Executive Directorship Changes Hands

A message from PAMLA’s President:

I write with some important news about PAMLA. Professor Salah Khan is stepping down as Executive Director to pursue his scholarly projects. On behalf of the Executive Committee, I thank Salah for his excellent management of the association as well as his inspired leadership. It has been a great pleasure to work with Salah these past several years, and we wish him well in all of his new endeavors.

I am happy to welcome Professor Craig Svonkin, who has been appointed by the Executive Committee to succeed Salah. Craig is already making plans for the association. Here is Craig Svonkin’s sketch:

Craig Svonkin is a dedicated PAMLA member, a lover of academic conferences, a graduate of UC Riverside, and an assistant professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver specializing in American Literature, Children’s Literature, American Poetry, and American Film and Visual Culture. Craig holds the distinction of having oh-so-briefly served on PAMLA’s Executive Committee (November 2008-the Present, when he somehow borrowed a page from Shepherd Mead’s 1952 best-seller How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying to vault himself into PAMLA’s Executive Director’s seat). Craig co-authored New Directions in American Literary Scholarship: 1980-2002 with Emory Elliott, and has published articles including “Melville and the Bible: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, Multivocalism, & Plurality” and “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other, Suiciding the White Male ‘Self'” (Pacific Coast Philology, 2008). Craig grew up in Southern California, where he squandered his youth wandering the streets of Los Angeles and the faux-streets of Disneyland. He is a dedicated fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s meta-museum-a sight of wonder and confusion examined in Craig’s essay “If Only L.A. Had a Soul: Spirituality and Wonder at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.” Despite the lightly flippant tone of this bio, please know that Craig is extremely excited and honored to have been appointed to work on PAMLA’s behalf. For those concerned, please also know that Craig does not habitually speak about himself in the third person.

I look forward to seeing many of you in San Francisco for the next PAMLA conference.

Cordially,
Beverly Voloshin
President, Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
Professor and chair, Department of English Language and Literature, San Francisco State University