courses taught cover a wide spectrum of content areas in film studies, popular culture, and American history. Recent scholarship includes journal articles on themed motels during the post-World War II period and the resonance of Swamp Thing with the environmental turbulence of the 1980s.
Pacific Coast Philology Book Editor
Lina Geriguis, Cabrillo College
Lina Geriguis received her PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. She has served as a book review editor for Pacific Coast Philology and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal since 2010. Her research projects and publications explore questions of disability, environment, race, and ethnicity in American literature. Her essay, “Rich in Pathological Instances: Disability in the Early Reception Theory of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome” received the Edith Wharton Society Award for a Beginning Scholar. Her book chapter, “Ecoliterary and Edith Wharton,” is forthcoming in Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction. Her teaching expertise includes multicultural literatures of the U.S., American Realism and Naturalism, American Gothic, literary theory and criticism, college composition, and ESL. From 2012 to 2019, Geriguis was a lecturer at Chapman University. Currently, she teaches at Cabrillo College.
PAMLA Graduate Assistant
Evan Krikorian, California State University, Los Angeles
Evan Krikorian is a Master’s student of English at California State University, Los Angeles and a 2023-2024 Sally Casanova scholar for the CSU system-wide predoctoral fellowship. He has also received his B.A. in English Education, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric & Composition at California State University, Long Beach. Evan specializes his graduate research on the intersection of digital humanities and pedagogy, focusing on artificial intelligence and augmented reality as a means of liberating disability studies within the compositional classroom. In his free time, Evan tinkers with all forms of analogue, exercising physical media into an interactable, creative space. His upcoming project, reIMAGEination: a series of scholars, constructs a multimodal display of class background, individuality, and the role of technology into one strikingly contemplative exhibit.
PAMLA Graduate Assistant
Angelica Ortiz, California State University, Los Angeles
Angelica Ortiz will be a first-year English Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside in the fall of 2024. She graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Chicanx studies in 2019. She then earned her master’s degree in English from the California State University, Los Angeles in May 2024. Her scholarly interests include multi-ethnic U.S. literature from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as queer and feminist theories emphasizing race, class, and gender. After completing her doctoral degree, Angelica plans to pursue a tenure track position teaching at a CSU or UC institution.
PAMLA Graduate Assistant
Emily Aguilar, California State University, Los Angeles
Emily Aguilar is a Master’s student in English at the California State University, Los Angeles, as well as a 2024 recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 2020 with a Bachelor’s in English. Aguilar’s scholarly research includes feminist abolition, literary trauma studies, and ethnicity, drawing a specific focus on speculative fiction and fantasy genres. Aside from writing and teaching, Aguilar is passionate about community welfare, uphill hiking, and buying comfortable leather boots.
PAMLA Graduate Assistant
Max Rothschild, California State University, Los Angeles
Max Rothschild is a graduate student in English Literature at California State University, Los Angeles. He is also a Teaching Associate and Graduate Assistant. He is primarily interested in 20th–century fiction, theory, and poetry, and hopes to pursue a PhD after he completes his MA.