2023 Officers & Executive Committee

Adam Parkes, President

Adam Parkes is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1993, having previously studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, 1988) and the University of Rochester (PhD, 1993). He is the author of two scholarly monographs published by Oxford University Press: Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996), a study of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf in the context of early-twentieth-century obscenity trials, and A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (2011), which considers how a discourse of impressions circulated among the writings of late Victorians such as Ruskin and Pater and Moderns such as Conrad and Woolf. His major ongoing research project focuses on representations of aristocracy in British and Irish modernism; initial results of this project have appeared or are due to appear in Aldous Huxley Annual, Etudes Lawrenciennes, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Parkes has also published a brief study of Kazuo Ishiguro in the Continuum Contemporaries series (2001) and articles and essays on such authors as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bowen, and Cormac McCarthy. A new essay on Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go will appear next spring in a special Ishiguro issue of Modern Fiction Studies. As well as a long-serving member of the editorial board of Modern Fiction Studies, Parkes is currently President Elect of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America; he will be President for 2021-22.

Lisa Nalbone, First Vice President

Lisa Nalbone is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Central Florida where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Spanish literature and culture. She also serves as the Spanish Graduate Program Director. She is the author of Negotiating Discursive Spaces: Censorship and Women’s Novels in Spain (1950s - 1960s) (forthcoming) and The Novels of Carmen Conde: Toward an Expression of Feminine Subjectivity (2012) as well as coeditor of Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture (2016). She has published over 25 articles and book chapters and has also translated short stories from Spanish to English. Her research, focusing on writings that span the late-nineteenth to twentieth centuries in Spain, engages with sociocultural representations of femininity and the links between modernity and gender. She also examines literary and cultural products to decenter Eurocentrism, in particular, social constructs, identity markers, and political conventions during and beyond the transition to modernity. A long-time member of SAMLA, she is also currently serving her second term as a member of the MLA’s Delegate Assembly and is the Secretary Treasurer of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas. She is a member of the advisory board of Anales Galdosianos and on the board of reviewers for the South Atlantic Review.

Chrystian Zegarra, Second Vice President

Chrystian Zegarra studied Latin American Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and received a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently an associate professor of Spanish at Colgate University (Hamilton, New York). He published the monograph El celuloide mecanografiado: la poesía cinemática de E. A. Westphalen. Some of his articles have appeared in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Hispamérica, Inti, Hispanic Poetry Review, Hispanic Journal, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. He has also published essays in volumes published in Europe, Latin America and the United States. He edited two books on the poetic, narrative and journalistic works of Peruvian writer Luis Valle Goicochea (Hilvanes: poemas & crónicas and Los zapatos de cordobán: escritos en prosa). He has also co-edited the collective volume Partera de la historia: violencia en literatura, performance y medios audiovisuales en Latinoamérica (in press). He is currently working on the co-edition of a collective volume on silent and sound cinema in Ibero-American literature. He contributes bibliographical annotations on Peruvian poetry to the Handbook of Latin American Studies. As a poet, he has published six books of poetry; with the collection Escena primordial y otros poemas, he won the Copé de Oro Prize in 2005.

Christina McDonald, Past President

Christina Russell McDonald is Professor of English and Institute Director of Writing at the Virginia Military Institute, where she teaches first-year composition, classical and contemporary rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, the rhetoric of health and medicine, as well as the senior capstone for English majors. In 2019, she was named the inaugural holder of the Jackson-Hope Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at VMI. She also organizes VMI’s nationally recognized Spilman Symposium on Issues in Teaching Writing. For nine years before her tenure at VMI, Christina taught undergraduate and graduate courses in both literature and writing at James Madison University, where she served as director of composition and founding head of the Writing Program, an independent academic unit in the College of Arts and Letters. Her participation in Cohort VI of the Inter/National Coalition for Research on Electronic Portfolios has resulted in presentations on reflective learning and ePortfolios at meetings of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the Assessment Institute. Her publications include two books, Teaching Writing: Landmarks and Horizons (Southern Illinois University Press) and Teaching Composition in the 1990s: Sites of Contention (HarperCollins). Her current is focused on reflective learning and ePortfolios. A long-time participant in annual SAMLA conferences, Christina also has served as a Member of the Executive Committee (2014-2017), as Chair of the Undergraduate Essay Award Committee, and on the Finance Committee. Currently, she is a member of the Editorial Board for the South Atlantic Review.

Amy Hodges Hamilton, Executive Committee Member

Amy Hodges Hamilton (PhD, Florida State University) is a professor of English at Belmont University. Amy’s research and teaching interests center on personal writing, feminist theory, trauma theory, and healing and the arts. She serves as Belmont University Capstone Coordinator and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Peer Education Faculty Leader. Amy is most at home when writing and collaborating with students, which is evidenced in “First Responders: A Pedagogy for Writing and Reading Trauma” in Critical Trauma Studies (NYU Press, 2016) and many conference presentations which highlight the voices of student and community writers. Amy has served as the Co-Chair for Belmont’s Women’s History Month for the past five years and is committed to helping women on the margins find their voices through writing, most notably through her collaboration with The Next Door, Rest Stop Ministries, Leaving the Cocoon, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. Similarly, she advocates for children on the margins by regularly linking her writing classes with the Ronald McDonald House and Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. She also serves as an educational consultant on the Maya Angelou Legacy Project as a result of the relationship cultivated during Dr. Angelou’s keynote address for the 2011 Belmont Humanities Symposium she co-organized around the theme of Liberating Voices and recently led a group of students across the Civil Rights Trail as a continuation of this work.

E. Nicole Meyer, Executive Committee Member

E. Nicole Meyer is Professor of French and Women's and Gender Studies at Augusta University, having earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current book project is Fractured Families in French and Francophone Autobiography. Her co-edited volumes include Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women (Routledge, 2019) and Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom (2022). She publishes on a wide array of topics from French and Francophone women's autobiography to Flaubert, French for Specific Purposes, Service Learning, contemporary French cinema, and 19^th-, 20^th- and 21^st-century French and Francophone literature. She is Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques (knighted by the French Republic), recipient of the Louis K. Bell Research Award (2021), Co-Chair of the Modern Languages Association Committee on Disabilities in the Professions, past Vice-President of the international organization, Women in French, Editor of French, Francophone and Comparative Literatures for the Rocky Mountain Review and Chair of the American Association of Teachers of French National Commission, French for Specific Purposes.. Her teaching interests include French and Francophone Contemporary Women's Autobiographies, Representation of the Body in French Literature, French Phonetics. She teaches all levels of French Studies.

Horacio Sierra, Executive Committee Member

Horacio Sierra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University, Maryland's oldest HBCU. His teaching and research interests include Renaissance studies, Shakespeare, gender/sexuality, popular culture, and Hispanic literature and culture. His scholarly work has been published in Comparative Drama, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, MESTER, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Journal of Florida Literature, CEA Mid-Atlantic Review, and Theatre Journal. His creative writing has been published in The William & Mary Review, Riversedge, Peregrine, Mosaic, and The Journal of Florida Studies. His journalism has been published in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant, Hispanic magazine, and The Miami Herald. He has received several research grants including an NEH research grant to work at the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid and an MSI Research Grant to work in the Benson Collection at the University of Texas-Austin. He is an adviser for Sigma Tau Delta and Raíces. He earned his BS in Communication from the University of Miami and his PhD in English from the University of Florida. He splits his time between Miami, Florida and Washington, DC.

Annachiara Mariani, Executive Committee Member

Annachiara Mariani is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests are in Italian Cinema, National and Transnational Media Studies and Italian Theatre. She has authored a book on the Grotesque Theatre and Pirandello (2013) and was the guest editor for a special edition of the journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies on Sorrentino’s films and TV series. She has also published numerous articles, essays, and book reviews on Italian Theatre, Cinema, Television, and the relationship between media and literature for, among others, Cambridge University Press, The Johns Hopkins University Press, The University of Toronto Press, and Rutgers University Press. She also edited the volume Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television as part of the Trajectories series (The University of Chicago Press, 2021). She is currently working on a book-length project on today’s portrayal of the Italian Renaissance through popular culture.

Carmela Mattza, Executive Committee Member

Carmela V. Mattza is Associate Professor of Spanish at Louisiana State University. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Chicago. One of her main research areas is the representation of women in Early Modern Iberia literature. In 2017, her book, Hacia La vida es sueño como Speculum Regina. Isabel de Borbón en la corte de Felipe IV was published by Verbum Editorial in Madrid, Spain. Since 2018, her research has focused on the interplay of emotions and environment in the Early Modern Period. In «Emotion Object and Space (Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño and Tang Xianzú’s The Peony Pavillion).» published in 2019, she takes a comparative approach to study the role of dreams, emotions and portraits in the works of two Early Modern playwrighters, Tang Xianzu and Calderón de la Barca. In «Emotional Objects in the Episode of the Cave of Montesinos», published in 2020, she studies Don Quixote’s episode in the cave of Montesinos to show how Don Quixote’s ekphrastic speech depicts displaced objects that Cervantes selects from literary tradition. They are reshaped and reinserted so as to engage with issues such as poetics, emotions and language. She is currently co-editing volume to appear in Cervantes, The Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. At Louisiana State University, she has taught a very wide range of classes, has served as graduate advisor, and directed undergraduate research projects. She is one of the recipients of the 2020 Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award in the College of Humanities and Social Science. She is also a MLA IB field bibliographer and has been a member of SAMLA since 2011.

Trisha Kannan, Executive Committee Member

Trisha Kannan (PhD, University of Florida) is a writer, editor, independent scholar, and owner of Concision Matters, an assessment and curriculum development company that serves students and teachers nationwide. For nearly ten years, she taught writing as well as a variety of courses in American and British literature. Her research focuses on Emily Dickinson, with her most recent publication a collection of essays on The Language of Emily Dickinson (Vernon Press, 2020). She has chaired panels at SAMLA for the Emily Dickinson International Society each year since 2012. She is also a longtime yoga practitioner and became a Registered Yoga Teacher in 2015. Originally from San Diego, California, she now lives and works in Lincoln City, Oregon

R. Barton Palmer, Editor of the South Atlantic Review

Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor Emeritus of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directed the Global Cultural Studies and Cinema and World Cultures programs. Palmer holds PhDs from both Yale (Medieval Studies—French, German, and English) and New York University (Cinema Studies). He is the author, editor, or general editor of nearly fifty academic books on various literary and cinematic subjects, as well as nearly a hundred journal articles and book chapters. As a medievalist, Palmer is best known as an editor and translator of the poetry of Chaucer’s French contemporaries, including Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, and Alain Chartier. Currently, he co-directs an international research team with musicologist Yolanda Plumley (U of Exeter) whose main focus is the preparation of the first complete edition and English translation of the poetical and musical works of Guillaume de Machaut; this project is supported by the Leverhulme Foundation and by the NEH through the Middle English Text Series at the University of Rochester. His most recent film monographs are (with Robert Bray) Hollywood’s Tennessee: the Williams Films and Postwar America (Texas) and To Kill a Mockingbird: the Relationship between the Text and the Film (Methuen/A.C. Black). His recent edited collections include (with David Boyd) Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor (SUNY); (with Murray Pomerance) “A Little Solitaire”: John Frankenheimer and Postwar Hollywood (Rutgers); and (with Steven Sanders) The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh (Kentucky). Palmer is the founding and general editor of book series at Routledge, Edinburgh, Florida, and Georgia. He is the former Executive Director of SAMLA and was active in the relocation of the association at Georgia State University, where he used to teach.

LeeAnne M. Richardson, Executive Director

LeeAnne M. Richardson (PhD, Indiana University, Bloomington) is Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature. She has a particular interest in the odd, the under-studied, and the culturally marginalized, focusing on the ways that characterizations of the “unpopular” intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, and genre. Author of New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Late Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire, she has also published on women prose writers from the British colonies (like Flora Annie Steel, the “female Kipling,” and Olive Schreiner); women poets (Dollie Radford, Michael Field); and the transition from Victorian to modernist literature. This work has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth Century Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies as well as in anthologies. She is currently completing a monograph titled The Forms of Michael Field, which argues that for Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), gender identity is—like the various types of lyric poetry and verse drama they produced—another form to experiment with and re-define. Moreover, in their many books of poetry, genre itself becomes a form of identity and a way to mediate gendered social expectations.