Dear Edith Wharton Society Members,
Please vote for two (2) of the following candidates for the open Member-at-Large positions. The two candidates who receive the most votes will serve 2017-19 terms. Voting will be open until April 15, 2017 at 5:00 pm (Pacific). Below are the candidates’ biographies. Please use the link at the bottom of this message to submit your ballot. Many thanks to the candidates for being willing to serve!
Tricia M. Farwell is an associate professor of advertising and public relations in the School of Journalism at Middle Tennessee State University. She recently completed terms as MTSU’s Faculty Senate President and the Faculty Regent on the Tennessee Board of Regents. She holds a doctorate in English from Arizona State University where her studies focused on romance in Edith Wharton’s works. Her research and teaching assignments include both English and Mass Communication. Her recent conference presentations include situating Edith Wharton in the tradition of war reporting and exploring Wharton’s public relations efforts to raise relief funds. Farwell is the author of Love and Death in the Works of Edith Wharton. Her current research interests include an examination of advertising of Wharton’s novels and furthering the idea of Wharton as a war reporter.
Anna Girling: I am in the latter stages of a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, in the United Kingdom. My thesis is about antimodernism, economic thinking and the representation of exchange in Edith Wharton’s writing (particularly focusing on her early career). I have been a member of the Edith Wharton Society since early on in my doctoral studies – and I am incredibly grateful for the advice, encouragement, support, enthusiasm, and friendship offered to me by both its individual members and the Society as a whole, and would like to continue this tradition by helping to offer the same welcome to other students and new members of the Society. I have presented at a number events organised by (or affiliated to) the Society; these include a symposium on The Custom of the Country (organised by Dr. Laura Rattray and Dr. Bill Blazek at Liverpool Hope in 2013), an EWS ALA panel (in 2015), and the EWS Wharton in Washington conference (June 2016) – and I will be part of a Wharton panel organised by Dr. Virginia Ricard and Dr. Paul Ohler at the SSAWW conference later this year. Additionally, I was lucky enough to win the Edith Wharton Society Beginning Scholar Prize in 2015, for my article, “‘Agrope Among Alien Forces’: Alchemical Transformations and Capitalist Transactions in Edith Wharton’s The Touchstone” – and this went on to be published in the Edith Wharton Review. A second article of mine was published by the EWR in 2016; this was about my discovery of letters between Wharton and the publisher John Murray at the National Library of Scotland – and an article about this correspondence was also published by the Times Literary Supplement (and picked up by the Wall Street Journal) in 2015. I am putting myself forward as a member of the EWS board for two main reasons. Firstly, the work of the Society has been vital in my own development as a graduate student, and I would like to be part of supporting and encouraging other students and early career researchers working on Wharton. Secondly, while Wharton was American, she spent much of her life in Europe and was a truly cosmopolitan, transatlantic figure; I think it is important that this is reflected in the make-up of the Society’s board, and in its activities. At the moment, the board is almost entirely North American; were I elected, I would be able to bring a European perspective to the Society’s work, and would hope to increase its membership and profile on both sides of the Atlantic – and especially among students (both graduate and undergraduate) and scholars in the early stages of their careers.
Margaret Jay Jessee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she teaches courses on Women’s and Gender Studies and American Literature, including a recent graduate seminar on corporeality in Henry James and Edith Wharton. Among her other publications, her article “Trying it On: Narration and Masking in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence” appears in JML: Journal of Modern Literature, and her essay “Wharton’s ‘Matter that Matters’: Bodies as Agential Objects and Objects as Agential Bodies,” an extension of her presentation at the 2016 Wharton in Washington conference, will appear in Critical Insights: Edith Wharton, edited by Myrto Drizou and forthcoming with Salem Press. In addition to her own scholarly work, she has experience on the editing side as the former assistant editor of Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literatures, Culture, and Theory, a position that included organizing the annual Arizona Quarterly Symposium, a 3-day event with presentations by national scholars of American Literature.
Margaret (Meg) Toth is an Associate Professor of English and the director of the film studies minor at Manhattan College. Her research interests include late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. literature, film, and adaptation studies. Her scholarship on Edith Wharton has been published in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies and the Journal of Narrative Theory and in the collections Edith Wharton in Context (ed. Laura Rattray) and Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (ed. Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando). Her current book project, After Innocence: Edith Wharton and Post-War Writings on Art and Faith, is an intertextual study that focuses on the figure of the artist and forms of spirituality in Wharton’s late works.
Please use this link to cast your ballot:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZFHBTT6
Thanks and happy spring,
Jennifer Haytock
Secretary, Edith Wharton Society
