EARLY CAREER CONNECTIONS
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In an effort to improve diversity in the field of nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies and support scholars starting out in the profession, C19 is continuing a pilot program initiated in 2020 to connect scholars of color in the early part of academic careers with mentors who have substantial experience. The goal is to create opportunities for mentors to offer guidance in relation to research, writing, and professional involvement. We plan to bring pairs of mentors/mentees together at the C19 conference in Miami and help them develop relationships that will assist the early-career scholars in navigating challenges in the field.
WHO CAN APPLY?
The program is open to scholars of color who have received their PhDs but do not yet have a tenure or the institutional equivalent. Priority will be given to those who have not yet secured a tenure-track job and those who are in their first three years of an academic appointment. Secondarily, we will consider more advanced assistant professors. The mentee must be attending the 2024 Conference in Pasadena.
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WHAT DOES A MENTOR DO?
Mentors can undertake some of the following activities:
1) Help the mentee with a piece of writing. This could include the development of the C19 conference paper into a publishable article or a book chapter. Or perhaps the mentee will request guidance in developing a book prospectus. To this end, the mentor should provide feedback on a draft of writing. We consider the writing process to be the main part of the mentoring relationship.
2) Help the mentee navigate the C19 conference if necessary, including introductions to senior scholars and the development of professional interactions.
3) Agree on regular contact (perhaps once a month) over a period of 12 to 18 months and establish incremental milestones for the writing process.
4) Make suggestions about journals, conferences, or presses that would be appropriate for the mentee’s work.
5) Offer advice about professional matters, such as the job market, navigating the profession as a BIPOC scholar, or alt-academic careers.
WHO MENTORS?
Mentors are both BIPOC and non-BIPOC scholars who are full or advanced associates. See the list for this year’s roster.
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CAN I CHOOSE MY MENTOR?
You can make that request and if at all possible, it will be accommodated. See application for further information.
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WHEN IS THE APPLICATION DUE?
Applications are due by December 15th. Notifications begin in early February.
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WHERE CAN I FIND THE APPLICATION?
The application is a Google Form:
https://forms.gle/hicpVgwQ1HXxX1VCA
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Early Career Connection Mentors:
RJ Boutelle is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press 2023) and his articles have appeared in Atlantic Studies, MELUS, and American Literature. He has also contributed to Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920 (Cambridge UP 2021) and African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900 (Cambridge UP 2024). He is also editing a new critical edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) for Broadview Press.
Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison where he teaches courses on American literature, political theory, and popular culture. He has published widely on American literature, paying special attention to critical flashpoints wrapped up with democracy, propaganda, citizenship, aesthetics, and surveillance. He has written on topics ranging from Freedom’s Journal (the first Black newspaper in the US) to silent film, from the American Revolution to mesmerism, and from conservatism to anarchism. He is the author of numerous books and edited volumes including, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability; Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America; Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture; Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century-United States; Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom. In addition to publishing a wide range of academic articles, he writes for public audiences more broadly at outlets such as Public Books, Public Seminar, the Capitol Times, and the Wisconsin State Journal and had edited and co-edited volumes on American Literature studies including The New Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature. He is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the University of Wisconsin system-wide teaching award and the x Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award.
Sarah E. Chinn is Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (2000), Inventing Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (2008), and Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, 1780-1840 (2017), the winner of the 2018 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She was awarded the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize for best article in American literature in 2020. Her most recent book, Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction is in production at Cambridge University Press. From 2007 to 2011, she was the Executive Director of CLAGS: A Center for LGBT Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. From 2014 to 2021 she chaired the Hunter College English Department. Currently she is the co-editor, with Brigitte Fielder, of J19: The Journal of the Society of 19th Century Americanists.
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Daniel Diez Couch is is Associate Professor of English and Associate Chair at the US Air Force Academy. He is the author of American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic (UPenn 2022) and a co-editor of The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture and Art (Bucknell, 2024). His writing has won the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville, and his work has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions. His research has appeared in journals such as Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Leviathan, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and he is an editorial board member of Early American Literature. His current project brings together form, affect, and democratic politics.
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Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and co-author (with Jonathan Senchyne) of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). She is currently finishing a second book manuscript, on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for both humanization and racialization. Her new project deals with pre-20th-century iterations of Afrofuturism – Black employments of “old” tech for hopeful future visioning. Fielder is co-editor (with Sarah Chinn) of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and the Vice President/President-Elect of the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA).
John Hay is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature. He is the author of Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2017) and the editor of Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2020). His essays have appeared in venues such as Early American Literature, ESQ, the New England Quarterly, and Raritan, and his scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a member of C19 since 2014, and he is currently at work on a book about the nineteenth-century American novel.
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Jennifer C. James is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies of English at the George Washington University and author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II. Her new book, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery, will appear this summer with Duke University Press. She is at work on a new book, Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and African American Cultural Memory, which traces the lives of three generations of her ancestors owned by Jackson to consider his relationship to enslavement and to explore a racialized memory of the president. She is also co-editing “‘That Pageant Terrible’: Cultural Representations of African American War Experience from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century,” a collection of new work on blackness and American warfare and a special issue of Regeneration “ ‘i agree with the leaves’: Diversifying the Arboreal Humanities." Her work has been included in journals including American Literature, American Literary History, African American Review, Feminist Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and MELUS, where she co-edited a special issue on race and disability studies. She has contributed essays to a variety of collections, such as Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century, Feminist Disability Studies, NYU’s Keywords in African American Studies and others.
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Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2018. Previously, she taught at Georgetown University, where she served as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program (2009-2012). She is the author of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S. (Duke University Press, January 2024) and Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth Century America (NYU, 2007). Other publications include Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson; “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (spring/summer 2015); and essays in American Quarterly, American Literature, Post45, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, a new multimedia, open-access environmental humanities journal.
Barbara McCaskill is Professor of English at the University of Georgia and Associate Academic Director, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. She has published five books, most recently Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (UGA Press, 2016) and The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Activist and Race Man with Sidonia Serafini (UGA Press, 2020; paperback forthcoming 2024). She has co-edited with Caroline Gebhard African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is co-P.I. or P.I. of several externally funded collaborative grant projects, including Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District (Mellon Foundation), A World Within Worlds: The Visionary Art of Sam Doyle (Luce Foundation), The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Georgia Humanities and Humanities Texas), and the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative (Institute for Museum and Library Services). Recent awards include the Graduate Mentorship Award, University of Georgia (2020) and the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians (2019).
Janet Neary is a Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives, essays in J19, ESQ, African American Review, MELUS, and a variety of scholarly collections on African American literature and culture. She is the editor of Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays by Lindon Barrett. She has two books-in-progress: Speculative Life: Land, Law, and the Nineteenth-century Black Western Imaginary, which examines Black American cultural life in the wake of the California Gold Rush and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and Misalliance: Race, Caste, and Empire in Print Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century, co-authored with Tanya Agathocleous.
Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Chair of English at Duke University, where she co-edits American Literature with Matthew Taylor. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke, 2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke, 1995) and the co-editor, as part of the Triangle Editorial Collective, of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, vol. 5 of Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), with Michael Elliott, of The American Novel 1870-1940, volume 6 Oxford History of the Novel in English (Oxford University Press, 2014), and with Sari Altschuler and Jonathan Metzl, Keywords: Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023). With David Kazanjian and Elizabeth McHenry, she co-edits the America in the Long Nineteenth Century series at NYU Press. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Human Being After Genocide.
Caroline Wigginton is Chair and Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures (UNC 2022) and also In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (Massachusetts 2016), which won the First Book Prize from Early American Literature. She is co-editor with Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Kelly Wisecup of a joint forum on Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies, published in 2018 in the William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature.
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Gretchen Woertendyke is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty of African American and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre (Oxford 2016) and has published essays in Early American Literature, Atlantic Studies, and in edited collections – The Secret History in Literature, 1660-1820, The Haitian Revolution in the Early United States, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown, and in Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas. Her first book is a study of romance in the U.S. as both response to and production of nineteenth century fears and fantasies about Cuba- U.S.-Haitian relations. Her current project, Violence and Secrecy in U.S. Literature, treats secrecy as a set of protocols that are fundamental to white masculinity, secret societies, and early Christian nationalism. But the project ultimately examines the ways secrecy creates spaces for emancipatory and collective action, particularly for slaves and post-antebellum non-white, non-Christian peoples. She was on the program committee for c19 in 2019-2020 that transitioned from in-person to our virtual conference and has participated at the conference since its inception. Her work has been funded by the Huntington Library, the ACLS, and by university wide and departmental fellowships at USC.
Autumn Womack is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which received the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. She is also the editor of the Norton Library Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition. Her essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Black Camera, Women & Performance, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues.
Caroline Yang is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research and teaching interests are nineteenth-century to contemporary Asian American and African American literatures and cultures, critical race and ethnic studies, Asian American history, and transnational American Studies. She is the author of The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford UP, 2020) and is currently working on a second book titled “The Korean War in Black America.” Currently a co-reviews editor at the Journal of Asian American Studies and a co-chair of the University of Massachusetts Press committee, she is looking forward to incorporating her experiences in publishing and scholarly writing to her mentorship.
Xine Yao is Associate Professor in American Literature to 1900 and co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America won the Robert K Martin Book Award from the Canadian Association of American Studies, Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award, honourable mention for the Arthur Miller First Book Prize from the British Association of American Studies, and was shortlisted for the University English Book Prize. Other accolades include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.