It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of our recent elections:
Stacy Alaimo and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen will serve as co-presidents, Andrea Knutson and Julietta Singh will be the new members of the Executive Council, and Kristin George Bagdanov will be the (junior) Graduate Student Liaison. All terms begin on January 1, 2018.
Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. She is a founding member of the MLA Forum on Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities and served as its first chair. Alaimo was a co-founder of the cross-disciplinary minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies at UTA, and served as its director for five years. She is the author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), which won the ASLE book award for ecocriticism; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016).
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is currently a Professor of English and the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI) at the George Washington University. He was recently appointed to the post of Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, beginning in July, 2018. He is a founding member of the MLA Forum on Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, and also founded the group blog In the Middle, which focuses on medieval studies, activism, and the humanities more generally. His book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman won the 2017 René Wellek Prize for the best book in comparative literature. He has also co-authored and edited a number of recent books, including Earth (published in the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), Elemental Ecocriticism (2015), Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (2013) and Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (2017).
Andrea Knutson is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, and she received her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her teaching and research focus on Early American Literature, Puritan Conversion Narrative, American Romanticism, and Philosophy and Literature. She is the author of American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James ( New York: Oxford UP, 2011).
Julietta Singh is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond. Her writing and teaching are situated at the intersections of postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2017). Her new academic book project, On the Verge: Experiments in Extinction and Ethecology, evokes radical ecologies and counter-intuitive ways of learning extinction through readings of performance art, literature, craft, video and film. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in leading cultural theory journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Symploke, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Kristin George Bagdanov will be the (junior) Graduate Student Liaison. She earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Colorado State University and is currently a PhD student in English Literature at U.C. Davis, where she studies 20th century and contemporary ecopoetics. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of the 2016 Henry David Thoreau fellowship at Vermont Studio Center and is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine.
We are also grateful to the many excellent candidates who ran for office but were not elected this time around: Greta Gaard, Kathryn Aalto, Brianna Burke, Sara Crosby, Barbara Eckstein, Mika Kennedy, Katherine Greulich, Jacob Price, Derya Agis, Md. Amir Hossein, David Rodriguez, and Carl Thompson.
ASLE would not function without the dedicated work of these many volunteers. Please consider putting yourself forward for elected or appointed office in the next election. ASLE’s mission is more urgent than ever, and among the rewards of our work is the excellent company we keep!
