LEADERSHIP

Executive Board

Melissa Gniadek, President

Gniadek is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and Associate Director of the English MA Program.  She is the author of Oceans at Home: Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) as well as essays in journals including American Literature, Early American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writer, New Global Studies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.  Other publications include chapters in edited collections on American apocalypse and on decolonizing “Prehistory.”   

Sandy Burr, VP of Programs

Burr is Associate Professor of Early American Literature at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, MI—that’s the Upper Peninsula, folks, not the lower one.  Half the time the US media forgets to include the UP on maps of the USA! She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, concentrating on 19th-century American literature, early African-American literature, early English-language children’s literature, and family studies.

Burr is co-editor, with renowned 18th-century scholar Adam Potkay, of the acclaimed anthology Black Atlantic Writers:  Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas. This project transformed and reoriented Burr’s intellectual and creative directions toward the late 18th-century, resulting in a widening and deepening of her interest in transatlantic Anglo-American children’s literature across the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly concerning science and the imagination. While Burr has published widely on topics ranging from libraries in Renaissance England to American war literature, her passion for children’s literature guides her recent publications on Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Sidney (aka, Harriet Lothrop, author of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew), and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her current long-term project focuses on recovering Anglo-Irish writers Harriet and Louisa C. Beaufort, whose texts for children and adults across the long 19th century brim over with intellectual curiosity and acumen.

Lydia Maria Child first entered Burr’s life as the editor of the children’s magazine The Juvenile Miscellany and as the writer of the 1831 domestic guide, The Mother’s Book.  Every time Burr teaches Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she is reminded of Child’s editorship, and her brave intervention in the fight for human rights and social justice.

Gia Coturri Sorenson, VP of Membership & Records

Coturri Sorenson, Assistant Director of the University Writing Center, completed her Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American and British literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her dissertation, “An Old Acquaintance: Personification of Trees in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction,” explores how Romantic-era historical fiction uses personified trees to demonstrate the connections between nature and culture and was awarded the 2019-2020 Mildred Kates Dissertation Fellowship. She has contributed to the ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance “Year in Conferences” special feature four times, covering SSAWW in 2015 and 2018 and ASLE in 2017 and 2019, and has given presentations on Mary Wilkins Freeman and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. As an instructor, her classes revolve around environmental injustice and help her students better understand how literature, film, and videogames highlight themes of injustice and environmentalism.

Sarah Olivier, VP of Communications

Olivier founded the Lydia Maria Child Society with guidance from Carolyn L. Karcher in the Spring of 2015 and served as its inaugural President. She is the guest editor and contributor for a special forum in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers entitled “Envisioning America’s Future: Lydia Maria Child and Social Justice” and the author of “Romanticism and Reform in the Writings of Lydia Maria Child,” an article for a digital volume published by Gale Researcher. Olivier completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver. Her dissertation, A Raucous Entertainment: Melodrama, Race, and the Search for Moral Legibility in Nineteenth-Century America, was awarded the Evan Frankel Dissertation Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2015 Robin Morgan Award bestowed on an “Outstanding Woman” who advocates for and empowers women.

Lori Robison, VP of Social Justice

Robison is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Dakota and currently serves as Department Chair. Over the years, her research has most frequently focused on the literature of Reconstruction, particularly on how that literature constructed race in the postbellum period. In forty years, the U.S. moved from the promise of early Reconstruction to the institutionalized racism of segregation culture, and, in a series of published essays, Robison has explored how literature by a range of authors (including Charles Chesnutt, Albion Tourgée, Grace King, Whitelaw Reid, Frances Harper, and Lydia Maria Child) both participated in and opposed this cultural shift. Her work on Lydia Maria Child has focused on A Romance of the Republic as one of the first literary works to intentionally address the challenges of Reconstruction. One of Robison’s essays on this novel was published in ESQ (2015) and another in JNT (2020); a final essay, which compares the disruptive narrative inscrutability of Rosa in A Romance of the Republic to Cassy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is forthcoming. She is pleased to work with the Lydia Maria Child Society—both to bring more attention to the importance of Child’s work and to support the Society’s ongoing commitment to social justice.

Advisory Board

Honorary Chair: Carolyn L. Karcher, Temple University (Emeritus)

Clark Davis, University of Denver

Robert Fanuzzi, St. John’s University

Hildegard Hoeller, The Graduate Center & College of Staten Island, CUNY

Constance L. Jackson, Permanent Productions

Susan Koppelman, Independent Scholar

Bruce Mills, Kalamazoo College

Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University

Jane Sciacca, Wayland Historical Society

Carolyn Sorisio, West Chester University