Jennifer L. Airey, University of Tulsa
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)
Many Thanks, From the Editor
I am drafting this preface during a time of transition: In January, we bid farewell to Dr. Karen Dutoi, our Managing Editor of the last thirteen years. I want to begin, therefore, by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Karen for everything she has done for the journal. All of our authors can attest to Karen’s deep care for her work, her acute sense of grammar and style, her keen eye for detail and errors in logic, and her ability to work with authors to improve even the strongest of articles. Karen has also been the mainstay of our office, training multiple generations of graduate students in the intricacies of scholarly publishing, and keeping us functioning through pandemics and times of institutional turmoil. Karen has joined the staff of Duke University Press (DUP), and I wish her the very best in her future endeavors there. DUP and its authors will benefit greatly from her skills, as we have for so long, and I’m glad that Karen will be able to advance her career with a bigger outfit, as she so amply deserves.
For the time being, then, I will be working directly with our authors as TSWL’s primary editor. I will be supported in my work by Dr. Carol Kealiher, the Managing Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, who will be supervising our graduate students, managing the logistics of the publication process, and overseeing our backend business functions. Carol began her career at TSWL, and we have long officed near one another; I have always valued her humor, kindness, and deep institutional knowledge, and I am very glad to welcome her back. It is a pleasure to get to work with her in this new capacity, and I am grateful to her for taking us on.
I am also thankful for my graduate assistants, Lizy Bailey, Oliver Dong, and Yuhyeoi Kim, who have been engaged, helpful, and cheerful during a complicated cross-campus office move and a change in leadership. I want to extend especial gratitude to Ciara Graham, our Book Review Editor, who has been my bedrock this semester. From managing our article workflow, to overseeing the relocation and unpacking of our office, to training our new graduate assistants, Ciara has kept us running and (mostly) on schedule, answering every question I’ve asked (and there were many) with wisdom and good humor. I cannot thank her enough for her leadership and hard work. Ciara will be leaving us next month to begin a richly deserved Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and I am sad to see her go. In her place, we will welcome Lizy Bailey, who I know has been well trained!
Next, I would like to thank our outgoing board members, Lara Vetter, Harleen Singh, and Melissa J. Homestead. I am thankful for their support of and work for the journal over the last three years. In their place, I am pleased to welcome our newest board members:
Nancy Bentley is Donald T. Reagan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship focuses on how cultural developments in the nineteenth-century United States––especially new ideas about of kinship, race, and gender––are expressed and explored in literature. Her first monograph, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, and Wharton (1995), examined how both literary writers and social scientists claimed special expertise in the domain of culture by decoding minute details of manners. Their claim to understand the hidden secrets of culture gave them a species of social authority, but did so at a moment when the culture concept itself was a kind of fiction invented to stabilize chaotic social transformations. Her second book, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (2009), looked more closely at how new media and mass culture transformed inherited literary forms. Writers who viewed mass culture with suspicion were still able to recognize how it captured uncharted tracts of human experience: the struggles of Indigenous peoples, the desires of women, the distinctive aesthetics of Black urban life, among others. She is currently finishing a book on how the kinship formations of Indigenous peoples and Black Americans in North America were de-realized–made merely cultural–by dominant discourses in order to secure and control what counted as kinship. Only by consulting a more expansive archive of letters can we recognize the real story of kinship and de-kinning in North America. She also teaches and publishes on topics in law and literature, biopolitics, early cinema, and secularity.
Maryna Romanets is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia. She specializes in comparative, postcolonial, and women’s literatures, critical theory and gender studies. Her research, focused on the critique of imperialism in the sphere of culture, is interdisciplinary and transcultural, drawing on the intersection of such analytical approaches as postcolonialism, representation, intertextuality, sexuality, and gender. In addition to literature, it deals with a variety of cultural forms, such as advertising, mass and social media, visual art, and film. Her peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters have appeared in Canada, the USA, Sweden, Spain, United Kingdom, Ukraine, and France. Her two monographs, Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature (2007) and Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave (2019), both funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), map virtually untouched aspects of cultural decolonization. She is the co-editor of Beauty, Violence, Representation (2014) and is currently working on the edited collection, Neo-Gothic Geographies: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Imperialist Warfare (forthcoming), which showcases this genre’s engagement with history, ideology, and politics.
Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy & Literature, Director of Gender Studies, and Professor of Indigeneity, Race, & Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College. Her research interests include the intersection of politics and literature in Caribbean fiction, trauma theory, and conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture. Her publications include Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction: Race, Kinship, and the Passion for Ontology (Bloomsbury, 2023), Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016), and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). She is the translator of Maryse Condé’s The Belle Créole (2020) and co-editor, with Christian Moraru and Bertrand Westphal, of Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020).
I would like to conclude with a message of gratitude to you, our readers and academic community. It is your scholarship, your engagement with our articles, and your care for the work of women authors that sustains us through times of change. We would not be here without you.
Jennifer L. Airey
University of Tulsa
