Please find below the nominees and vision statements for the 2025 SSAWW Election. The vote is open to all members in good standing, not just those in attendance at the conference. Members will vote online via. link sent to members via WildApricot our online membership system. Voting began at the time of the conference and will stay open until December 2nd.
Please contact Jennifer Putzi (Chair, Nominations and Elections Committee) if you have questions.
Thank you on behalf of SSAWW!
Jennifer Putzi, jlputz@wm.edu
SSAWW Ballot 2025 Nominees
PRESIDENT
Theresa Strouth Gaul
Vision Statement:
I am honored to be nominated for president of SSAWW, a professional organization that has meant so much to me. My career began around the same time as the Society, and I was fortunate to have Sharon M. Harris, SSAWW’s co-founder, as a colleague. Through her example, I saw how organizational work and mentorship can shape a career. Early on, I was shy and intimidated at conferences, though thrilled to see all the “famous people.” SSAWW drew me into community, encouraged me that my work mattered, and introduced me to mentors and collaborators. Publishing in Legacy, serving as its co-editor and as an SSAWW Advisory Board member, and receiving the SSAWW Edition Award have been high points of my professional life. I have sought to extend that combination of research/pedagogy and community by co-founding the Texas Regional SSAWW Study Group and serving as SSAWW–Society for Early Americanists (SEA) liaison.
Now, I aim to give back in a new way, as president. In my administrative roles at my home university, I’ve built a small women and gender studies program into a department, led an English department through a pandemic leadership crisis, co-founded an initiative to confront the university’s history with Indigenous peoples, and led the first general education reform in twenty years. I hope to bring my collaborative, process-based approach to SSAWW. My vision for the organization would build on its legacy and its potential: to foster and nurture an inclusive space for the shared purpose of studying American women writers, sustaining a community premised on intellectual and pedagogical aspiration, generosity, and respect that nourishes the collective work of expanding and deepening the field.
Biographical Statement:
Theresa Strouth Gaul is director of the core curriculum (since 2021) and professor of English at Texas Christian University. Her scholarship centers on U.S. women’s writing, early Indigenous authors, letters as literary form, and early multicultural Texas in literature. She is editor of Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 (Nebraska, 2014), winner of the SSAWW Edition Award; To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1825-1839 (North Carolina, 2005); Letters and Cultural Transformation in the United States, 1760-1860 (with Sharon M. Harris, Routledge, 2009); A Companion to American Literature, Vol. A, Beginnings to 1820 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) and Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023 (TCU Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in American Literature, J19, Women’s Studies, Legacy, and many other journals. She co-edited Legacy from 2008-2015, served on the SSAWW advisory board, was series editor for Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (Nebraska), and co-founded the Texas Regional SSAWW Study Group (with Desiree Henderson). At TCU, she directed Women & Gender Studies (2012-2018), chaired the English department (2019-2021), co-founded the Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiatives (2016) and has been recognized with the Deans’ Teaching Award, the Michael R. Ferrari Award for Academic Leadership, and the Plume Award, awarded by the TCU Race & Reconciliation Initiative.
Elissa Zellinger
Vision Statement:
I would be honored to serve as President of SSAWW, an organization that has shaped my scholarly life. My vision builds on the sense of community that makes this society so distinctive. I want to emphasize stability, transparency, and reliable communication, while collaborating with an inclusive and responsive team of officers and advisors to strengthen SSAWW’s presence. I am committed to ensuring that members at every stage of their careers feel that SSAWW supports and sustains them.
I see leadership not as individualistic or iconoclastic work, but as consensus-building through grounded vision and concrete steps. For me, relationships are the core of strong leadership, and I am driven by my ability to connect with others across roles, perspectives, and disciplines. Through this leadership style, I aim to bolster SSAWW’s organizational framework to carry the society through transitions and challenges. From this foundation, SSAWW can expand initiatives that highlight what it does best: providing support, fostering community, and foregrounding the voices of American women writers.
Looking ahead, I envision initiatives to strengthen mentorship across career stages, build collaborations with peer organizations, create forums that address pressing issues in higher education and public life, and expand programming with an international reach. In short, I want SSAWW to maintain a dynamic presence even in non-conference years so that members feel engaged year-round. With steadiness and care, I hope to guide SSAWW into its next chapter of growth and impact.
Biographical Statement:
Elissa Zellinger is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English at Texas Tech University where she teaches nineteenth-century American Literature. Her research specializes in poetry and poetics, women’s writing, and nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. She is the author of Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women’s Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC 2020). She is also the guest editor of the Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation special issue on “The Poe/tics of Reception” (October 2025) and her articles have appeared in J19, Legacy, ESQ, and TSLL. Her second monograph, tentatively titled The Poetics of Profession, combines occasional poetry, U.S. monuments, and the discourse of professionalism to explore the racialized rationale underpinning memorialization in the late nineteenth-century United States. As Associate Chair, Dr. Zellinger has implemented strategic initiatives while deploying her relationship-building skills; her portfolio involves working with fifty-nine full-time faculty members across units to oversee some of the most complex aspects of shared governance, including merit allocations, faculty and student scholarships and awards, and tenure and promotion procedures.
VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS
Charline Jao
Vision Statement:
One of my first conferences as a graduate student was the 2021 SSAWW conference in Baltimore. Almost immediately, I knew that SSAWW would be an intellectual home for me. There, I found a welcoming community who shared the same curiosity and excitement I had for American women writers. The space SSAWW has created is one which magnifies the thrill of a recovery project, the inspiration we gain from our writers, and the fascination we draw from their complexities. I am delighted to be nominated for the Vice President, Communications position and for the opportunity to support the society in a leadership role.
At Cornell, I helped organize conferences, reading groups, speaker events, and workshops, doing tasks like website creation, registration management, and poster design. I also currently manage the American Women Writers listserv and a virtual working group. As Communications VP, I would be excited to support the incredible programming SSAWW organizes and executes, ensuring that our records and information channels are consistently updated, easily accessible, and visually pleasing. I am especially keen to help SSAWW continue building their virtual communities, which have been a wonderful resource for collaboration, presentations, and discussion. If elected, I will do my best to ensure SSAWW continue its core mission of promoting the study of American women writers while facing the challenges of our current moment—losses in institutional funding, the shrinking of the humanities, job precarity—head on.
Biographical Statement:
Charline Jao recently completed her PhD at Cornell University and is currently a lecturer at Tufts University. Her research looks at nineteenth-century print culture, with an emphasis on abolitionist periodicals, sentimentality, and albums. She is currently working on her manuscript, Early Lost, which looks at the representation of child death in nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, which examines poetry in NYC periodicals run by Black editors, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, a catalog of material related to the abolitionist free produce movement. Her research has been supported by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Quarry Farm Fellowship Program at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. Her work has been published in Comparative Literature, American Literary Realism, American Periodicals, and Commonplace.
VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCES AND MEMBERSHIP
Stephanie Palmer
Vision Statement:
I am deeply honored to be nominated for the post of Vice President for Membership and Finance. Attending SSAWW conferences since the noughties, I have benefited from the collegial and cogent discussions, and I am committed to ensuring their longevity. I am aware that the Society has recently adopted new software for keeping track of membership and finances. I plan to continue the good work started by my predecessors in adapting to this software and keeping up to date with whether it is delivering good results for us. I will ensure that people’s membership stays up to date through reminder emails and the like. Reminders will encourage people to pay their dues and ensure that the Society has sufficient funds to carry out its important activities: the triannual conference; online presentations, roundtables and discussions in between conference years; mentoring graduate students and early career faculty; advocating for underemployed members; and promoting the study, appreciation, and enjoyment of American women writers by the wider public both within the United States and internationally. A comprehensive review of finances will enable us to ensure that dues are set at a price that is affordable and equitable. When not researching and teaching, I served as a treasurer for a group raising funds for a playground in my village in Nottinghamshire, so I have some numeracy qualification (as well as years of calculus from back in the day before I majored in English).
Biographical Statement:
After graduating with a PhD in English literature from the University of Michigan, I have taught American women writers at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, at De Montfort University and the University of Leicester in the UK, and I have been employed in a permanent lecturing/senior lecturing position at Nottingham Trent University in the UK since 2009. I have published two monographs: Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009), and Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers (Routledge, 2020), and I am finalizing a third, tentatively entitled The Revolt from the Village and the Sustainable Community (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). I am interested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers, regionalism, and transnationalism.
VICE PRESIDENT, ORGANIZATIONAL MATTERS
Mollie Barnes
Biographical Statement:
Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and First Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society. At USCB she teaches the first-year writing sequence, Introduction to English Studies, Survey of American Literatures, and seminars in American Literature 1830–1860, 1860–1910, Transatlantic Literature, and African-American Literature. She has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century women writers. Her book—Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (University of South Carolina Press, 2026)—studies the ways women documented their own and one another’s lives in diaries and biographies, focusing especially on the intersection of gender and race. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported this research with a 2023 Summer Stipend. She is completing two new books: Laura Matilda Towne, Abolitionist: Penn School Diaries, 1862–1864 and Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Lives: A Cultural Biography.
Vision Statement:
Most of what makes my professional life sweet beyond my home institution has grown out of communities forged through SSAWW and the Margaret Fuller Society. I attended my first SSAWW conference one year into my role at USCB, a regional public university where I teach a 4/4 load. SSAWW has transformed my career. I see serving as SSAWW’s VP of Organizational Matters as my way of caretaking communities that mean so much to me at a time when we need intersectional community more than ever before. My most important responsibilities for SSAWW would be gathering people together and helping people claim seats at our professional tables, hand-in-hand with fellow officers, at our triennial conference, but also through the grad student caucus and with other associated events/organizations (regional study groups, for example).
My work with the MFS for the last seven years—as an Advisory Board member, as First and Second VP, and as a member of our Committee for Racial Justice—have prepared me to grow into a leadership role with SSAWW. I’ve collaborated with some of the most generous leaders in nineteenth-century women writers’ circles to build a more inclusive community that transcends what some might expect from the name of a single-author society. We do this in a variety of ways that I’d bring to SSAWW: we plan dinners for panelists at conferences so that nobody eats alone; we use our platforms (guaranteed sessions at MLA, for example) to amplify the voices of graduate students, international scholars, contingent workers, marginalized and/or underrepresented populations, and folks whose non-profit work should illuminate our scholarship; we recognize people whose service, social justice activism, and teaching transcend even what Fuller herself may have advocated; and, above all, we look for opportunities to build community, friendships, mentorships, and partnerships with other societies.
VICE PRESIDENT, PROGRAMMING
Nazera Wright
Vision Statement:
As Vice President of Programming for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), my vision is to create programs that reflect the breadth of SSAWW’s membership and the evolving field of American women’s writing. I bring a vision grounded in scholarly excellence, public humanities leadership, and a commitment to community-building. My programming will spotlight the impact of American women writers through lectures, symposia, and conversations that connect academic, public, and intergenerational audiences across disciplines.
With a track record of participating on national roundtables, co-organizing seminars for C19: Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists and delivering public lectures at institutions such as the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Medgar Evers College, and the American Philosophical Society, I will expand SSAWW’s reach through partnerships with libraries, museums, HBCUs, and community organizations. My scholarly work equips me to spotlight underrepresented voices and generate cross-institutional collaborations.
I envision a SSAWW calendar that includes initiatives such as Book Celebrations featuring new author-scholar dialogues; panel series on emerging research areas; and workshops on grant writing and archival research tailored for graduate students and early career scholars. My ongoing university service, ranging from graduate program assessment to mentoring junior faculty demonstrates my commitment to community-building across career stages. I bring national service experience from roles as Member-at-Large on C19’s Executive Board, Chair of C19’s Nominations Committee, and a member of the editorial board for J19: Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists. I will convene committees to steward the SSAWW awards, ensuring transparency, excellence, and recognition across fields. I am committed to cultivating an environment that nurtures dialogue, mentorship, and innovation, ensuring that SSAWW remains a leading force in the study of American women writers.
Biographical Statement:
Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright is Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which received the 2018 Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. A scholar of early African American literature and print culture, she is currently completing her second book, Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Wright has conducted extensive archival research at the American Antiquarian Society where she was elected a member in 2019, as well as at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work bridges early African American literature, archival research, and public humanities.