PAMLA 2016 Election

We wish to thank all of our fine nominees for running for PAMLA office. And congratulations to the following new PAMLA Executive Committee members who were elected:

Stanley Orr, University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, PAMLA 2nd Vice President

Karin Bauer, McGill University, PAMLA Executive Committee

Andrew Howe, La Sierra University, PAMLA Executive Committee

Raymond Hong Jig Rim, University of California, Riverside, Graduate Student Representative

 

The PAMLA 2016 Election ballot will be emailed on October 3 to all members who are current in dues for the 2016 calendar year.  Voting must be completed by midnight, October 17, 2016. If you were expecting a ballot but did not receive an email, please contact [email protected].

The time has come for PAMLA elections for new members of our Executive Committee. Your PAMLA Executive Committee is the body that makes major decisions regarding PAMLA on a day-to-day basis, helping to plan the future of PAMLA so that we may continue to serve our members’ needs. We require your assistance in choosing the best officers possible. Happily, the Nominating Committee, lead by its chair Heidi Schlipphacke, has come up with an amazing slate of potential officers. Please take a moment to read through the candidate’s statements and to cast your vote. You will vote for one candidate for 2nd VP, one for Graduate Student Representative, and two for Executive Committee member. The 2nd VP moves up automatically to 1st VP and then to President in consecutive years. The Graduate Student Rep serves a two-year term. And the two EC members who receive the most votes will each serve three-year terms. I’d like to thank and acknowledge the fine work of the Nominating Committee (Chair Heidi Schlipphacke, and members Cheryl Edelson and Lorely French), and most of all the willingness of our candidates to serve PAMLA. Now, let the voting commence!

 Best, and happy voting, Craig Svonkin, PAMLA Executive Director

** PAMLA BALLOT AND CANDIDATE STATEMENTS ** 

PAMLA 2016 Nominees for Executive Committee: (You may vote for two)

Karin Bauer

Karin Bauer is professor of German Studies at McGill University and editor of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Publications include Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner (SUNY Press, 1999), Everybody Talks About the Weather: We don’t (Seven Stories, 2008), special journal issues on Herta Müller, the Red Army Faction, and Berlin, and articles in the areas of critical theory and contemporary German literature and culture. An edited volume on Topographies of the New Berlin (Berghahn Publisher) and a special issue of Seminar on Surveillance (co-edited with Andrea Gogröf) are forthcoming. Currently, she is working on actual and virtual literary publics and a manuscript on Ulrike Meinhof.

Karin has served as chair of the Department of German Studies and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from 2000-14 and as president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (2002-04). She has been a member of PAMLA since she was a graduate student at the University of Washington in the late 1980s. At PAMLA, she found a warm and supportive community of mentors and scholars with whom she has collaborated on various projects. She has delivered many papers at PAMLA and organized and chaired several sessions. As a member of the executive board, Karin’s objective would be to work with members and the executive team to advance PAMLA’s goals, plan upcoming conferences, debate new initiatives, and increase graduate student participation and support. She is committed to maintaining and enhancing PAMLA’s wonderful spirit of community so that the atmosphere of collaboration, collegiality, and genial intellectual exchange may inspire future generations of scholars.

Andrew Howe

Andrew Howe is a Professor in the Department of History at La Sierra University, and also director of La Sierra’s Honors Program. He earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Riverside; his appointment at La Sierra is in American Studies. Andrew teaches courses in popular culture, film studies, and cultural history. Recent scholarship includes the following book chapters: “Now Voyagers!: Time Travel and the Culture Wars of the 1980s” in Time Travel Television (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); “Partial Rehabilitation: Task Force and the Case of Billy Mitchell” in ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves (Edinburgh University Press, 2016); and “Victims & Warriors: Domestic Abuse Films from Three Cultures” in Women, Violence, and Resistance (University of Tunis, forthcoming 2016). Andrew is currently working on several different publications involving the role of Manifest Destiny and the frontier in the popular imagination: the narrative function of burial and cemeteries in the Western genre; the transformation of the Mohican myth in Avatar; and metaphors involving the 19th century extinction of the Passenger Pigeon.

Personal Statement:

My involvement with PAMLA extends back to the early days of my graduate education. Fairly new to conferencing, I nervously attended the 2000 meetings held at UCLA, worried that my paper might find a difficult reception. What I found instead was a supportive network of colleagues from different disciplines and institutions, a community built upon the sharing of ideas. It has been my pleasure, since that time, to present numerous conference papers, organize panels, serve on the conference planning committee for the 2014 conference in Riverside, and serve as a referee for PAMLA’s journal, Pacific Coast Philology. If elected, I look forward to contributing to the continued strength and vitality of PAMLA as a member of its executive board, making use of the experience gained from having served as a department chair and as director of my university’s Honors Program to help plan upcoming conferences, foster community, and embrace and promote new initiatives. I would work hard to give back to an organization that has done so much for me.

Leonard Michael Koff

Leonard Michael Koff is an Associate of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) and has degrees from Columbia (B.A., M.A.) and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.). He’s developed and taught courses at UCLA, on campus and online, including Homer and James Joyce, the Literature of Existentialism, Technology and Human Values, and Banned Books, and courses in Comparative Literature’s humanities sequence.  He’s lectured in this country and in Europe on such subjects as literature and philosophy, the shared texts of Western religious identity (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas, and he’s spoken twice on distance learning at Salahaddin University-Erbil for the Ministry of Higher Education, Iraqi Kurdistan. Leonard has written Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (University of California Press) and published essays on medieval literature and medievalism; his essays on Chaucer and Gower appear in MLA’s “teaching literature” series. His recent essay, “Adaptation as Translation,” is forthcoming in The Medieval Translator. Leonard is co-editor of The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, for which he wrote on the Clerk’s Tale, and co-editor of two volumes from Brill:  Mobs in which he has an essay on Elias Canetti, and Time: Sense, Space, Structure that includes his essay “No-Time in Non-Places.”

Personal Statement:

I’ve participated actively and happily in PAMLA — it provides an impressive array of forums for sharing ideas, and I’ve benefited greatly from conversations with PAMLA colleagues. I’d welcome the chance as an Executive Committee member to work for strong and collegial exchanges among scholars and teachers nationwide. A special session, for example, on banned books and the development of the canon, an interdisciplinary session, would encourage, it seems to me, important discussion of the changing maps of cultural value. I would also like, as a member of the Executive Committee, to help keep Pacific Coast Philology the engaged journal that it is.  As for my participation in PAMLA to date:  I’ve organized the “Ancient-Modern” session for PAMLA 2014 and the “Bible in Literature” special session for PAMLA 2015 and 2016.  My talk at PAMLA 2014 on the Kurdish court poem, Mem û Zîn, is forthcoming from Harrassowitz Verlag (Wiesbaden).

Peter Schulman

Peter Schulman is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue University Press, 2003) as well as Le dernier livre du siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), and he has recently translated  a variety of literary works (meditation on waves by Marie Darrieussecq, On Waves (VVV editions, 2014); Ying Chen’s Impressions of Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Jules Verne’s last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (University of Nebraska Press. 2012); Suburban Beauty by poet Jacques Reda (VVV editions, 2009); as well as Adamah by Céline Zins (Gival Press, 2010). He is also translating Jules Verne’s unpublished plays, A Thousand and Second Night and Other Plays. He is currently co-editor in chief with Josh Weinstein of a new journal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy and the Arts and is at work on a book on French filmmaker Alain Resnais for the University of Mississippi Press. Peter is President and Producer of the Haberdasher Theater in NYC and Columbus, and is at work on a documentary titled American Cinemathèque with director Robin Paez. He has organized international film festivals and an inaugural Virginia Beach-Quebec Poetry Festival.  He was a member of the MLA Executive Committee of the Division of Twentieth-Century French Literature from 2004 to 2009 and has held a seat on the executive committee of the Societé des Professeurs Français et Francophone (SPFFA) since 2001. He is currently serves on the editorial boards of five journals, including The French Review, Nouvelles Francographies, and French Studies in Southern Africa.

Personal Statement:

I am truly appreciative of the creative and broad scope of PAMLA and its openness to new voices and research. I have deep bonds to the Pacific Northwest and Southern California, but I also appreciate how PAMLA attracts scholars and contributors from around the world. It is this synergy of international reach and local examinations that make PAMLA so unique and dynamic. I have also reviewed articles for Pacific Coast Philology, a journal that is an important and proud part of the PAMLA mission, and I have enjoyed organizing panels and giving papers at the annual conference on subjects as diverse as the Brooklyn Dodgers or Jacques Rivette. I want to see PAMLA continue to nurture young and more established scholars alike with areas of expertise that span PAMLA’s rich subjects of inquiry.

Nominees for Second VP (Vote for one candidate)

Jeffrey Gray

Jeffrey Gray is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, where he teaches courses in American poetry and poetics, literary theory, and postcolonial literature.  He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (U Georgia P, 2005), and editor or co-editor of several volumes, including The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry (Greenwood, 2005), The New American Poetry of Engagement (McFarland, 2012), and The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement (U Michigan P, 2016). His articles on poetry, American culture, travel, Caribbean literature, and immigration have appeared insuch journals as Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, Chronicle of Higher Education, Profession, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Papers on Language and Literature, and Pacific Coast Philology, among others. His poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Atlantic, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, and others.  He is also the translator of two novels by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, The African Shore (Yale UP, 2014) and Chaos (forthcoming 2017). He is the recipient of Fulbright and NEH fellowships, a Geraldine R Dodge fellowship in poetry, a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and other awards.  He was born in Seattle, Washington, and has lived in Asia, the South Pacific, Europe, and Latin America. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Washington, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside.  

Personal Statement:

I have been a PAMLA member since 1993, when I gave my first paper, and when the organization was still called The Philological Association of the Pacific Coast. My most recent PAMLA paper was in 2014.  One of the many in between was given as an invited speaker for the annual forum in 2012 (“Roberto Bolaño, Juárez, and the Future of Nativism”). I also served on the executive board from 2009 to 2011.  Thus it has been more than twenty years since I have been participating in PAMLA, which, during that time, has grown a great deal and happily continues to draw scholars from all over the world. My principal academic focus is U.S. poetry and literary theory, but as a Spanish speaker and a translator who lived several years in Latin America—and as someone who currently conducts a study-abroad program to Italy–I share what I perceive to be an ongoing concern among PAMLA members in stressing the importance of language programs, of travel, border-crossing, forging international scholarly alliances, and interdisciplinarity.  These emphases are necessary in themselves but also as part of the larger need to address the decline of the humanities in the United States, which in turn devolves from changes in North American society and from distinct political forces. As vice president, I would want to find ways that PAMLA might address the erosion of the humanities in higher education if not also to enhance access to humanities programs on the part of students who have been bypassed or misdirected.

Stanley Orr

Hailing from Riverside, California, Stanley Orr is Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Division at the University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, where he teaches courses in writing, literature, and screen studies. Orr earned a B.A. in English at U.C. Riverside and a Ph.D. in English at UCLA. He has published a number of essays in critical anthologies as well as articles in journals such as American Quarterly, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Orr’s book, Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir (The Ohio State University Press, 2010), charts a trajectory of the noir ethos from fin de siècle adventure through postmodernist parody and revision. This study has been recognized for its distinctive situation of hard-boiled fiction and film noir within the context of colonial discourse. Orr also serves as a co-editor of The Pearson Custom Library: Introduction to Literature. At present, Orr is writing a book on the teleplays of Pasifika dramatist John Kneubuhl. In his latest publication—“‘Welcome to the Fabled South’: John Kneubuhl’s Global Southern Gothic, 1959-1966” (forthcoming in Small Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive [Louisiana State UP, 2017])—, Orr analyzes a number of the episodes that Kneubuhl contributed to Adventures in Paradise, Thriller, and The Wild Wild West, including innovative adaptations of fiction by William Faulkner, Robert E. Howard, and Cornell Woolrich.

Personal Statement:

Since 2005, I have enjoyed various roles with the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. In addition to regularly presenting papers at the Annual Conference, I have served as Presiding Officer for many areas, including Adaptation Studies, Oceanic Literatures and Cultures, Travel and Literature, and Western American Literature. I served as a member of the Executive Committee (2009-11) as well as the Editorial Board of PAMLA’s journal, Pacific Coast Philology. In 2014, I joined the Annual Conference Site Committee and I have co-chaired the Site Committees for the PAMLA Conference in Honolulu (2010, 2017). Throughout the last decade, PAMLA has become very important to me as a venue to develop scholarly projects and learn more of my colleagues’ work. To be sure, I also cherish the opportunity to get reacquainted with old friends and make new ones. As a PAMLA officer, I would strive to maintain the traditions of our organization while creating new opportunities for conversation among scholars of adjacent fields. Moreover, as the Chair of UHWO’s Humanities Division— an academic unit that houses English, Pacific languages (Hawaiian, Ilokano, Japanese, Samoan), Hawaiian-Pacific Studies, Creative Media, History, and Philosophy—, I have gained much in the way of knowledge and experience representing our disciplines. This experience will prove valuable as I join PAMLA’s important Humanities advocacy efforts.

Graduate Student Representative (Vote for one candidate)

AJ Burgin

AJ Burgin is a doctoral candidate from the Department of English at the University of Washington. Her dissertation explores the role of violence in twentieth-century British literature and culture. Specifically, she studies the ways in which violence is internalized and redeployed as style. AJ has also written an article on violence and temporality in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow for a forthcoming edited collection on time culture. In her role as Assistant Director of UW’s Expository Writing Program, she also served as an editor the forthcoming Contexts for Inquiry, a textbook for first-year composition, for which she is also a contributing author. She will defend her dissertation in June of 2017.

Personal Statement:

What struck me most about my first experience with PAMLA was the sense of genuine support and enthusiasm for the incredible diversity of scholarship showcased at the conference. Equal parts rigor and camaraderie, PAMLA is distinct in its encouragement of research, networking, and professionalization. As such, I am truly humbled by my nomination to serve on its Executive Committee as a Graduate Student Representative. My dissertation surveys twentieth-century British literature and fashion—from WWI aviators to femme fatales to punks —to argue that violence is inextricable from race, gender, class, and sexuality in modern urban landscapes. PAMLA provided me with an exceptional venue for discussing the early stages of my research process, an experience that led to my becoming Chair of the British Literature and Culture: 20th and 21st Century standing session for the 2015 conference. PAMLA has proven to be incredibly formative to both my research and my own process of professionalization as a graduate student. Should I be elected to the Executive Committee, I would be grateful for the opportunity to continue PAMLA’s mission of furthering and disseminating diverse scholarship as well as to uphold the standards of excellence and inclusiveness that make PAMLA such an incredible organization.

Raymond Hong Jig Rim

“Raymond” Hong Jig Rim is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Riverside and an immigrant from South Korea. His academic focus is Cold War texts, looking especially at the ways religion and capitalism are used culturally to construct hegemonic and subordinate masculinities. His dissertation research seeks to understand how and why masculinity remains potent and, more importantly, how to deconstruct its importance in a neoliberal, Christian society. Using texts drawn from diverse genres, Raymond considers the problematics of queer and female masculinities existing in a competitive, closed circle.

Personal Statement:

Generating dynamic and applicable academic theory is a vital and necessary part of academia. PAMLA has provided a space for me to test and discuss important ideas as a paper presenter and a panel presider, and its members have provided vital input that has helped to shape my academic career. Being of service is also an important part of academia, and I would like my labor to benefit others within PAMLA. Recently, the executive committee has expanded funding for graduate students, and I would work to continue that trend. In addition, I have a strong desire to address mental health and mental wellness issues within the graduate student community and to create dialogue around constructing practical and supportive programs for graduate students.