Emerson Society

Advisory Board and Committees

Advisory Board

Alice de Galzain, University of Edinburgh

Alice completed her Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Rewriting the Life of an ‘Ultra-Radical’: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852),” she looked at Emerson’s and Fuller’s different understandings of womanhood impacted their views of society and the American nation. Research interests include Transcendentalism, transnational writing, abolitionism, and women’s studies. She is the recipient of the Barbara L. Packer Fellowship (23-24).

John Lysaker, Emory University

John Lysaker is William R. Kenan Professor of Philosophy at Emory University teaching American and Continental philosophies and circulating through most of philosophy’s subdisciplines, with a focus on ethics and aesthetics. He is the author of Emerson & Self-Culture and After Emerson, and more recently, Philosophy and the Character of Thought and Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude.

Nicholas Guardiano, Southern Illinois University – Carbondale

Nicholas L. Guardiano is Alwin C. Carus Archivist and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His interests focus on American philosophy and literature, the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, aesthetics, and semiotics. He is the author of Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2017). He also oversees the archival collections in philosophy at the Special Collections Research Center of Morris Library.

Michael Jonik, University of Sussex

Michael teaches American literature and contemporary critical theory at the University of Sussex. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice. He recently published Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and he writes on pre-1900 American literature, continental philosophy, and the history of science.

Leslie Morris, Harvard University

Leslie A. Morris is Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University, where she cares for the Emerson family papers among other collections. She serves as Trustee for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and the Emily Dickinson Museum. She is the General Editor of the online Emily Dickinson Archive.

Anita Patterson, Boston University

English professor at Boston University and Author of ‘From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest’ (Oxford UP, 1997) examined Emerson’s critical engagement with the dynamics of economic individualism and the debate over slavery, and showed how his writings fostered an abiding legacy of protest writing by African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Committees

Program Committee

Mark Gallagher, UCLA

Mark Gallagher, PhD (UCLA, 2021) is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Texas Woman’s University where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature. He is at work on his first book, a study of Transcendentalism and labor reform.

Yves Gardes, Rouen University

Associate Professor of American Literature Department of English Université de Rouen Normandie

Serge Grigoriev, Ithaca College

Serge Grigoriev is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College, NY.  His primary research interests are in pragmatism and philosophy of history (or historical theory).  His work has
been published in various academic outlets, including Metaphilosophy, Journal of Political Philosophy,
Contemporary Pragmatism, Journal for the Philosophy of History, History and Theory.

Bill Scalia, Louisiana State University

Bill Scalia holds a Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University and teaches writing, rhetoric and literature at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland.  He has published widely in literature and film. 

Awards

Austin Bailey, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College

Austin is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He currently teaches American literature and first-year composition at Hunter College (CUNY), and serves as the Writing Across the Curriculum Associate at Lehman College in the Bronx.

Anita Patterson, Boston University

Anita Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and is currently researching an American literary tradition of East-West interculturality that extends from Emerson and T. S. Eliot to Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the haiku-inspired poetry of Richard Wright.

Web Editor

Christina Katopodis, City University of New York (CUNY)

Christina Katopodis is Mellon Senior Research Associate at the City University of New York’s Humanities Alliance, the former Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities and founder of Engaged & Ready, a project that empowers faculty with antiracist active learning tools to democratize their classrooms. With Cathy N. Davidson, Katopodis is author of The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022), which is the winner of AAC&U’s 2023 Frederic W. Ness Book Award

Media Committee

Kathleen Crosby, Elon University

Kathleen Crosby is a lecturer in the English Department at Elon University where she teaches classes in literature and the law, southern studies, and first-year writing. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, pedagogy practices, the first-year experience, and retention and persistence programming. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Daphne Orlandi, Sapienza – University of Rome

Daphne is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the American Literature program at Sapienza – University of Rome and at Technische Universität Dortmund. As a DAAD scholarship holder, Daphne is currently working – between Rome and Dortmund – on her PhD project centered around R. W. Emerson’s models of European and World Literature, his transatlantic literary and cultural relations.

Thomas Howard, Washington University in St. Louis

Thomas W. Howard is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation, “Pragmatic Ambiguities: Aphoristic Thinking in the American Nineteenth Century,” examines the role of the aphorism in nonfiction prose among the Transcendentalists and Pragmatists. His article on “Thoreau’s Arboreal Encounters and Aphoristic Forest Thinking” appeared in 2021, and he has also written on Mark Twain and brain science as well as W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” as an aphorism. Thomas’s research has been supported by The Huntington Library, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and a Fulbright Research Fellowship, during which he spent two years in Germany at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, part of Freie Universität Berlin.

Emerson Society Papers

Michael Weisenburg, University of South Carolina

Michael Weisenburg is President of the Emerson Society and Director of Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections University Libraries at the University of South Carolina.

Todd Richardson, The University of Texas – Permian Basin

Todd Richardson is Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Language at The University of Texas – Permian Basin