2023 Board Election

My name is Christian Ylagan and I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Western University in London, Ontario (Canada). I have been involved with NeMLA since 2017 in various capacities within the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC), having started out as a Communications Director, Vice President, and now as Interim President. I would be honoured now to serve as CAITY President if given the opportunity.

As GSC Officer, I am privy to the multiple challenges graduate students face around the tripartite issues of academic development, professionalization, and precarious labour. I have worked committedly with other officers of the GSC to aid graduate students with these concerns in various ways. First, I have organized sessions that accorded graduate students various networking opportunities and programs that aided in filling the gaps on a wide range of issues such as alt-ac (“From PhD to the Public: Alternative Career Prospects and Life Outside Academia”; “The Adaptive Academic: Building Skills and leadership Culture”) and grad student-centric culture (“Managing Milestones: Navigating Grad School’s Hidden Curriculum”). Second, I led the streamlining of the processes by which the GSC Travel and Essay Awards were administered to our numerous Caucus members, which has resulted in higher award amounts and a steady increase in the number of awards given. Finally, I have leveraged my position at the NeMLA Executive Board to facilitate ongoing dialogue on how to improve relations between graduate students who attend NeMLA and the various other stakeholders  within our organization.

Outside NeMLA and the GSC, I have been a Limited Duties adjunct instructor for three departments within my university: Languages and Cultures; Film Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. I teach courses on a wide array of topics including Postcolonial Queer Literature, Critical Masculinity Studies, the Disney Dream Factory, and Stardom. As an adjunct instructor, I have also served in part-time/adjunct-specific administrative capacities such as member of the Annual Performance Evaluation and Faculty Council committees.

As a Year X PhD candidate who has also been a Limited Term adjunct instructor over the last four years, I feel that I am in a unique position to represent members of CAITY going forward. As someone who is increasingly immersed in the challenging waters of contingent instruction, I believe that I offer an understanding of key issues surrounding precarious labour but also the transitional yet vital nature of contingent faculty in every university. If elected as CAITY President, I will continue to leverage existing structures such as the Annual Business Meeting and the Travel Awards in order to provide the necessary services to members of the Caucus, improving on administrative processes where necessary. Furthermore, I endeavour to continue working with other Caucuses such as the GSC and Pedagogy and Professionalization to deliver CAITY-focused training and remediation programs. Finally, I commit to continue advocating for CAITY members at every level of NeMLA and beyond, knowing that we all share in the strenuous and often underappreciated labour of teaching and instruction.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you as part of CAITY!

I herein submit my candidacy for the post of CAITY President/ Board Representative. In this post, I would continue the great work already completed, such as a more cohesive, defined identity for CAITY, along with greater prestige and more recognition within NeMLA; closer, more productive collaboration with the rest of the board, membership, and other caucuses; as well as more quantifiable accomplishments like Board-sponsored sessions, guest speakers, workshops, and the like.

I would bring to this position my prior experience within CAITY (I served as Secretary 2010- 1, as President 2011 – 4, and as Past President 2014 – 7, taking over the former two posts at rather tumultuous times within the caucus’ history) and NeMLA itself since 2007, including as Area Director for Pedagogy & Profession/ Rhetoric & Composition, 2018 – 21. I thus have rare insight into the operations of the organisation and caucus which I would only further and exercise to the benefit of all.

Having served as the NEMLA Area Chair for Pedagogy and Professional Development from 2015-18, I am familiar with the responsibilities of this position and am committed to supporting NEMLA and its goals. My primary field of specialty in my doctoral work was medieval British literature, and my secondary field the British Victorian era. Over a 25-year career, I have taught nearly every period of British literature in undergraduate classrooms, and courses on medieval and children’s literature at the graduate level.

My academic position as a long-term adjunct has made me particularly sensitive to issues of equity and representation across the board. As Area Chair for British and Global Anglophone Studies, my commitment would be to encourage participation from scholars across the teaching and career spectrum, and to attempt to make sure that voices from as many places and eras as possible are represented. I am particularly open to projects that explore the teaching of British and Anglophone literatures.

Dr. Angela Fulk teaches literature, composition, and Latin at SUNY Buffalo State and Canisius Colleges in Buffalo, NY. She received her Ph.D. in English from Miami University of Ohio, where her dissertation was entitled “‘On Angynne’: Anglo-Saxon Readings of the Book of Genesis.” Her publications include “How Bias toward Adjuncts Plays Out among Students, Faculty, and Administrators,” Inside Higher Ed. Feb 14, 2019, and “Patriarchal Rituals: Anglo-Saxon Readings of Genesis and the Shift from Pagan to Christian Religious Practice,” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe,  www.heroicage.org, Issue 19, Aug. 13, 2019. She is a former NEMLA area chair for Pedagogy and Professional Development, and currently serves as the Associate Editor for Professionalism and Pedagogy at Modern Language Studies.

I would like to be considered for the position of president of NeMLA's Diversity Caucus. I have been attending NeMLA conferences for almost 15 years, since I was in graduate school, and would be honored to serve the organization in this capacity. Currently I am Chair and Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN, where my teaching and research focus on contemporary Global Anglophone, postcolonial, and US immigrant literatures. In my ten years at Saint Mary's, an all-women's liberal arts college in South Bend, IN, I have welcomed the opportunity to become a campus leader in the areas of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) outside the classroom. While this work is challenging, one of my greatest strengths is being able to communicate what needs to be done to a diverse audience, even when it means being clear and direct about uncomfortable truths, in a way that fosters trust and encourages buy-in rather than defensiveness. At my small, predominantly white institution, this work has included bringing faculty together for reading groups on critical race theory and inclusive pedagogy, revising our faculty annual review process to make faculty DEIJ work visible and valuable, writing the College's first public diversity values statement, participating in significant curriculum revision initiatives aimed and decolonizing our academic programs, and serving on the team that lobbied for the successful hiring of a Vice President for DEIJ, with whom I now work closely on academic DEIJ initiatives. As NeMLA's Diversity Caucus President I would bring similar energy to the role, helping to facilitate conversations, identify areas of potential growth, and ensure that diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice guide the work NeMLA does.

My name is Andrea Dawn Bryant, and I am writing to express my interest in the position of German Studies Director of Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA). I completed my dissertation in German in August of 2021 at Georgetown University, and currently hold bilateral appointments at the University of Oklahoma (Norman, OK) and Appalachian State University (Boone, NC). In my dissertation research, I focused on literary texts by German-speaking women of the African diaspora, verbal and visual discourses of diversity in German-language curricula, and decolonizing, materialist anti-racist approaches to the teaching of additional languages. One of my foci in the dissertation project was on developing innovative and equitable approaches to German curricular leadership. I have conducted ethnographic research in both literary studies and critical applied linguistics and look forward to deepening these transdisciplinary engagements in the years to come.

As a scholar-teacher engaged within and across my adjacent disciplines, I view a forthcoming directorship of German Studies at NeMLA as one that aligns with my core motivations. I remain active in regional and national organizations and am committed to forging collaborative ties in both the humanities and the social sciences. In the past, for example, I have organized sessions, panels, virtual town halls, and workshops at conferences regionally and nationally (i.e., NeMLA, AATG/ACTFL, DDGC). I have additionally presented at conferences in formats as diverse as poster presentations, roundtables, traditional presentations, seminars, and workshops (i.e., at conferences such as the MLA, the GSA, and WiG, to name a few).

I would very much appreciate the opportunity to continue merging research networks in capacity as German Studies Director. As a site of networking, NeMLA is recognized as being a transnational space of transdisciplinary communication, collaboration, and scholarly outreach, a tradition I would be delighted to continue and extend.

I have been a NeMLA member since 2010. Since then, I have attended all the NeMLA conferences for the following years (except for the one in Baltimore in 2017) and also encouraged other colleagues to attend as well.

I have seen for many years many colleagues serve with professionalism and enthusiasm at this conference. We all benefited from their tireless work that made the NeMLA a very important conference not only on the East Coast but across the United States. It’s time to give back and put my energies, enthusiasm, and my knowledge at the service of the Italian area. If elected, I intend to build on the successes achieved by the outgoing director, but also to think about other initiatives that have the potential to attract more people such as special events that contribute to showcasing the transnational nature of Italian Studies. Short movie screenings and invitations of well-known authors, film directors, and poets would be extremely important to that end.

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. I hold a Ph.D. in Italian and Gender and Women’s studies from the University of Wisconsin Madison. My research interests include migration and diaspora studies and digital motherhood studies.  I am the author of many articles about migration, migration and music, and motherhood. I am also the co-author of two books, Migrazioni contemporanee. Testi e Contesti (Farinelli, 2017) (with Martina Di Florio) and Longing for a Somali Future: Mal d’Afrique, Somali Pain and Afro-optimism (Routledge, forthcoming) (with Rosetta Caponetto and Martina Di Florio).