Edith Wharton Society Secretary and Member-at-Large Ballot
2019-21 Term
[EWS Members will soon be receiving an email from Jennifer Haytock containing this information and a link for voting. Here are the candidate biographies for the election.]
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When you receive the email link, please vote to affirm or not affirm the candidate for Secretary and candidates for Member-at-Large (two positions open). Voting will be open until October 8, 2018.
Secretary
Myrto Drizou is Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where she teaches American and transatlantic literature. She received her PhD in American and Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught at Valdosta State University and the University of Illinois at Springfield in the US. She is associate co-editor of the Edith Wharton Review and editor of the volume Edith Wharton for the series Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018). She has also served as book review editor of the Edith Wharton Review and as membership coordinator for the Edith Wharton Society. Her work on Wharton has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019); Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties (Palgrave, 2016); 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies (2016); and Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (Salem Press, 2015). Other published work includes essays on Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry Adams, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She is currently editing a special issue on the global dimensions of American literary naturalism (forthcoming in The New Centennial Review) and is working on a comparative study of American and Greek literatures, in which Wharton is placed alongside early twentieth-century Greek writers, such as Alexandros Papadiamantis and Konstantinos Theotokis. As an Americanist scholar of Greek descent whose work has matured through the cross-cultural experience of teaching in both the US and abroad, Myrto is invested in sustaining the international scope of the EWS and supporting the network of Whartonians across the world.
Members-at-Large
Katie Ahern, PhD candidate in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland.
I hold a BA, and a Masters in American Literature and Film from University College Cork. My PhD research examines representations of marginal figures in urban space in twentieth-century American literature, with a particular focus on on the writing of Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska. I am an active member of the American Studies community in Ireland and served for two years as the Postgraduate and Early Career representative on the Executive Committee of the Irish Association for American Studies. During my tenure, I organised two symposia dedicated to postgraduate and early career researchers, developed strong links with colleagues in the British Association for American Studies, and helped to create a vibrant network for postgraduates and early career researchers in Ireland. I am interested in fostering a more inclusive environment for postgraduates, ECRs, and those who are not in traditional academic roles. I believe I can play a part in increasing participation in Wharton studies, particularly here in Europe, which would encourage diversity in the discourse around the work of an author so dedicated to her trans-Atlantic identity.
Rita Bode, Ph.D. (University of Toronto), is professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her research interests center on women writers of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. She has presented at several Edith Wharton conferences, and her article on Edith Wharton’s and George Eliot’s historical novels appears in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. Other publications include work on Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, and Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery, a contemporary of Wharton’s. She is a past president of the Northeast Modern Language Association, and was the VP of Organizational Matters and Conference Director of the 2015 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference. She is very pleased to be nominated for a member-at-large position of the Edith Wharton Society.
