Institute Participants
Alex Beringer is an assistant professor at the University of Montevallo where he teaches in the English and Art departments. He has lectured at the University of Michigan, where he also received his Ph.D. in American literature. He specializes in 19th-century American literature and visual culture. His course offerings have included courses on 19th and early 20th century comics, hoaxes in American literary culture, and the literature of the transatlantic slave system. He is currently at work on a book about the history of graphic narratives in nineteenth-century American culture. This book traces how nineteenth century artists in the United States experimented with an array of visual languages that often look distinct from the modern comic strip. In his free time, he enjoys watching and playing basketball, playing guitar and perfecting his recipes for Chicago-style pizza. email: aberinger@montevallo.edu
Ayendy Bonifacio is originally from Brooklyn, East New York and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is a PhD student and teaching associate in the English department at The Ohio State University. He studies nineteenth-century American literature with a focus in historical poetics and poetry and teaches English composition. He is particularly interested in nineteenth-century periodical poetry and its connections to historical ecopoetics. His research centers in antebellum and postbellum poetry published in monthly magazines, newspapers and story papers to explore questions of nature and environmental culture in the Americas, namely in nineteenth-century women poets published in The New York Ledger. During his time off, he writes poetry and does photography. email: ayendy9@gmail.com
Janet G. Casey is Professor of English and Director of the First Year Experience at Skidmore College. She is the author of Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (Cambridge UP, 1998) and A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford UP, 2009). She has also edited The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (Iowa UP, 2004) and Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom (Iowa UP, forthcoming in 2015). She is a Core (i.e., founding) member of the Middlebrow Network and recently co-curated a museum exhibition entitled Classless Society, which included a catalogue and associated website. When not serving in an administrative position, she regularly teaches a course in Skidmore's American Studies Department entitled Magazines and Modernity. email: jcasey@skidmore.edu
Jim Casey is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. His dissertation charts the evolution of editorship and editorial practices in a wide variety of newspapers during the 19th-century in the United States. He is currently the coordinator of the Colored Conventions Project [coloredconventions.org] and has collaborated on many digital and historical projects. He has published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and more about his work is available at jim-casey.com email: ccasey@udel.edu
Jean Lee Cole is an Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland. Her recent publications include Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (2013), an edition of Turner’s columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, and “The Hideous Obscure of Henry James,” an analysis of the serialization of The Turn of the Screw in Collier’s, published in an American Periodicals special issue on visual culture in 2010. She is also the author of The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity (2002), and co-editor of Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (2008) and Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale: Two Orientalist Texts (2002). She is currently working on How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility of Art and Literature 1895-1920, which examines the nexus between early comic strips, the yellow press, and magazine fiction in the first two decades of the twentieth century. email: lcole@loyola.edu
Norma Fay Green, Ph.D. is a professor in Columbia College Chicago's Department of Communication & Media Innovation where she has taught 20 different courses since 1988 when she was hired as an adjunct journalism instructor while completing her doctorate in Mass Media at Michigan State University where she also earned her B.A. in Journalism. In between those degrees, she earned an M.S. in Magazine Journalism from Northwestern University and worked for more than 20 years in various editorial and marketing positions for newspaper, magazine and book publishers. She is a recipient of grants and faculty fellowships from The Ford Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Poynter Institute, Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays programs and has guest lectured in Egypt, Ireland,England and Denmark. She has been published in 10 books including the award-winning Print Culture in a Diverse America and Women's Periodicals in the United States as well as the key journals of her discipline. In addition to Columbia teaching excellence and student service awards, she has been recognized nationally for her research and curricular development. email: ngreen@colum.edu
Theodore (Ted) Hamm is chair of journalism and new media studies at St. Joseph's College, Brooklyn. He was a co-founder of The Brooklyn Rail and editor from 2000-2013. Over the past year he's written for publications including Vice News, NY Daily News, the Columbia Journalism Review, City Limits and Gotham Gazette. His books include Rebel and a Cause (2001),The New Blue Media (2008), and Pieces of a Decade(co-edited with Williams Cole, 2010). His current projects include a history of freedom of the press. Follow him on Twitter @HammerDaily Email: thamm@sjcny.edu
Dr. Yadira Perez Hazel is currently an assistant professor at the Center of Ethnic Studies at BMCC, CUNY and an Oral Historian at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. She completed her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia with a dissertation entitled Blanqueamiento (whitening) in Paradise: Nation-building, Japanese Immigration and Race in the Dominican Republic. From 2010-2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Waikato University and Auckland University in New Zealand and a researcher for public health programs and research projects for the Latino Commission on AIDS in NYC. At the Tenement Museum, Dr. Perez Hazel is the Oral History Manager collecting life histories of the Latino community who lived and/or worked in the Lower East Side while also conducting ethnographic research in the Lower East Side with the Puerto Rican, Dominican and Chinese communities. She has published on issues related to identity, whiteness, belonging and immigration in the Dominican Republic. Email: dryadiraperez@gmail.com
Brooks E. Hefner is an associate professor of English at James Madison University, where he teaches American literature, American Studies, and Film Studies. He received his PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2009 and has published widely on popular genres and media culture. This includes essays on the links between race and cultural hierarchy in popular 1920s detective fiction (Clues, 2012), the queer counterpublic of the 1970s blaxploitation film Blacula (Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2012), the influence of racial pseudoscience and criminal anthropology on H.P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett (Modern Fiction Studies, 2014), and the complexities of auteur theory in Ray Milland’s films of the 1950s and 1960s (Journal of Film and Video, 2014). Additionally, he has forthcoming book chapters on generational conflict in the westerns of Budd Boetticher and the pulping of history in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! His first book manuscript, The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (currently under review), examines the use of experimental slang across a host of popular genres in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. Email: hefnerbe@jmu.edu
Melissa J. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in publishing history and American women's writing from the Early Republic through the early twentieth century. She is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (2005) and and co-editor of Willa Cather and Modern Cultures (2011), Clarence by Catharine Sedgwick (2011), and E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (2012). She is currently working on a book on the creative partnership between Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, a magazine editor and advertising copywriter with whom Cather shared a home for four decades. Homestead is also the project director of a digital edition of the magazine Every Week (everyweek.unl.edu) and associate editor of the NEH-funded Complete Letters of Willa Cather: A Digital Edition (the first installment scheduled for release in 2018). Email: mhomestead2@unl.edu
Kathleen Hulser has worked as a public historian, curator, and instructor for many New York organizations. From 1999-2011 she served as a public historian at the New-York Historical Society, and her community preservation activities include service on the board of the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association which recently raised $4 million for a restoration project in Marcus Garvey Park. Hulser is also the assistant director of the Museum of the American Gangster on St. Marks Place. She recently co-curated The Volunteers Join World War I, 1914-1919 and developed a digital interpretation of the War of 1812 for smart phones (www.warof1812.us). Among other curatorial experience, Hulser worked on Slavery in New York and New York Divided, and was a co-curator of Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery. She lectures inside the classroom at Pace and NYU as well as facilitates walking tours for the Municipal Art Society, leads educational workshops in museums and schools, and has created history content for the new DiMenna Children’s History Museum at N-YHS. Hulser writes online for http://newyorkhistoryblog.blogspot.com, and her recent publications include “Slavery as History at the New-York Historical Society” in The Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in Public Space (2012) and “Click History: Anywhere, Anytime,” with Steve Bull. in Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media (2010).
Blog http://ramblingdigitalhumanist.blogspot.com
email:kathleen.hulser@gmail.com khulser@pace.edu
Natalie Kalich earned her doctorate at Loyola University Chicago, specializing in Twentieth-Century Literature with a Concentration in Women's Studies. Her current book project investigates commercial magazines from the 1920s, including, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post to reveal the frequency with which modernist writers contributed to these periodicals and the extent to which public interest made modernism profitable for larger-circulating magazines. Additionally, her essay, “How Fatally Outmoded is Your Point of View?”: 'Vanity Fair’s' Articulation of Modernist Culture to the Modern Reader" was recently published in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History. She looks forward to the NEH Institute this summer as she works on an essay for an anthology on interwar women's periodicals. Email: natalie.kalich@gmail.com
Kelley Kreitz is an Assistant Professor of English at Pace University in Manhattan, specializing in print and digital cultures of the Americas. Before joining Pace at the start of this academic year, she was a postdoctoral Visiting Scholar in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Her research combines media studies, hemispheric studies, and U.S. and Latin American literary studies. She is currently completing a book called Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of the Present in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture. Kelley has also worked as a reporter for several nonprofits dedicated to broadcast and digital media production and as the director of the Idea Lab at Root Cause, a nonprofit committed to advancing social innovation. email: kkreitz@pace.edu
Gretchen Long is an Associate Professor of History at Williams College in Williams College in Western Massachusetts. She teaches courses on slavery and emancipation, urban history, American Women’s history and African American literary history. She also teaches in and works closely with the Africana Studies program at Williams. Her first book, Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation, tells the story of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education and explores the relationship between medical culture and political identity and possibility. More recently, her research has turned to the history of African American childhood and literary culture. email: glong@williams.edu
Jennifer Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine and will join the journalism faculty at the University of Minnesota Duluth in the fall of 2015. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research interests include journalism history, visual communication, digital news preservation and public health. Moore teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her undergraduate teaching responsibilities include courses in convergence and digital journalism, journalism history and mass media ethics. Moore is currently a co-coordinator of the Joint Journalism and Communication Historians Conference (JJCHC), the annual meeting between the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) and the American Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) History Division. She also serves as treasurer on the steering committee of the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression. Prior to academia, Moore worked as a radio reporter and on-air talent, and most recently as a producer at two Minneapolis Internet start-up companies from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s. email:jennifer.e.moore@maine.edu
Michael D. Murray is a UM Board of Curator’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri’s St. Louis campus. He received his undergraduate degree at St. Louis University and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Prior to that, he worked for CBS News and News Election Service. He was founder and first director of the Communication program (now department) at the University of Louisville, the first person tenured in his field at that institution. He also taught at Virginia Tech and was founding director of the Greenspun School of Journalism & Media Studies at UNLV. He served as department chair before being named a UM Board of Curators’ Professor and subsequently served as Chair of the Faculty Senate and University Assembly. His scholarly articles have appeared in all of the major, main-stream journals in mass media including: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, American Journalism, Journalism History, Communication Quarterly, TV Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Communication Education. He is co-author of the text Media Law & Ethics (Routledge/Taylor & Francis). email: murraymd@umsl.edu
Noreen O’Connor is an associate professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small undergraduate-serving school where she teaches professional writing, new media, literature, film, and also serves as a faculty adviser to the weekly student newspaper The Crown. A Los Angeles native, she studied comparative literature at University of California, Irvine, then completed a Master’s in literature and the teaching of writing at San Francisco State University before moving to the east coast to do doctoral work Ph.D. at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her dissertation focused on modernist narratives by women writers in the decade after WWI. Her recent research has focused on literary works as they appeared in their original magazine serialized versions such as popular publications like Pictorial Review. Her article, "Consumer Culture and Jazz Age Discontents: Edith Wharton in Pictorial Review," appeared in the Edith Wharton Review in 2012. She travelled to East Africa in summer 2014 as a part of a Fulbright-Hays research project, and she is working this summer to complete an article focusing on Edith Wharton’s and Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction publications on Africa; some of their pieces were serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, while others appeared in popular periodicals such as Look Magazine. Her work has also increasingly focused on digital humanities. While completing graduate work, she was the Director of Web Communications for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She has also developed Web sites, blogs, and other online content for a number of nonprofits, universities, and museums. She has also volunteered at WRKC, Radio King's College, for the past five years, where she produces radio programs and podcasts. She is launching a community-based public program this summer called "Wyoming Valley Stories," which will bring student research and voices from local archives to radio, podcasting, and the Web. The first program—an interview with Wilkes-Barre native Gussie Brennan Mitchell about her father-in-law UMWA president John Mitchell, will air this month. Email: noreen.oconnor@mac.com
Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor + CLAS-Honors Preceptor of Journalism in the Department of Communication and Journalism + Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches courses on the history and practice of literary journalism, the relationship between journalism and democratic processes, depictions of the press in popular culture, and the future of news production and consumption in the digital age. Roiland received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Saint Louis University in 2011. He is currently working on two book manuscripts: The Elements of Literary Journalism: The Political Promise of Narrative News and The Rest is Silence: The Unexplored Nonfiction of David Foster Wallace. email:joshua.roiland@maine.edu
Sarah H. Salter is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English with a PhD in English from Penn State. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American and Italian literature, U.S. periodical cultures and ethnic writing, and the intersections of cultural politics and literary aesthetics; her work has been supported by fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, the Italian American Studies Association, and the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Sarah has taught widely in the Penn State English Department, including courses on linguistic history and American grammar, U.S. literature, and advanced writing for the humanities. Most recently, Sarah's work can be found in the essay collection Facing Melville, Facing Italy and The Henry James Review. email: shs161@psu.edu
Jesse W. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College. In 2013, he received his PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. His interests include radical American literature, periodical studies, Marxian theory, and critical ethnic studies, and his work examines the cultural responses to American radicalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent project examines the coverage of the Russian Revolution in American print culture. In particular, he traces the ways in which mainstream periodicals used the event to naturalize an increasingly muscular American capitalism, while the Black, radical, and ethnic presses invoked Moscow to galvanize opposition and create coalitions across the lines of race and class. email: jwschwartz@gmail.com
Blevin Shelnutt is a Ph.D. candidate and Henry M. MacCracken Fellow at New York University. Her dissertation, New YorkCity’s Broadway and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture, explores the operation of Broadway as setting and inspiration for the development of mass literary culture in the United States. She has presented on the material cultures of print and reading at several conferences, including the 2014 MLA and ACLA annual conventions. At NYU, she co-founded and helps to organize NewYorkScapes, a research collaborative dedicated to exploring the application of digital technology to the study of urban space. email: mbs405@nyu.edu
Steven Carl Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Providence College. Formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Early American Literature & Material Texts fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, he received his PhD in history from the University of Missouri in 2013. He has published essays in the Maryland Historical Magazine, Literature in the Early American Republic, andThe Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. He was named the 2012 Malkin New Scholar by the Bibliographical Society of America and his research has been supported by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the New York Public Library, the Archives Partnership Trust & New York State Archives, the New York State Library, the University of Missouri, and the New York State Historical Association. He is currently at work on a book that examines the rise of a national print culture in the new nation by tracing the development of trade networks that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He resides in Providence, Rhode Island. email: ssmith32@providence.edu
Brian Sweeney is Assistant Professor of English at The College of Saint Rose, where he teaches courses in literature, print culture, and critical theory. He received his PhD in English from Brown in 2010. His current book project, For Love or Money: Professionalism, Postsentimentalism, and American Fiction, 1830-1910, examines occupational affect in the nineteenth-century U.S. novel; a chapter from this monograph, “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Jim Crow: Medical Professionalism, Race, and Postsentimentalism in The Marrow of Tradition,” recently appeared in the essay collection The Sentimental Mode (McFarland, 2014). He is currently completing an essay on serial form and the politics of national reconciliation in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter, part of a projected second book project on serialization and reprinting in U.S. periodicals from 1850 to 1910. He is co-director of “The Colored American Project,” a digital humanities initiative undertaken in partnership with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. email: sweeneyb@strose.edu
Edward Timke is a continuing Lecturer in the Media Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He recently completed his PhD in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Ed's work centers on understanding the role of popular mass media in international relations and how different cultures and people come to understand and imagine each other through the media. His dissertation, which he is revising for a book manuscript, focused on representations of American and French women in popular French and American magazines, respectively, that were used to work through cultural, political, and social changes of the post-WWII period in and between France and the United States. Ed's research and teaching specialties include American and international media history, trans-Atlantic magazine history, women in the media, photojournalism and visual culture, the cultural history of advertising, and research methods. When not training for his next marathon, spoiling three cats, remodeling a 1910 Craftsman bungalow, or shuttling among California, Oregon (where he lives with his partner), and the Lake Michigan shoreline of Northeastern Wisconsin (where he grew up), Ed enjoys "just one more coffee," delicious food with friends, or the ultimate vice known as The Golden Girls. email: etimke@umich.edu
Sheila Webb is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at Western Washington University where she teaches magazine and visual journalism, research methods, and history and ethics of media. She holds a doctorate in mass communication and a M.F.A. in graphic design and photography, both from the University of Wisconsin. She has received both research and teaching awards, including the Covert Award for the best publication on media history in 2011 and a Best Practices Award for visual communication from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). She has served as Project Manager of ONline@UW, a web publishing group for civic journalism clients, and has worked in museums as an educator, curator, and public information coordinator. Her research focuses on the interplay of visual and textural artifacts embedded in the mass media, particularly magazines, and how such artifacts embody the larger cultural narratives of their time. Her most recent work, the chapter “Magazines and the Visual Arts—Recent Research” appears in the forthcoming The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research. At the Institute, she seeks to investigate the visual portrayal of suffragists in periodicals from 1850 to 1920. This will further her work on the suffragist journal Woman Citizen and also will add to the discussion of visual framing. email: Sheila.Webb@wwu.edu
Daniel Worden is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback edition, 2013), which received the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies. He is also the coeditor of Oil Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and the editor of The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). He is currently completing a book about literary journalism, the politics of the personal, and privatization, an article from which, on Alex Haley, Malcolm X, and Hunter S. Thompson, is forthcoming in American Literature. This summer, before and after the Institute, he will be working on the New Yorker magazine, Truman Capote, and Rachel Carson. email: dworden@unm.edu