President—Allen Josephs, University Research Professor and Professor of Spanish, has taught at the University of West Florida, Pensacola since 1969. A founder and past president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, he is the author of White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture, "For Whom the Bell Tolls": Ernest Hemingway's Undiscovered Country, five books on Federico García Lorca and numerous articles on Hispanic culture, Lorca, and Hemingway in scholarly journals, as well as articles and reviews in the Atlantic, Boston Review, New Republic, and the New York Times Book Review. His book Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida: The Saga of Cesar Rincón, won the George B. Smith Award for Arts and Letters from the National Association of Taurine Clubs. A SAMLA member since the early 70's, he initiated the Hemingway Society's affiliation with SAMLA.

Website

First Vice President—Hunt Hawkins is Chair of the English Department at University of South Florida. For the past seven years he was Chair of the English Department at Florida State University where he held the title of James M. McCrimmon Professor. His academic specializations are Modern British Literature and poetry writing. He has published two books: Teaching Approaches to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” with the Modern Language Association and The Domestic Life (poems) with the University of Pittsburgh Press. The latter won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He has served as President of the Joseph Conrad Society, the South Atlantic Graduate Education Consortium, and the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English.

Website

Second Vice President—Joan McRae Kleinlein is an associate professor of Modern Languages at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where she has taught since 1997. Her major field of concentration is Medieval French Literature. She has taught courses in this topic area, as well as French film, history, culture, and composition. She has published numerous papers and texts in her field. In addition, Dr. Kleinlein has received the William W. Elliott Assistant Professorship in Modern Languages Award and the Fuqua Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Kleinlein received her B.A. from Agnes Scott College, M.A. from Middlebury College, and her Ph.D. from University of Virginia. In her time at Hampton-Sydney, she has held numerous significant college and departmental committee positions including the College Benefits Committee, Student Affairs Committee, Academic Affairs Committee, Committee on Studies and Core Requirements. She also served as Head of the French and German Divisions in the Modern Languages Department. Dr. Kleinlein is very active in campus activities, including the founding of the French Club, where she serves as the advisor, andworks with campus theater productions.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2008) —Jim Clark is the Jordan Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Barton College. He has served as an Instructor of English at Auburn University and Christian Brothers College (Memphis, TN) and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he was also Director of Creative Writing. He has published two books of poetry -- Handiwork and Dancing on Canaan’s Ruins -- and edited another -- Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece. In 2003 he released Buried Land, a CD of Appalachian folk music and original poems. He has served as Editor of The Vanderbilt Poetry Review, Associate Editor of the Greensboro Review, Managing Editor of the Denver Quarterly, and is presently an Assistant Editor of Crucible. He was the Alan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1985, received the Harriette Arnow Award in Fiction in 1990, was named the Jefferson-Pilot Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year at Barton College in 2003, and is presently serving as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Website

Past President—Bert Hitchcock, Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and Southern literature. He is the co-editor of American Short Stories and has contributed entries and essays on American writers to a number of reference books, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Reference Guide to American Literature, and Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. He also received the 2001 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinguished Alabama Literary Scholar and the 2006 Humanities Award from the Alabama Humanities Foundation.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2008) —James Thompson's areas of interest are eighteenth-century studies and literary theory. He conceives of his work as a kind of historical sociology of culture by focusing on the conditions of cultural exchange in the early modern period and what would make potential readers susceptible and receptive to the kind of fiction we have come to call the novel. Thompson co-edited with Suzanne Pucci a volume of essays on novels and film, Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture. At present Thompson is studying modern histories of the novel. Instead of the usual critique, Thompson is studying the Rise of the Novel as a historically specific legitimation exercise, a book that exemplified a kind of data and argument that fitted literary studies for the modern research university. On the back burner, Thompson plans for another collection of essays on early modern literature in the age of cultural studies for Tennessee Studies in English, and, more distantly, an anthology of shorter eighteenth-century fiction.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2009)—Scott Yarbrough, Professor of English and Department Chair at Charleston Southern University, won the Faculty Merit and 2002 Excellence in Teaching awards for CSU. His publications include articles on William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and Cormac McCarthy, and he co-authored the textbook A Practical Introduction to Literary Study. His fiction appears in Blackbird, New Orleans Review, Clackamas Literary Review, In Posse Review, Apalachee Quaterly, Iron Horse Literary Review and elsewhere. Yarbrough is fiction editor of storySouth.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2009) —Carolina Marquez-Serrano is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Tuskegee University. She has been awarded a Ford Foundation grant, won a university-wide teaching award, staged two original plays and produced three videos, and worked as a translator, interpreter, guide, and tutor. Her languages include Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Nahuatl (Aztec), Portuguese, and Spanish.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2010) —Valerie Dotson is an associate professor at Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston, Georgia campus. In addition, she serves as the Leadership Academy Director, an initiative of the Board of Regents focused on African American men in the University System of Georgia. She started her teaching career at Georgia Perimeter in 1999, after completing her education at Tougaloo College (B.A.), and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A., Ph.D.). She has taught courses in freshman composition, digital literacy (ATEC), American Literature, and African American Literature, including honors classes. Dr. Crawford is well-published in her area of study and received numerous awards and fellowships throughout her career. Dr. Crawford is an active member of the College Language Association, National Council of Teachers of English, and SAMLA.

Website

Executive Committee Member (2010) —Emily Seelbinder is a professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, where she has taught courses in American Literature, American Studies, African American Literature, Non-Fiction Writing, and in the Core Program in the Liberal Arts, the honors program, and the freshman writing program. She is a frequent speaker on various topics, including Emily Dickinson, for the North Carolina Humanities Council. After eighteen years with Queens College, she was honored in May of this year with the 2007 Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award. In addition, she has twice received the Fuqua Distinguished Educator Award and has served as Faculty President and Director of the Honors Program. Dr. Seelbinder is a graduate of Salem Academy, Hollins College (B.A., English) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A., Ph.D.).

Website

Editor of SAR—Matthew Roudané, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Georgia State University, has published over a dozen books on various aspects of American Drama. The recipient of three Fulbright awards, Roudané has lectured widely both here and abroad, and he has taught at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain and will be a visiting professor for part of the 2008-09 year at the Université de Toulouse, France.He has served on a number of editorial and advisory boards for such journals as PMLA and Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense.  His forthcoming books will be on Sam Shepard (U Michigan P), Arthur Miller (Cambridge UP) and Edward Albee (Cambridge UP).

Website