QUARRY FARM TESTIMONIALS
We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.
JILL SPIVEY CADDELL
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Jillian Spivey Caddell is lecturer in nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. Dr Caddell joined Kent in 2019 after teaching at George Mason University and American University in the US. Her current work centers on literature of the American Civil War and its intersections with questions of history and memory. She has published her work in The New England Quarterly, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Apollo: the International Art Magazine, as well as two edited collections: Literary Cultures of the Civil War (ed. Timothy Sweet) and Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (eds. Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan).
Jillian Spivey Caddell’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
NATHANIEL CADLE
2019 Quarry Farm Fellow
Nathaniel Cadle is an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. He is the author of The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State, winner of the 2015 SAMLA Studies Book Award, as well as essays on subjects ranging from the anti-imperial politics of W.E.B. Du Bois to the teaching of American literary realism. In addition to a 2019 Quarry Farm Fellowship, his current research project is supported by a 2019-20 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nathaniel Cadle’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
MAX CAVITCH
2020 Quarry Farm Fellow
Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Comparative Literature, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) and of numerous essays on topics in American and African American Literature, Cinema Studies, Poetry and Poetics, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford World’s Classics edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and co-editor, with the historian Brian Connolly, of the forthcoming essay collection, Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies. He also edits and regularly contributes to Psyche on Campus: A Blog on Teaching Psychoanalysis in the Undergraduate Classroom, which he launched in August 2019.
Max Cavitch’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
STEPHEN CUSHMAN
Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), and Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (University Press of Virginia, 1999). Cushman has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Greece. He has been honored as UVA Cavalier Distinguished Professor and recipient of a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award.
Stephen Cushman’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
COURTNEY DERUSHA
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Courtney DeRusha is a senior masonry student at Alfred State College. Her studies and practical work focus primarily on preservation, restoration, and sound building practices. She also is pursuing certification in dry stone walling. Masonry is a mid-life career change. DeRusha formerly managed graphic design and production for the Corning Museum of Glass and had earlier careers in non-profit management and journalism. Preservation merges her backgrounds in research, reporting and design with her interest in historic buildings and building techniques. Learning a skilled trade continues her family’s legacy of fine building and handwork.
Courtney DeRusha’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
BERNARD J. DOBSKI
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
Bernard Joseph (B.J.) Dobski is a Professor of Political Science at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, where he teaches courses on political philosophy, international relations, and American foreign policy. While his training and much of his scholarly work focuses on classical Greek political thought, especially the work of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plato, he also has co-edited volumes on the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare, most notably Souls With Longing (Lexington, 2011), Shakespeare and the Body Politic (Lexington, 2013), and “The Political Wisdom of William Shakespeare” (Perspectives on Political Science, 2012). His published work on Mark Twain appears in The Review of Politics (“‘We Should See Certain Things Yet, Let Us Hope and Believe’: Technology, Sex, and Politics in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee,” 2007), The Journal of American Political Thought (“Gospel of Joan: Statesmanship and Providential Politics in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections,” 2020), and in The Artistic Foundations of Nations and Citizens: Art, Literature, and the Political Community (“Neither Patriot, Nor Saint: The Theological Implications of Twain’s Portrait of Nationalism in Personal Recollections,” 2021).
Bernard J. Dobski’s Quarry Farm Testimonial can be found HERE.
FRED GARDAPHE
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Fred Gardaphe is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian/American Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He is past-President of MELUS, the Italian American Studies Association, and the Working Class Studies Association. This year he celebrates his 45th year of teaching, forty of them at the college and university level. His books include Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Leaving Little Italy, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American Gangster and the short fiction collection, Importato dall’Italia. He is currently working on a study of humor and irony in Italian American culture and a novel.
Fred L. Gardaphe’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
SUSAN GILLMAN
Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She teaches 19th-century US literature and World Literature and Cultural Studies, and works on national literatures and cultures from a hemispheric perspective. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA. She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, most recently with co-editor Christopher Castiglia on Neither the Time nor the Place: Today’s Nineteenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Her new book, American Mediterraneans (U. of Chicago Press, 2022) traces the strange career of the “American Mediterranean,” a scholarly metaphor and folk geographical concept used from 1799 to the present in multiple disciplines, genres and languages, as a point of departure for a transnational and translational study of the Americas.
Susan Gillman’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
EDWARD GUIMONT
2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Edward Guimont is Assistant Professor of World History at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. He received his PhD in history from the University of Connecticut (where he lived around the corner from Mark Twain’s Hartford house) and is co-author of the book When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (Hippocampus Press, 2023). His second book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea: History from the Marginalised, is currently being written under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for publication through the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series. His interest is on the political ramifications of fringe science and pseudohistory, including cryptozoology, settler colonial invented histories, and the role of speculative fiction in the development of worldviews.
Edward Guimont’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
SUSAN K. HARRIS
2018 Quarry Farm Fellow
Susan K. Harris has served on the faculties of the University of Kansas, Penn State, and Queens College, CUNY. Her specialties are Mark Twain Studies and Studies of American Women Writers. Among her five monographs are Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (U Missouri P, 1982); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge, 1996); and God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford, 2011). She has edited three American women’s novels for Penguin/Putnam Press, the Library of America’s volume of Twain’s historical romances, and a Houghton Mifflin pedagogical edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Her most recent publication, Mark Twain, the World, and Me: “Following the Equator,” Then and Now (U Alabama P, 2020), follows Twain’s last lecture tour as he wound his way through the British Empire in 1895–1896.
Susan K. Harris’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
ANDREW HEBARD
2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Andrew Hebard is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio, working in the field of late nineteenth century American literature. He has published articles in journals including American Quarterly; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, The Mark Twain Annual, and Studies in American Naturalism. His book, The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910 (Cambridge, 2013) examines how American literature conventionalized legal forms of sovereignty and administration. His current book project, Draining the Swamp: Gilded Age Corruption Narratives, examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and political corruption in the late nineteenth century.
ALEKSANDRA HERNANDEZ
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Aleksandra Hernandez is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Her book project, (Un)Civilized Humans: Empathy, Disgust, and the Representation of Animals in America (1850-1900), investigates the representational methods used by writers in this period of American history to draw attention to the norm-transgressing nature of violence, and to distance readers from humanity’s barbaric and violent tendencies. Other research interests include: American pragmatism, pragmatist aesthetics, environmental ethics, interspecies ethics, animal minds, animal studies, care ethics, ecofeminism, and the history of distributed cognition. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Journal of Modern Literature, and Hypatia.
Aleksandra Hernandez’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
RYAN HERYFORD
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Ryan Heryford is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Literature in the Department of English at California State University, East Bay, where he teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with a focus in ecocriticism and cultural narratives of environmental justice. He has published, or has forthcoming articles, on environmental thought in the works of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Édouard Glissant, and M. NourbeSe Philip. His scholarship has been supported by the William Faulkner Society, the Emily Dickinson International Society, and the University of California Center for Global California Studies. His current book-length project, “The Snugness of Being:” Vitalism and Decay in Nineteenth Century American Literature, explores the influence of nineteenth-century environmental and biomedical philosophy on constructions of self and subjectivity within the works of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville.
Ryan Heryford’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
CLIFTON HOOD
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Clifton Hood is the George E. Paulsen ’49 Professor of American History and Government at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He received his B.A. from Washington University and his Ph.D. from the History Department at Columbia University. Hood is the author of two books: 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (1993) and In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City’s Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis (2016). He is now writing a history of imposters in the United States (tentatively entitled “American Imposters: Identity, Aspiration, Surveillance”) and plans another book project, about the relationship between core and periphery in the Pittsburgh region. Hood has published scholarly articles in publications like the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Urban History, and the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute; op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and has appeared in several American Experience as well as other historical documentaries.
Clifton Hood’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
MALLORY HOWARD
2022 Quarry Farm Fellow
The Mark Twain House & Museum’s Assistant Curator Mallory Howard shares the responsibility for the care, exhibition, and interpretation of the Mark Twain House and the museum’s collection of more than 20,000 artifacts and documents. Howard has aided countless researchers, done important work herself on Twainian subjects, and has spoken on aspects of Twain’s life and work in venues ranging from scholarly conferences to Mississippi riverboats. She earned her B.A.in American History at Central Connecticut State University and was inducted into the national history honor society Phi Alpha Theta. She holds a certification from the Modern Archives Institute in Washington, D.C.
Mallory Howard’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
LAWRENCE HOWE
2019 Quarry Farm Fellow
Lawrence Howe is past-president of the Mark Twain Circle of America, Professor of English and Film Studies at Roosevelt University, and editor of Studies in American Humor. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority and co-editor with Harry Wonham of Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture.
Lawrence Howe’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
CHARLINE JAO
2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Charline Jao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research broadly focuses on grief, print culture, and gender in the American nineteenth century. Her dissertation, “Early Lost,” looks at the temporality of child death and separation in texts by nineteenth-century American women writers, with an emphasis on events not easily absorbed into sentimentalism or nation-making such as infanticide and abandonment. Jao is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, a catalogue of poetry published in New York City periodicals run by Black editors in the nineteenth century, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, a collection of material related to the abolitionist free labor/free produce movement. Her research has been supported by the Cornell Rural Humanities Initiative, The Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the American Antiquarian Society. Jao is also the 2024 Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow – NEEDS LINK Recipient.
Charline Jao’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
STEVE JORDAN
Steve Jordan is a retired preservation specialist who restored old and historic windows in Rochester, New York. He grew up in west Tennessee, graduated from Memphis State University, Cornell’s graduate program in Historic Preservation, and has worked in the building trades since he was a young boy. He was the rehab advisor for the Landmark Society of Western New York for six years, an architectural conservator for Bero Architecture for four years, and a contributing editor for Old-House Journal from 1998 through 2015. Steve is author of the award winning Rehab Rochester: A Sensible Guide for Old-House Maintenance, Repair, and Rehabilitation (Landmark Society of Western New York, 1995) and co-author of Painting Kitchens – How to Choose and Use the Right Paint . . . (Quarry Books, Gloucester, MA, 2004). He is also author of The Window Sash Bible (Create Space, 2015) and Storm Windows: A Comprehensive Guide to Wood, Aluminum, and Interior Storm Windows (Self Published, 2021). He is introducing a new book, Glazing and Replacing Glass on Traditional Wood Windows, the spring 2023. Steve is currently working on a book about the use and spread of sprung dance floors in early and twentieth-century America and a second edition of Rehab Rochester.
Steve Jordan’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
BARBARA LADD
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Barbara Ladd is Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches courses in American literature, with an emphasis on the work of southern writers. Her publications include Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner; Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty; and The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South (co-editor) as well as numerous essays. “‘Night After Night and Day After Day’: Mark Twain and the Natural World” appeared in the Mark Twain Annual in 2019.
Barbara Ladd’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
DON JAMES MCLAUGHLIN
2019 Quarry Farm Fellow
Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of English at The University of Tulsa specializing in 19th century and early American literature. He earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He completed his dissertation “Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature” under the direction of Heather Love, Max Cavitch, Nancy Bentley, and Chi-ming Yang. The dissertation (now first book project) provides an intellectual history of phobia in American print culture as a medical diagnosis, political metaphor, and aesthetic sensation in the 18th and 19th centuries. In January 2016, an essay from the project was published in The New Republic, titled “The Anti-Slavery Roots of Today’s -Phobia Obsession.” Two additional essays from the project are currently forthcoming in Literature and Medicine and J19: The Journal of 19th -Century Americanists. In 2018, Penn English awarded Don James the Diane Hunter Prize for Best Dissertation submitted during the 2017/18 academic year. In the summer of 2018, Don James was awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society to support completion of his first book. His research has also been supported by a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Penn Humanities Forum.
Don James McLaughlin’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
BRUCE MICHELSON
Bruce Michelson is the author of Mark Twain on the Loose and Printer’s Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution, as well as many articles and book chapters about Mark Twain and other writers. He is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Illinois, and a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and The American Humor Studies Association. A Contributing Editor at Studies in American Humor, he is also a Fulbright Ambassador, having received two fellowships from the Fulbright Program. His most recent work includes a translation of George Clemenceau’s writing on Claude Monet and the fine arts and a one-act comedy about Sam Clemens, his daughter Susy, and a Mysterious Stranger in France.
Bruce Michelson’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
CINDY HUNTER MORGAN
2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of Far Company (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and Harborless (Wayne State University Press), which was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. She also is the author of two chapbooks, Apple Season (Midwest Writing Center Chapbook Award, 2012) and The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker (Ledge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Michigan State University, where, for several years, she also taught book arts. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Tin House Online, Passages North, Salamander, Sugar House Review, and West Branch. For several years, she was a regular contributor for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. She is a co-founder of FILMETRY: A Festival of Film and Poetry. She leads various poetry workshops and book arts workshops. Her artist’s books are held in private collections and in Murray & Hong Special Collections at Michigan State University Libraries, the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University, and the Rolvaag Library Special Collections at St. Olaf College.
Cindy Hunter Morgan’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
LINDA A. MORRIS
2019 and 2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Linda A. Morris is Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Davis. Her book-length studies include Women’s Humor in the Age of Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam Whitcher, American Women Humorists: Critical Essays (Ed.), and Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression. She has written a number of essays about Mark Twain, including “What is Personal about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc?”, “The Sources of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” (with Ronald Jenn), “Gender Bending as Childs’ Play,” “Identity Switching in Huckleberry Finn,” “Twice-Told Tales: Aunt Sally Phelps and the ‘Evasion’ in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “the Eloquent Silence in ‘Hellfire Hotchkiss’”, and an in-press essay on “Mark Twain and Sexuality,” for Mark Twain in Context.” Her essays on American women’s humor include “Good Food, Great Friends, Cold Beer: The Domestic Humor of Mary Lasswell,” “Domestic Manners of the Americans: A Transatlantic Phenomenon,” and most recently “Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression.” She was the recipient of “The Charlie Award” by the American Humor Studies Association, and “The Olivia Langdon Clemens Award” by the Mark Twain Circle of America.
Linda A. Morris’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
SARAH NANCE
2020 Quarry Farm Fellow
Sarah Nance is an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. Her work examines late 19th, 20th, and 21st-century literature and art through the lens of the medical humanities, and her current scholarly book project explores the intersections of illness, violence, and scale in contemporary literature. She is also at work on a collection of poems about the strange temporality of grief and the physical locations associated with loss. Her critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Literature and Medicine, Arizona Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, Belletrist, Parentheses, Muse/A, and elsewhere.
Sarah Nance’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
NICHOLAS OTRANTO
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
Nicholas Otranto is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Dallas, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. His research focuses on the construction and maintenance of boundaries within intimate spaces, such as the home, and how those boundaries communicate complexities associated with social, genealogical, and rhizomatic identities. He is working on a dissertation that, in part, applies the study of belonging to the works of Mark Twain.
Nicholas Otranto’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
STEPHEN PASQUALINA
2020 Quarry Farm Fellow
Stephen Pasqualina is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Core Humanities program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research focuses primarily on American modernism and critical theory. His current book project, Mechanical Failure: Modernism, Technology, and the Mediation of History, examines the role of speed and visual media technologies in the US modernist historical imaginary. Work related to this project has recently appeared in Modernism/modernity, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Public Books, and MarkTwainStudies.org.
Stephen Pasqualina’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
JAMES PLATH
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
James Plath is the R. Forrest Colwell Endowed Chair and Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he has taught American literature, journalism, film, and creative writing for 35 years. His essays on American literature have appeared in numerous edited collections and in such journals as The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the American Short Story, The John Updike Review, and Journal of the Short Story in English. He is the author/editor of Conversations with John Updike (U. Press Mississippi, 1994), Remembering Ernest Hemingway (Ketch & Yawl, 1999), Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway (Turner, 2009), John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews (Lehigh U. Press, 2016), The 100 Greatest Literary Characters (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), three volumes in the Critical Insights series from Salem Press, and two poetry chapbooks. As president of The John Updike Society he also took the lead in restoring Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania. and converting it into a museum and literary center.
James Plath’s Quarry Farm Testimonial can be found HERE.
STEPHEN RACHMAN
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
Stephen Rachman is Associate Professor in the department of English, former Director of the American Studies Program and former head of Digital Humanities at Michigan State and former Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University. He is the co-editor and translator of Chinese Women Writers and the Environment (McFarland). He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow (Rutgers University Press). He is a co-author of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press) and the co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has written numerous articles on 19th-century American literature, the history of medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning Web site on Sunday school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. His most recent work on Mark Twain is “‘The £1,000,000 Bank-Note’: Mark Twain and the 19th-Century Monetary Imagination” Mark Twain Journal 59:2 (Fall 2021).
Stephen Rachman’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
ALAN RANKIN
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Alan Rankin is a writer and independent researcher with an abiding interest in the unexplored corners of history. Since 1992, he has been studying the life of Nina Gabrilowitsch, Mark Twain’s granddaughter. His presentation “Nina: The Lost Diary of Nina Gabrilowitsch” was received with acclaim at the 2019 Clemens Conference in Hannibal, Missouri. The companion piece, “Finding the Lost Diary of Mark Twain’s Granddaughter,” appears on the website for the Center for Mark Twain Studies. His work-in-progress chronicles the lives of Nina and her parents, Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens, in Europe and America during the Roaring ’20s. He also writes a biographical column for Renaissance Magazine.
Alan Rankin’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
LAURA RICE
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Laura Rice is Professor Emerita in the School of Writing, Literature and Film at Oregon State University. Specializing in comparative literature, literary translation, and sustainable development, she has written widely on Colonial and Postcolonial literatures, Cultural Studies, and Gender in international context. Her books include Revolutions in Tunisian Poetry, co-edited and co-translated with Karim Hamdy, and Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa. As Principal Investigator, she designed and conducted federally-funded research and development and academic exchange projects on the MENA region, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, US Department of Education, and the US Department of State. Her current book project, focusing on Elmira in the last two decades of Twain’s life, brings her research back to the U.S. and to archives concerning her own family.
Laura Rice’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
MERAV SCHOCKEN
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Merav Schocken is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature with a particular emphasis on critical race studies and topics of space and place. Her dissertation explores practices of self-deception in nineteenth-century American literature.
Merav Schocken’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
EDWARD SHANNON
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Edward Shannon is Professor of Literature and former Literature Convener at Ramapo College of NJ; he teaches courses in Humanities, American Studies, and American literature, including Author Studies: Mark Twain. His “’Our clothes are a lie’: Disguise and Christian Typology in Pudd’nhead Wilson” appeared in the 2009 Mark Twain Annual. He also writes and teaches about comics and graphic novels. He’s written about cartoonists Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Charles Schulz, George Herriman, and Winsor McCay. He most frequently writes about Woody Guthrie. His most recent work on Guthrie includes “Illegal, Not Wanted, Unnamed: Woody Guthrie’s Exploration of Media, Immigration, and Identity in ‘Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)’” (forthcoming, Theory in Action) and “‘Good Grief, Comrade Brown! Woody Guthrie, Charles Schulz and the Little Cartoon Book that was a Big Lie’” (Studies in Comics, 2019). He was named a 2005 Woody Guthrie Fellow by the Woody Guthrie Foundation.
Edward Shannon’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
ARIEL SILVER
2022 Quarry Farm Fellow
Ariel Silver is the author of The Book of Esther and the Typology of Female Transfiguration in American Literature (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and a contributor to Esther in America (Maggid, 2020). Her work on Margaret Fuller and May Alcott has just been published in The Forgotten Alcott (Routledge, 2021). She has written on Joan of Arc in the work of Hawthorne, Adams, and Twain for a RFEA special issue on Joan of Arc in America (2019) Her article on Twain’s Roughing It, “From Liverpool to the Lion House,” is forthcoming in the Mark Twain Journal. She currently serves as President-elect of the Hawthorne Society.
Ariel Silver’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
KHYL STEPHEN
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
Kyhl Stephen is a PhD candidate and graduate student at Cornell University, where he studies nineteenth-century American literature and American Studies in the Department of Literatures in English. Generally, his interests include the cultural and intellectual histories of capitalism, and the economic humanities. His dissertation (currently titled but awaiting renaming), “Great Paper Cephalopods: American Fiction and the Textual Basis of Corporate Personhood, 1873-1913,” traces the contested rise of corporate personhood in the United States as the outcome of the production and uptake of texts. Corporations, he proposes, could assume the status of people because of the cultural and intellectual frameworks, codified in writing, through which they were perceived. As such, the dissertation locates literary form and commercial circulation as central in the history of corporate capitalism. It features key readings of literary writers such as Mark Twain, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Edith Wharton, as well as economists such as Irving Fisher, John Bates Clark, and Henry George.
Khyl Stephen’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
TODD NATHAN THOMPSON
2019 and 2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
Todd Nathan Thompson is Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Assistant Chair of the English Department. He is also Treasurer-Secretary of the American Humor Studies Association. Todd is author of The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). His work on political satire and pre-1900 American literature has also appeared in Scholarly Editing, Early American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Journal of American Culture, Teaching American Literature, and elsewhere. He currently is at work on a book project entitled Savage Laughter: Nineteenth-Century American Humor and the Pacific, 1840-1880.
Todd Nathan Thompson’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEY
Laura Skandera Trombley, in addition to being the forthcoming president of Southwestern University, is president emerita of Pitzer College, where she served for 13 years, and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Previously, she served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Trombley is the author of five books and a number of articles. She is the recipient of many awards for her scholarship, including being recognized by the Mark Twain Journal as a Legacy Scholar in spring 2019 for her efforts in rehabilitating the intellectual reputations of the women who surrounded Mark Twain. In 2017, she won the Louis J. Budd Award from the Mark Twain Circle of America for her contributions to Mark Twain Studies. Trombley graduated summa cum laude with a Master of Arts in English from Pepperdine University. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Southern California.
Laura Skandera Trombley’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
MIKA TURIM-NYGREN
2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
Mika Turim-Nygren is an American Literature Faculty member at Bard High School Early College DC, part of the Bard College network. Her current book project concerns 19th-century American dialect literature, and the relationship between racialized dialect and the formation of a national literature, both in the American context and beyond. Her published work related to this project includes “Twain’s Modernism: The Death of Speech in Huckleberry Finn as the Birth of a New Aesthetic,” which appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and “Bret Harte’s Birtherism: Dialect Literature and the Fiction of Native-Born Citizenship,” which is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 legal issue of nonsite.org.
Mika Turim-Nygren’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE .
BRIDGET BOSSART VAN OTTERLOO
Bridget Bossart van Otterloo paints and teaches in Corning, New York. Her artwork is about the beauty in nature. She has a degree in Studio Art from Houghton College and has studied in Florence, Italy. Bridget moved to Corning in 2002 to work as an apprentice and studio assistant for the late Thomas S. Buechner. She currently works from her light-filled home studio, where her subjects include still life, flowers, plants, portraits and landscapes painted in oils and watercolor. Bridget teaches painting workshops from her home studio. She has also has taught art classes at local youth centers, museums, libraries, Corning Community College, and public schools. Bridget has been on the faculty of 171 Cedar Arts Center teaching oil painting and watercolor painting classes since 2002. Bridget’s work can be viewed at several venues in New York State including The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in Corning, The North Star Gallery in Ithaca, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, Oxford Gallery in Rochester, Gallery 54 in Skaneateles, and The Franklin Street Gallery in Watkins Glen.
Bridget Bossart van Otterloo’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
WYNN YARROW
2023 Quarry Farm Fellow
Wynn Yarrow is a professional artist focusing on the connections between nature and human nature. Her work has been exhibited in a dozen museums and as many colleges and universities. Some of the venues at which she has exhibited are Kyoto International Community House, Kyoto, Japan; Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY and Penland School of Craft, Penland, NC. Yarrow’s work is represented by West End Gallery, Corning, NY and Artful Home, Madison, Wisconsin. Her public art comforts patients and families at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN and other hospitals in New York and Pennsylvania. She has been a teaching artist for programs funded by the US Department of Education and by The National Endowment for the Arts.
Wynn Yarrow’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.
MELISSA SCHOLES YOUNG
Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novel Flood, winner of the Literary Fiction Category for the 2017 Best Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and Poets & Writers. She’s a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review and Editor of Grace in Darkness: D.C. Women Writers. She’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.
Melissa Scholes Young’s Quarry Farm testimonial can be found HERE.