Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
Frederick Luis Aldama is an American author, editor, and academic. He is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab at the University of Texas, Austin. At UT Austin is also affiliate faculty in Latino Media Arts & Studies and LGBTQ Studies. He continues to hold the title Distinguished University Professor as Adjunct Professor at The Ohio State University. He teaches courses on Latinx pop culture, especially focused on the areas of comics, tv, film, animation, and video games in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film at UT Austin. At the Ohio State University he was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher as well as recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He was also founder and director of the award-winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research and founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. In has been inducted into the National Academy of Teachers, National Cartoonist Society, the Texas Institute of Letters, the Ohio State University's Office of Diversity & Inclusion Hall of Fame, and as board of directors for The Academy of American Poets. He sits on the boards for American Library Association Graphic Novel and Comics Round Table, BreakBread Literacy Project, and Ad Astra Media. He is founder and director of UT Austin's BIPOC POP: Comics, Gaming & Animation Arts Expo & Symposium.
Ann Pancake is an American fiction writer and essayist. She has published a novel, short stories and essays describing the people and atmosphere of Appalachia, often from the first-person perspective of those living there. While fictional, her short stories contribute to an understanding of poverty in the 20th century, and well as the historical roots of American and rural poverty. Much of Pancake's writing also focuses on the destruction caused by natural resource extraction, particularly in Appalachia, and the lives of the people affected.
West Virginia University Press is a university press and publisher in the state of West Virginia. A part of West Virginia University, the press publishes books and journals with a particular emphasis on Appalachian studies, history, higher education, the social sciences, and interdisciplinary books about energy, environment, and resources. The press also has a small but highly regarded program in fiction and creative nonfiction, including Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, winner of the 2020/21 Story Prize, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. John Warner wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "If you are wondering what the odds are of a university press book winning three major awards, being a finalist for a fourth, and going to a series on a premium network, please know that this is the only example." In 2021, another of WVU Press's works of fiction, Jim Lewis's Ghosts of New York, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. WVU Press also collaborates on digital publications, notably West Virginia History: An Open Access Reader.
Lila Abu-Lughod is a Palestinian-American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics and the politics of memory.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his pioneering work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).
Catherine M. Sama is a professor of Italian at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on Early Modern and 18th-Century Italian Women Writers, Correspondence Networks, The Italian Enlightenment, Italian Women Artists, and Gender Studies. In 2013 she was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship. She also serves as a board member of the URI Center for the Humanities. She has edited the work and written a biography of the 18th-century Italian writer Elisabetta Caminèr Turra.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Electronic Book Review (ebr) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal with emphasis on the digital. Founded in 1995 by Joseph Tabbi and Mark Amerika, the journal was one of the first to devote a lasting web presence to the discussion of literature, theory, criticism, and the arts.
Kathleen Woodward is an American academic. She is a Lockwood Professor in Humanities and in English at the University of Washington and has been the Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. Her areas of specialization include 20th-century American literature and culture; discourse of the emotions; technology and science studies; and age studies; digital humanities; and gender, women, and sexuality studies. She is working on risk in the context of globalization and population aging. Her writing talks about the invisibility status of older women and she advocates for an arena of visibility.
Kirsten Saxton is a professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California where she is also the director of the MA of English.
Francesca Ammon is an assistant professor in the City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation departments at the University of Pennsylvania. An urban historian, she focuses on changes to the built environment over time. Recently, her work has centered around the urban renewal period in the mid-twentieth century.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks is an American literary scholar. She is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia and former President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. She specializes in eighteenth-century English Literature and also writes cultural criticism on varied subjects such as boredom, gossip, and feminism. "With remarkable breadth of reference, Spacks has written more extensively than any other feminist critic on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English narrative".
Felicity A. Nussbaum is Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include 18th-century literature and culture, critical theory, gender studies and postcolonial and Anglophone studies. In the past she taught at Syracuse University and Indiana University South Bend.
Keisha N. Blain is an American writer and scholar of American and African-American history. She is Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. Blain served as president of the African American Intellectual History Society from 2017 to 2021. Blain is associated with the Charleston Syllabus social media movement.
Suzanne Keen is a literary scholar, feminist critic, a poet, author and academic administrator. She was W. M. Keck Foundation Presidential Chair and Professor of English at Scripps College, the women's college of the Claremont Colleges. Previously she served as Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. She became president of Scripps College on July 1, 2022. Dr. Keen announced her resignation from Scripps College effective March 20, 2023. Her resignation letter states she intends to return to teaching at Scripps after a sabbatical on the East Coast to be near elderly family members.
Catherine Elizabeth Rigby is a scholar in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities.
