About

Statement of Interest as Candidate for MLA’s Executive Committee LLC 20th and 21st Century English and Anglophone Literatures

My interest in serving on the Executive Committee for Twentieth and Twenty-First Century English and Anglophone Literatures stems from my ongoing research within these fields and from my commitment to addressing the changing structure of the profession and its effects on knowledge production and scholarly activity. I take the current ideological and financial pressures placed on the humanities and literary studies occurring in the context of ecological and employment crises as challenges to be met on a number of fronts. I will work toward fomenting an inclusive atmosphere in the organization of sessions, panels, and other scholarly activities to encourage dialogue among all ranks of teacher-scholars across racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and class identifications. I am interested in supporting a range of scholarship that foregrounds methodological debates about interpretative practices and ways of reading colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial modernities; scholarship that reflects on the protocols of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary formations in era of an increasingly globalized and digitalized literary studies; and scholarship that considers how these debates, practices, and protocols are shaped by precarities emergent with the contraction of employment opportunities and resources for those working in the fields of twentieth and twenty-first century literatures. I will work to encourage the participation of graduate students, Early Career Researchers, and independent scholars in reimagining the intellectual landscape of the field and its professional practices. Finally, given the unevenly experienced effects of the climate crisis, I will support environmental humanities work that foregrounds marginalized perspectives while reconfiguring the boundaries of humanistic thought through engagement with social sciences, natural sciences, and science and technology research.