MLA PANELS 2021 American Literature Society at MLA 2021 American Literature Society at One Hundred Thursday, 7 January 2021 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM In 2021, the American Literature Society will celebrate its one hundredth year of existence. Panelists speak on the history, present, and possible futures for this historic organization, thinking critically about what the ALS has made possible and what it might do next. Participants: Katherine L. Chiles (Chair ALS), U of Tennessee, Knoxville Carrie T. Bramen, U at Buffalo, State U of New York Gene Jarrett, New York U Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt U Andreá N. Williams, Ohio State U, Columbus Revolution in the Ruin: Historicism and New Horizons for Black Writers during the Cold War Saturday, 9 January 2021 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM Crystal S. Rudds (Chair), U of Utah “William Gardner Smith’s Last of the Conquerors and the History of the Novel” Kenneth W. Warren, U of Chicago “Life as It Is, or Otherwise, in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” Christopher Freeburg, U of Illinois, Urbana “Old Nubia, New Egypt, and the Boundaries of Blackness” Sophia Azeb, U of Chicago “William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and the Historiographic Dilemma of Anticolonial Solidarity” Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford U (fb)

American Literature Society Election News! Elections: In accordance with 501.3c rules, we are announcing this year’s election two weeks in advance. Each year we elect the new ALS Chair from among the senior advisor council members and two new Advisory Council Members. Many thanks to our nominations committee (Alisha Gaines [chair], Yogita Goyal, and Chris Freeburg) for your work this year! Voting will begin on December 9, 2020. Nominees (biographies below) Advisory Council Chair: Helane Adams Androne, Professor of English and Chair, Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies at Miami University Alisha Gaines, Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English at Florida State University Advisory Council Member (two new members): Janaka Bowman Lewis, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Interim Director of the Center for the Study of the New South, and Associate Professor of English at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Cody Marrs, Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, Clemson University Stefan Wheelock, Associate Professor of early American and African American literature, George Mason University Nominee Biographies Advisory Council Chair: Helane Adams Androne is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies at Miami University where she teaches African American literature, Latinx literatures, and speculative fiction. She is the editor of Multiethnic American Literatures: Essays for Teaching Context and Culture, a rare text on teaching American ethnic literatures. Her most recent book, Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction examines the sacred in texts by Chicana authors Ana Castillo, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Denise Chavez, and is part of the Literatures of the Americas Series, edited by Norma Cantú for Palgrave/MacMillan Publishers. Helane's research focus is on the emergence, use, and validation of the sacred, using ritual studies to learn from texts that intersect the real and imagined. Her current project examines the sacred in black futurisms, including how authors project the sacred as part of a larger activist methodology for enhancing community and belonging, expanding love relationships, and the survival of climate trauma. Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with University of North Carolina Press (Spring 2017). The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. Black for a Dayconstructs a genealogy of white liberals who temporarily "become" Black under the alibi of racial empathy. Her most recent article, “Passing for Tan: Snooki and the Grotesque Reality of Ethnicity” is in the edited collection, Neo-passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow, published by University of Illinois Press in 2018. Her next book project is about memory, public history, and transatlantic “slave play.” Her interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature and culture, Black queer theory, media and performance studies, narratives of passing, and New Southern studies. Advisory Council Member: Janaka Bowman Lewis, Ph.D. is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Interim Director of the Center for the Study of the New South, and Associate Professor of English at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches courses in gender and African American literature (specifically narratives by and about Black women and girls). She is the author of several book chapters and articles on 19th Century African American women's writing and material culture, a monograph Freedom Narratives of African American Women (McFarland 2017), and two children's books (Brown All Over and Bold Nia Marie Passes the Test). Her current monograph in progress is on representations of black girlhood in American literature and film. Cody Marrs is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), a book about the primal narratives that have shaped how Americans remember the Civil War. Not Even Past has been featured in Time Magazine, nominated for a National Book Award, and reviewed in venues such as the New York Journal of Books and the Civil War Book Review. It is a kind of sequel to his first book, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2015; Choice Outstanding Academic Title), a monograph about four writers—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass—who not only lived through the Civil War but also wrote about it, and kept writing about it, for a long time afterwards. He is also the editor of The New Melville Studies(Cambridge UP, 2019), the coeditor of Timelines of American Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), and the General Editor of American Literature in Transition, 1770-1910, a four-volume series forthcoming from Cambridge UP. A recipient of the Hennig Cohen Prize in Melville Studies, he has published more than a dozen articles in journals such as American Literature and American Literary History. He currently serves on the editorial boards for ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, Clemson University, teaches and writes about contemporary American literature and theories of race, empire, law, and international migration. She serves as lead editor of Humanity journal on behalf of the editorial collective for 2020–2022. Her book, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham), examines how Black and Latinx narrative fiction contends with the violence inhering across categories of the legal person. Salvage Work won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present annual book prize and received honorable mention from the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough award. She is working on two book projects: an edited volume, “Diaspora and Literary Studies” (Cambridge), and a monograph about contemporary literature and international border systems. She has served on conference organizing committees, executive committees, editorial teams, or advisory boards involving American and postcolonial literary studies. Teaching at Clemson University has underscored the relationship between American literature and ongoing racial projects of land capture, labor exploitation, policing, and migration control. As a member of the ALS Advisory Council, Naimou would devote her energy to helping scholars and students of American literature pursue their work freely and vibrantly and in more just teaching and living conditions. Stefan Wheelock: I received my PhD from Brown University and am currently an associate professor of early American and African American literature at George Mason University. My first book, Barbaric Culture and Black Critique, published by the University of Virginia Press (2015), examines the ways black polemical and autobiographical writers characterized race slavery, terror, and their ideological consequences for North Atlantic civilization and progress during the early national period. I have new work appearing in the forthcoming anthology African American Literature in Transition, Volume 2 and in the journal, American Literary History, respectively. My current research examines the effects lynching and mob rule have had on conceptions of American civic and religious identity at the dawning of the twentieth century; and to this end, I have recently published an Op-Ed piece on Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American empathy in a blog series on Africana women’s political philosophy. I believe that studies in literature have the capacity to direct our public conversations, speak truth to power, and frame how we imagine justice and empathy, as we reckon with (and respond to) the crises of our current moment. If elected, I would advocate for the kind of scholarship which underscores the ways literature decodes as well as redresses social ills. (fb)