Previous Years First Book Institute
2024 First Book Institute
The 2024 First Book Institute was once more hosted on Penn State’s main campus. The institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State faculty John Marsh, Sarah Townsend, Tina Chen, and Cathleen Cahill; and Institute alums Mary Kuhn (FBI 6), Joo Ok Kim (FBI 5), Jessica Hurley (FBI 5) and Jenny Rhee (FBI 3). The event also featured a publishing roundtable discussion between Kendra Boileau, Editor-in-Chief of PSU Press, and Institute alums—and authors of recently published first books—Renee Hudson (FBI 7) and Ben Bascom (FBI 6).
Congratulations to the eight successful applicants to this year’s Institute! This cohort of early-career scholars spent five days workshopping their book projects, receiving feedback on their draft introductions and one sample chapter. Participants in FBI 12 (along with their current academic posts and works-in-progress) are listed below:
Mia Alafaireet, Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin
Project Title: Transplanting Blackness: New Negro Botanicals and the Ecology of Black Health
Heidi Amin-Hong, Assistant Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara
Project Title: Transpacific Contaminations: Ecological Aesthetics and Cold War Afterlives
Eve Eure, Assistant Professor of English, Lehman College, City University of New York
Project Title: The Grammar of Kinship: Black and Native Intimacies in the Nineteenth-Century
Molly MacVeagh, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, Wake Forest University
Project Title: Novel Metabolisms: Environmental Fiction in the Molecular Age
Rebecca Liu, Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park
Project Title: Contract Spirit: Asian American Literature after the Coolie Trade
Alyssa Quintanilla, Assistant Professor of English, United States Naval Academy
Project Title: Markers, Monuments, Memorials in the United States-Mexico Borderlands
Sidonia Serafini, Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College and State University
Project Title: Cultivating Citizenship: Racial and Environmental Justice and African American Writing at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, 1890-1925
Arthur Wang, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania
Project Title: Minor Theories of Everything: On Popular Science and Contemporary Fiction.
2023 First Book Institute
The 2023 First Book Institute was hosted on Penn State’s main campus, marking a return to an in-person format for the first time since 2019. The institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State faculty Matt Tierney, Jim Casey, Cynthia Young, Tina Chen, and Shuang Shen; Institute alums Samaine Lockwood (FBI 1), Bart Brinkman (FBI 2), and Lindsay Thomas (FBI 4); and Penn State English alum Sarah Salter. The event also featured a publishing roundtable discussion between Kendra Boileau, Editor-in-Chief of PSU Press, and Institute alums—and authors of recently published first books—Ana Schwartz (FBI 8) and Todd Carmody (FBI 1).
Congratulations to the eight successful applicants to this year’s Institute! This cohort of early-career scholars spent five days workshopping their book projects, receiving feedback on their draft introductions and one sample chapter. Participants in FBI 11 (along with their current academic posts and works-in-progress) are listed below:
Margarita Castromán Soto, Assistant Professor of English, Rice University
Project Title: Collecting Race: The Archival Predicament in Twentieth Century Black Literature and Culture
Valentina Montero Román, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Irvine
Project Title: Modernizing the Mind: Gender, Race, and Cognitive Citizenship
Clare Mullaney, Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
Project Title: A Word Made Flesh: Disability and Editorship in U.S. Literary Culture
Sarah Nance, Assistant Professor of English, United States Air Force Academy
Project Title: Monumental Poetics: The Long Duration of Illness, Bodies, and Memory
Melissa Parrish, Assistant Professor of English, Smith College
Project Title: Situation Normal: Emergency Poetics and the Rise of the National Security State
Samantha Pergadia, Assistant Professor of English, Southern Methodist University
Project Title: Slavery’s Slaughterhouse: Envisioning Multispecies Ethics in an Antiblack World
Spencer Tricker, Assistant Professor of English, Clark University
Project Title: Imminent Communities: Liberal Cosmopolitanism and Empire in Transpacific Literature
Jennifer Wang, Assistant Professor of English, Middlebury College
Project Title: Oblique Aesthetics: Race, Transpacific Capital, and Literary Form in the Twenty-First Century
2022 First Book Institute
The 2022 First Book Institute—the third in a row hosted virtually—was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty participants included Penn State faculty Tina Chen, Christian Haines, Aldon Nielsen, Claire Colebrook, and Matt Tierney, and FBI alumni Abby Goode (FBI 5), Sonya Posmentier (FBI 1), and Chris Perreira (FBI 6). Jordan Carroll and Joo Ok Kim, also FBI alumni (FBI 6 and 5 respectively) who recently published their first books, joined Penn State Press Editor-in-Chief Kendra Boileau at the Publishing Roundtable.
Over the course of five days, the eight successful applicants to the Institute workshopped an introduction and chapter from their book projects. The participants and their projects were:
- Justine M. Bakker, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
Project Title: Demonic Ocean: Parareligion in the African Diaspora - David M. de León, Lecturer in English and Senior Editor, The Yale Review
Project Title: Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter
- DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Project Title: Separate Yet Intertwined: Black and Native Bonds in the Ongoing New Negro Renaissance
- Hannah Manshel, Assistant Professor of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Project Title: Without the Law: Theories of Freedom from Early America
- Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Assistant Professor of English, Rice University
Project Title: Overseas Filipina Writers: Reproductive Fictions and Fantasies in the World-Literary System
- Cole Morgan, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Irvine
Project Title: The World Before Us: Blackness, Narration, and Photography
- Amrah Salomón J., Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
Project Title: Burning Fences, Mending Labyrinths: An Indigenous Border Critique
- Talia Shalev, Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies
Project Title: Some Inarticulate Major Premise: Poetry, the Will of the People, and the U.S. Supreme Court
2021 First Book Institute
The 2021 First Book Institute–the second hosted virtually–was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State faculty Tina Chen, Christian Haines, Aldon Nielsen, Janet Lyon, Hester Blum, Matt Tierney and Judith Sierra-Rivera, FBI alumni Adrienne Brown, Sunny Xiang and Lindsay Thomas, and Penn State Press Editor-in-Chief Kendra Boileau.
Congratulations to the eights successful applicants to this year’s institute! They were:
- Alison Glassie, Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Project Title: Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms
- Lindsey Grubbs, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Sciences, California State University, East Bay
Project Title: Moral Disorder: A Literary History of Mental Diagnosis in the Nineteenth-Century United States
- Ayasha Guerin, Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Studies, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia
Project Title: Making Zone-A: Race, Nature, and Resilience in New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores
- Alyssa Hunziker, Assistant Professor of English, Oklahoma State University
Project Title: Histories in Common: Native American Literature, U.S. Empire, and Archival Form
- Chad B. Infante, Assistant Professor of English, The University of Maryland
Project Title: Cool Fratricide: Murder and Metaphysics in Black and Indigenous U.S. Literature
- Lukas Moe, Lecturer, San José State University
Project Title: Archives and Afterlives: U.S. Poetry’s Radical Generation, 1935—1968
- Nancy Quintanilla, Assistant Professor of Hemispheric American Literature, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Project Title: Discourses of Failure: Empire and Crisis in Contemporary Transnational American Literature and Culture
- Matthew Scully, Affiliated Faculty, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing and Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College
Project Title: Democratic Anarchy: Figures of Equality in United States Literature and Politics
2020 First Book Institute
The 2020 First Book Institute–the first hosted virtually–was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State faculty Christopher Castiglia, Tina Chen, Christian Haines, Aldon Nielsen, Sarah Townsend, and Cynthia Young, and FBI alumni Adrienne Brown, Joe Darda, Doug Guerra, Carrie Hyde and Sonya Posmentier.
Congratulations to the eight successful applicants to this year’s First Book Institute! They are:
- Faith Barter, Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon
Project Title: Fugitives, Rebels, and Cryptographers: Un-Fiction, Law, and African American Literature, 1830-1860
- Andrew Belton, Assistant Professor of English, Oklahoma State University
Project Title: Hip Hop Illiterate: Black Hermeneutics and the Future of Literary Theory
- David Hollingshead, Assistant Professor, MacEwan University
Project Title: Protoplasmic Naturalism: Race, Reductionism, and the Biomaterial Imagination
- Renee Hudson, Assistant Professor of English, Chapman University
Project Title: Genres of the Americas: Revolution, Form, Futurity
- Justin Mann, Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University
Project Title: Breaking the World: Blackness and Insecurity in the New World Order
- Paul Nadal, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University
Project Title: Remittance Fiction
- Danica Savonick, Assistant Professor of English, SUNY Cortland
Project Title: Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions
- Ana Schwartz, Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin
Project Title: Subjective Knowledge: Disciplines of Affection in the Early Modern Colony
2019 First Book Institute
The 2019 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State faculty Hester Blum, Kendra Boilieau (PSU Press), Christopher Castiglia, Tina Chen, Gordon Fraser, Christian Haines, John Marsh, Sandra Spanier, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Matt Tierney, and Sarah Townsend.
Congratulations to the eight successful applicants to this year’s institute! They are:
- Nissa Ren Cannon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kilachand Honors College, Boston University
Project Title: Paper Identities and Identity Papers: Documents of Interwar Expatriation and Modernist Writing
- Chris A. Eng, Assistant Professor of English, Syracuse University
Project Title: States of Provisionality: Improvising Queer Extravagance in Asian American Camps
- Emily Hainze, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kilachand Honors College, Boston University
Project Title: Incorrigible: Writing from the Early Women’s Prison in the United States
- Alexander Mazzaferro, Postdoctoral Fellow, American Philosophical Society
Project Title: No Newe Enterprize: Empirical Political Science and the Problem of Innovation in the Colonial English Americas
- Don James McLaughlin, Assistant Professor of English, University of Tulsa
Project Title: Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature
- Jesse Miller, Clinical Assistant Professor of Writing, School of Management, University at Buffalo
Project Title: The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Modernism, Bibliotherapy, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1916-1944
- Cristina Pérez Jiménez, Assistant Professor of English, Manhattan College
Project Title: Here to Stay: The Making of Latinx New York, 1931-1951
- Christy Pottroff, Assistant Professor of English, Merrimack College
Project Title: Citizen Technologies: The U.S. Post Office and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
2018 First Book Institute
The 2018 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Chris Castiglia, Tina Chen, Claire Colebrook, Amy Greenberg, Jonathan Marks, Jeff Nealon, Steele Nowlin, Matthew Restall, Matt Tierney, and Sarah Townsend.
- Ben Bascom, Assistant Professor of English, Ball State University
Project Title: Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early United States
- Jordan Carroll, Postdoctoral Scholar and Associate Director, ModLab Digital Humanities Lab, Department of English, University of California, Davis
Project Title: Publishing the Unpublishable: Obscenity and Editorship in U. S. Literary Culture
- Juliana Chow, Assistant Professor of English, Saint Louis University
Project Title: Diminishment: Partial Readings in American Regionalism and the Casualties of Natural History
- Mary Kuhn, Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Virginia
Project Title: The Garden Politic: Radical Plants in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
- Christopher Perreira, Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas
Project Title: Manufacturing Prisoner-Patient Consent: Race, Violence, and the Medical Archive
- Kathryn Walkiewicz, Assistant Professor of Literature, University of California San Diego
Project Title: Un-tied States: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Indigeneity and Territory
- Sunny Xiang, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University
Project Title: Neutral Tones: A Sense of Race
- Christine Yao, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia
Project Title: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
2017 First Book Institute
The 2017 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Hester Blum, Kendra Boileau (Editor-in-Chief, Penn State University Press), Tina Chen, John Marsh, Jeffrey Nealon, Anita Starosta, Matt Tierney, Sarah Townsend, Nicolai Volland, and Grant Wythoff (FBI Alumnus and Center for Humanities and Information Postdoctoral Fellow).
- Alex Benson, Assistant Professor of Literature, Bard College
Project Title: Alternating Sounds: American Literature and Ethnographic Transcription - Matthew Bolton, Assistant Professor of English, Gonzaga University
Project Title: A Rhetorical Approach to Adaptation: Effects, Purposes, and the Fidelity Debate - Abby Goode, Assistant Professor of English, Plymouth State University
Project Title: Democratic Demographics: A Literary Genealogy of American Sustainability - Jessica Hurley, Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Chicago
Project Title: Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex - Joo Ok Kim, Assistant Professor of English, University of Kansas
Project Title: Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War - Jarvis McInnis, Assistant Professor of English, Notre Dame University
Project Title: Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South - Sunny Yang, Assistant Professor of English, Louisiana State University
Project Title: Fictions of Territoriality: Legal and Literary Narratives of Race, Geography, and U.S. Empire - Meina Yates-Richard, Assistant Professor of English, Syracuse University
Project Title: Echoes of the Future-Past: Slavery and Sonic Testimony in African American and Diasporic Literature 1845-Present
2016 First Book Institute
The 2016 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Jessamyn Abel, Hester Blum, Chris Castiglia, Tina Chen, Ariane Cruz, Jonathan Eburne, Debra Hawhee, John Marsh, Janet Lyon, Carla Mulford, Chris Reed, and Ben Schreier.
- Kelly L. Bezio, Assistant Professor of English, Texas A & M—Corpus Christi
Project Title: Communicable Disease in the American Literary Imagination - Brianna Burke, Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and American Indian Studies, Department of English, Iowa State University
Project Title: Becoming Beast: The Humanimal in Climate Justice Literatures - Danielle Christmas, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Project Title: Auschwitz and the Plantation: Labor and Social Death in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction - Joseph Darda, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, Texas Christian University
Project Title: Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War - Gordon Fraser, Assistant Professor of English, North Dakota State University
Project Title: Nationalist Cosmologies: Revolution, Astronomy, and the Limits of the Universal in Nineteenth-Century America - Kya Mangrum, Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, Cornell University
Project Title: How Deep and Dark: Photography, Slavery, and the Limits of Narrative - Matthew Schilleman, Fellow, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College
Project Title: Typewriter Psyche: Office Media and the Techno-Inscriptive Origins of Modernism - Lindsay Thomas, Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
Project Title: Training for Catastrophe: Preparedness Media, Speculative Fiction, and the Management of the Future
2015 First Book Institute
The 2015 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Michael Bérubé, Hester Blum, Chris Castiglia, Tina Chen, Jonathan Eburne, John Marsh, Shirley Moody-Turner, Ben Schreier, Linda Selzer, Shuang Shen, and Scott Smith.
- Jesus Constantino, Assistant Professor of English, Notre Dame University
Project Title: Fighting Form: Boxing and the Violence of Aesthetic Formalism, 1880-1950 - Sarah Ensor, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Portland State University
Project Title: Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment - Tara Fickle, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Oregon
Project Title: Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature - Doug Guerra, Assistant Professor of Literature and Technology, State University of New York at Oswego
Project Title: On the Move: Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature - Phil Maciak, Assistant Professor of English, Louisiana State University
Project Title: The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era - Shaundra Myers, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Northwestern University
Project Title: Worlds beyond Brown: Race, Embodiment, and the Remapping of Integration in African American Literature - Jenny Rhee, Assistant Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University
Project Title: Anthropomorphic Attachments: Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Literature, Art, Technology, and War - Andrew Rippeon, Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, Hamilton College
Project Title: Lyric Resource: Sound Technologies and Lyric Criticality
2014 First Book Institute
The 2014 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Jonathan Abel, Hester Blum, Chris Castiglia, Tina Chen, Eric Hayot, Janet Lyon, John Marsh, Shirley Moody-Turner, Carla Mulford, Scott Smith, and Susan Squier, as well as Penn State University Press director Patrick Alexander.
- Bartholomew Brinkman, Assistant Professor of English, Framingham State University
Project Title: Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print - Natalia Cecire, ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Department of English; Postdoctoral Fellow, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University
Project Title: Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge, 1880-1950 - Joy A. J. Howard, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Saint Joseph’s University
Project Title: Iroquois Captive and Haudenosaunee Interpreter: Reconstructing the Borderlands Life of Rebecca Kellogg Ashley - Carrie Hyde, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles
Project Title: Literary Originalism: The Extra-Legal Development of U.S. Citizenship, 1776-1868 - Molly Pulda, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Department of English, University of Southern California
Project Title: Sympathetic Ink: Memoirs of Family Secrets - Jillian Sayre, Associate Lecturer, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Project Title: In a Scryptural Economy: Nation, Narrative, and Necropolitics in Post-Revolutionary American Literatures - Sarah Wald, Assistant Professor of English, University of Louisville
Project Title: The Nature of Citizenship: Race, Nature, and Citizenship in Representations of Californian Agricultural Labor - Grant Wythoff, Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Project Title: Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination
2013 First Book Institute
The 2013 First Book Institute was co-directed by CALS Director Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Institute faculty included Penn State professors Thomas Beebee, Hester Blum, Robert Caserio, Tina Chen, Jonathan Eburne, Eric Hayot, Janet Lyon, Shirley Moody-Turner, and Jeffrey Nealon.
- Adrienne Brown, Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago
Project Title: The Black Skyscraper: Modern Architecture and the Shape of Race and Writing - Todd Carmody, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
Project Title: “Racial Handicap”: The Disability History of Racial Uplift - Danielle Heard, Assistant Professor of English, University of California at Davis
Project Title: Mavericks of Masquerade: Comic Strategies of Post-Blackness - Sarah Juliet Lauro, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Clemson University
Project Title: Rise Up! Living Death in Slavery, Rebellion, and Resistance - Samaine Lockwood, Assistant Professor of English, George Mason University
Project Title: Recollecting Regionalism: Queer Women, New England, and the Work of US History, 1875-1915 - Theodore (Ted) Martin, Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Project Title: Contemporary Drift: Genre and the Measures of the Present - Christen Mucher, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Smith College
Project Title: Becoming Indigenous: Colonial Memory, American Antiquities, and Native Pasts - Sonya Posmentier, Assistant Professor of English, New York University
Project Title: Cultivation and Catastrophe: Forms of Nature in Modern Poetry of the Black Diaspora
