NAVSA Grad-Rep Election for 2016 Advisory Board

Graduate-student members of NAVSA,

Please consider this message an official call for elections for the two grad-rep positions on NAVSA's 2016 advisory board.

-The positions will be configured as follows for 2016: one American-university rep and one Canadian-university rep.
-Below is a shortlist of candidates with bios.
-Ballots will remain open for one week from the date of this official call for elections.
-Only graduate students may vote in this election
-You may vote by way of the following survey monkey site: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCM6CHT

American Candidates:
AMY KAHRMANN HUSEBY (English, U of Wisconsin-Madison)
ANNE SULLIVAN (English, UC Riverside)
HEATHER BOZANT WITCHER (English, St. Louis U)

Canadian Candidates:
AMY COTÉ (English, U of Toronto)
SAMANTHA MACFARLANE (English, U of Victoria)
KATHERINE MAGYARODY (English, U of Toronto)

Bios:
AMERICAN CANDIDATES

Amy Kahrmann Huseby is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation, “Quantified Lives: Victorian Women’s Poetry, Biopolitics, and the Nineteenth-century Statistical Imaginary,” considers how poets concerned themselves with counting as social control. She has an article forthcoming on James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” in Victorian Periodicals Review and has previously published essays on Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Virginia Woolf’s poetics, which earned the Alexander B. Chambers MA Essay Prize and Chair’s PhD Prize, respectively, at her home institution. Currently, she is serving as guest editor for a special issue of Victoriographies, where she has contributed as an editorial assistant since 2012. From 2013-2014, she was co-chair of the UW-Madison Graduate Student Association, which involved organizing the annual MadLit Graduate Student Conference, and she has worked as a Writing Center Instructor in Madison since 2014. Her own poetry has appeared in Pearl, Atlantic Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, among others.

Anne Sullivan is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and is currently writing her dissertation, “On Fire: Industrialization, Media Technologies, and Victorian Literature, 1800-1900.” She will present on c19 Vesuvian pyrodramas at NAVSA this summer in addition to participating in the professionalization workshop. She has delivered papers at INCS and MVSA conferences, and in 2016 she will present on fireside reverie as part of an MLA panel she organized. When she isn’t researching c19 pyrotechnics, she is known for organizing academic and social opportunities for fellow grads. As the 2012-13 President of UCR’s Graduate Students in English Association she catalyzed the English Department’s new summer dissertation fellowships. This year, she will serve as a Dickens Universe “Cruise Director,” a time-honored and convivial co-host of nightly Dickens-themed parties for all attendees. Ever since attending her first NAVSA conference in 2013, she has been impressed by the way that NAVSA enables generative connections among grad students, and she looks forward to fostering that collegial atmosphere by serving as a 2016 Grad Representative.

Heather Bozant Witcher is a PhD candidate at Saint Louis University, working on her dissertation that theorizes the collaborative process throughout the British long-nineteenth century. Using 18th and 19th-century understandings of sympathy, particularly Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), as a model framework for the ideal collaborative process, her dissertation argues that collaboration becomes a means of artistic construction and a lived experience of communal relations. Concentrations will include: Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, aesthetic presses (Kelmscott Press, Vale Press, and Hogarth Press), Michael Field, and Vernon Lee. Her forthcoming article (April 2016) on the collaborative process of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley will appear in Forum for Modern Language Studies. She has presented at various conferences (such as NAVSA, VISAWUS, BWWC, Michael Field Centenary Conference in London) and will be presenting at MLA 2016.

CANADIAN CANDIDATES

Amy Coté is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Toronto, where she studies theology, trauma, and the realist novel. She holds a BA (hons) from the University of Victoria and an MA from the University of Alberta. She is a member of VSAO and VSAWC, and has worked as a conference assistant for the annual VSAWC conference for the past three years.

Samantha MacFarlane completed her B.A. (Honours) and her M.A. in English Language and Literature at Queen’s University. She is currently a SSHRC-funded Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, where she studies Victorian poetry and teaches first-year academic writing. Her dissertation analyses the emergence of the Victorian verse novel in the mid-nineteenth century by examining its cultural context and critical reception, as well as contemporary debates on genre and poetics, and she was recently awarded the Hugh Campbell and Marion Alice Small Graduate Scholarship for Scottish Studies for this research. She has presented papers at conferences hosted by the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, the British Women Writers Association, and NAVSA. She has also worked as a research assistant on the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry and serves as a Graduate Student Representative for the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada.

Katherine Magyarody is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, “Boy Republics and Imperial Guides: Small Social Groups in the Literature of Empire, 1850-1914,” focuses on the representation of small social groups (ranging from school boy tribes to terrorist networks) as a constitutive element in the creation and destabilization of empire in nineteenth-century literature. Her secondary interests include children’s literature, diasporic literature, transnationalism and post-colonialism. Katherine is the Editorial Assistant at the University of Toronto Quarterly. She has an article forthcoming on diasporic Scouting practices and has presented her research at NAVSA, ChLA, MVSA and ACCUTE.