D.H. Lawrence Society
of North America
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Business Reports & Bylaws
Officer Biographies
List of Past Presidents

 Current Officers

Holly Laird (University of Tulsa, OK), President
Elizabeth (Betsy) Sargent (University of Alberta), Past President
Nancy Paxton (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff), President Elect
 Heather Lusty (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Recording Secretary
Joyce Wexler (Loyola University, Chicago), Treasurer
Tina Ferris (Diamond Bar, CA), Directory/WebMaster
Pamela Wright (Texas A&M, Kingsville), Newsletter Editor
Julianne Newmark (New Mexico Tech), Newsletter Archivist
See Bios and Job Descriptions

Members of the Executive Committee

Elected 2012-2014
Erin K. Johns Speese (West Virginia University)
Matthew J. Kochis (University of Tulsa)
Nanette Norris (Royal Military College Saint-Jean, Québec)
Matthew Leone (Colgate University)

Elected 2011-2013
Paul Poplawski (formerly of the University of Leicester)

Director of the 2011 International Lawrence Conference
Nancy Paxton (Northern Arizona University)
See Bios and Job Descriptions

 

Society Contact:

Holly Laird
Frances W. O'Hornett Chair of Literature
University of Tulsa
800 S. Tucker Dr.
Tulsa, OK  74104
(918) 631-3408

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DHLSNA Business Reports

2012 Financial Report - Prepared by Joyce Wexler
2011 Financial Report - Prepared by Joyce Wexler
2010 Financial Report - Prepared by Carrie Rohman
Financial Report Format - Revised 2013

2013 MLA DHLSNA Business Meeting Minutes
2012 MLA DHLSNA Business Meeting Minutes
2011 MLA DHLSNA Business Meeting Minutes

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 Society Bylaws

Official DHLSNA By-laws (Amended January of 2012)

Summary of By-law Changes
(Approved by an online vote of the DHLSNA membership,
effective as of Jan 1, 2011)

Proposed By-law Changes for Dec. 2012 Election

The DHLSNA Executive Committee has approved a number of changes to our by-laws in order to update, extend, and enhance the reach of Society information.  These changes affect Articles IV, V, and VII only. 

The major change is the addition of Section 9 in ARTICLE IV: OFFICERS—this new section proposes the creation of a Society Archivist, a role that has been performed without official recognition by Julianne Newmark (the creator of our online archive of newsletters) for the past two years.  Other proposed changes are primarily those required in order to acknowledge this new position in every location where Society offices are listed, although a few other small changes simply bring the by-laws into line with actual practice during the past few years.  (View Changes)

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Job Descriptions and Bios

Current DHLSNA Officers were elected
to the following positions:

(Positions extend two years with the exception of the Vice President, who automatically becomes President at the end of two year's time.  Some positions allow multiple terms.)

President

The President is the chief executive officer of the Society and presides at all meetings of the Society and of the Executive Committee (electronic and otherwise), serves as liaison to the Modern Language Association and other professional organizations, co-chairs annual MLA sessions, represents the Society to the public and to CCILC, collaborates with the Webmaster on overall planning for (and coordinating of updates to) the Society website, and provides leadership for the Society in all of its activities.

Elected:
Holly Laird is Frances W. O'Hornett Chair of Literature at the University of Tulsa.  Author of Self and Sequence:  The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence (1988), she has also published numerous articles on Lawrence's poetry and other texts, including most recently on Women in Love, in Howard Booth's collection, New D.H. Lawrence (2009).  She is author also of Women Co-authors (2000) and past editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, which she directed for 18 years and for which she received the CELJ Distinguished Editor award in 2007.  She is now completing a term on the Executive Committee of DHLSNA.  She has attended every conference held in America on D.H. Lawrence since the eighties; wishes she could have attended more conferences outside its borders; and plans to travel to the Sydney Conference this coming summer.  She will be happy to talk to you there (when not too jet lagged) regardless of whether you elect her or not!  She remains deeply grateful for the support and encouragement she received from DHLSNA officers and their activities when she was first entering literary studies.
 

Vice President (to become President on January 1, 2015)

The President-Elect, in addition to serving as requested by the President or by the Executive Committee, serves as Program Chair, issuing a call for papers and submitting timely proposals for DHLSNA annual sessions as an Allied Association of MLA.  The President-Elect shall also supply the Webmaster with time-sensitive information about upcoming MLA sessions and calls for papers.

Elected:
Nancy Paxton is Professor of English at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches courses on 19th and 20^th century British literature, on women’s writing, and feminist theory.  She is the author of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer:  Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender  and Writing under the Raj:  Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947.  She attended her first D. H. Lawrence conference in Santa Fe in 2005 and presented papers there and at the Eastwood conference in 2007.  Her essay, “Male Sexuality on the Frontier:  D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo,” appears in Virginia Hyde and Earl Ingersoll’s “A Window to the Sun”:  D. H. Lawrence’s Thought Adventures.  She edited the newsletter for the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America from 2006-09.  In 2011, she co-directed the 12^th International D.H. Lawrence Conference with David Game and hopes that everyone who attended has happy memories of Sydney’s beautiful harbor.  She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Books Travel:  Literary Censorship in a Global Frame which focuses on D. H. Lawrence and other modernist writers.
 

Past President

The Past President is responsible each year for soliciting nominations and conducting elections for Society officers and other positions on the Executive Committee and shall supply the Webmaster with election information and timely calls for nominations.  The Past President may serve in additional ways  as requested by the President or by the Executive Committee.

Elected:
Elizabeth (Betsy) Sargent is currently Professor of English and Director of Writing Initiatives at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.  She received her BA from Duke University, and her Ph.D. from University of Kent at Canterbury.  She co-authored Approaches to Teaching the Works of D.H. Lawrence (MLA 2001) and Conversations about Writing (Nelson 2005).  Her work has appeared in the D.H. Lawrence Review, The ADE Bulletin, Profession, and College English.  She served as DHLSNA membership/treasurer 1992-99.

Secretary

The Secretary keeps minutes of all meetings of the Executive Committee, reports to the newsletter on the Society's panels at the Modern Language Association convention each year, and collaborates with the Webmaster to maintain both online and hardcopy archives of the activities of the history, activities, and decisions of the Executive Council and the membership.

Elected:
Heather Lusty is full-time English faculty at The Meadows School in Nevada. She completed her PhD in English in 2009, writing on Topoi of Nostalgia in the modern British novel.  She is very familiar with Lawrence; one chapter of her dissertation analyzed his focus on architecture and landscape.  She has presented several conference papers on various aspects of his work, including one at the DHLSNA’s MLA panel in 2008 and one on Lawrence’s depictions of Italian life at the 2010 International James Joyce Symposium.  She has served on the Editorial Board for the Popular Culture Journal for the last 3 years.

Treasurer

The Treasurer maintains the financial and banking records of the Society, sends out membership dues reminders via email in August and September, oversees the online bank account that allows for payment of dues and conference registration fees online, issues checks and deposits funds on behalf of the Society, and provides a one-page summary financial statement for the Executive Committee upon request (minimally once a year at the business meeting at MLA).  The Treasurer ensures that the Society's non-profit tax-exempt status (501c) is maintained by filing a short tax return each April and supplying the Webmaster with an electronic copy of this return, along with the annual financial statement, to be posted on the Society's website.  The Treasurer shall collaborate as needed with the Webmaster/Directory Editor to ensure current and accurate membership information in the online directory.

Elected:
Joyce Wexler is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Loyola University in Chicago.  She has written about Lawrence in relation to his time and ours in her book, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1997) and in essays published in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Blackwell, 2006), College Literature, and DHLR.

Newsletter Editor

The Newsletter Editor is responsible for collecting information and then publishing and distributing a newsletter to all members of the Society at least two times a year.  The newsletter will be distributed electronically to members to reduce waste and Society expense.  Starting in 2011, Society members who require a hardcopy of the newsletter will need to pay a small surcharge for postage and printing.  Within one month of its publication, the most recent issue of the newsletter will be posted online as part of a continuous archive of past newsletters.  The Newsletter Editor shall maintain past and current issues of the Newsletter online and notify the Webmaster when new issues have been posted.

Elected:
Pamela Wright currently teaches English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.  She

received her Ph.D. from Washington State University in December 2006, where

Virginia Hyde directed her dissertation on D.H. Lawrence.  Her special interest is in

twentieth-century British literature, with a focus on disability theory and the literature

of war.  She has been an active member of the DHLSNA since 2001, attending the

Santa Fe Conference in 2005 and the Eastwood Conference in 2007.  She has

presented on Lawrence twice at MLA and has chaired sessions and presented three

times at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900.  Her article

“Living ‘Outside-In’:  The Role of Beauty and Disfigurement in D.H. Lawrence’s 'The

Ladybird'” appeared in D.H. Lawrence Studies.  In addition to her research on

Lawrence, she has written about such diverse figures as Kazuo Ishiguro, Katherine

Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway and Ana Castillo.

Webmaster/Directory Editor

The Webmaster/Directory Editor maintains the Society’s webpages under the direction of the President.  The Webmaster will ensure that the domain name “www.dhlsna.com” or “www.dhlsna.org” is renewed when necessary and will maintain and update the DHLSNA website as needed including the following: current officers/Executive Committee; nomination and election announcements; online forms for membership dues payment; organizational  information required by the IRS (such as current by-laws, an approved application for tax-exempt status, the annual tax return, and the most recent financial report); history pages; calls for papers on Lawrence, as well as information on upcoming Lawrence sessions at MLA and Lawrence conferences; award pages; an online, password-protected directory of current Society members; links to the Society newsletter archive; and a memorial list of past members, as well as such other links/pages of interest to Lawrence scholars as the Society may deem useful. The Webmaster depends on other Society officers to keep the website current and accurate. 

Elected:
Tina Ferris, who currently lives in Southern California, earned a data processing certificate from Canal Zone College, Panama CZ, and an English degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.  She is co-moderator of the Rananim Society email discussion listserve since 1997, and webmaster/reader for the D.H. Lawrence Review.  She is coauthor, with Dr. Virginia Hyde (WSU), of the successful National Historic Register nomination for the D.H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos, NM (1998-2004).  In 2005 she presented a paper titled "D.H. Lawrence and the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration" at the 10th International Lawrence Conference (Santa Fe, NM), which was later published in the James Caird Society Journal (No. 3, 2007).  A longer version of this essay, "White Wonderful Demons," was also published in "Terra Incognita":  D.H. Lawrence at the Frontiers (2010).  Other publications include two poems in the DHLR and several in the DHLSNA Newsletter.

Newsletter Archivist (see new Executive Committee role proposed to begin January 2013)

Julianne Newmark is an Associate Professor of English at New Mexico Tech.  She has published articles in Arizona Quarterly, American Indian Quarterly, Western American Literature, and other journals.  She also published a chapter in the recent book "Terra Incognita":  D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers, edited by Virginia Hyde and Earl Ingersoll.  Currently, her book manuscript focusing on multi-ethnic American authorial refusals of race-centric Nativist ideologies in early-twentieth-century literature is under review.  She is at work on her second book-length project examining the papers and political writings of three prominent early-twentieth-century Native activists:  Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Carlos Montezuma, and Charles Eastman.  She served as Secretary of the DHLSNA  2003-2010 and Newsletter Editor  2011-2012, creating our online archive of past newsletters as part of the latter position (see http://infohost.nmt.edu/~dhlsna/).

Executive Board Members  (5)

Elected:
Erin K. Johns Speese is currently a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at West Virginia University, completing a dissertation on the connections between parenthood, sublimity, and gender in D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.  She has presented papers on Mary Hays, Virginia Woolf, Karen Tei Yamashita, Mary Somerville, William Faulkner, and D.H. Lawrence that explore the gender dynamics of their works and her most recent publication is “Raping Prejudice: Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, Gender, and Rape.”  She has been involved with the DHLSNA since her presentation in the society’s 2011 MLA panel in Seattle (“50 Years after the Lady Chatterley Trial:  Lawrence and Censorship, Pornography, Obscenity”):  her paper was entitled "Aren't We Guilty Too? The Censorship of D. H. Lawrence in the Ivory Tower."

 Matthew J. Kochis is currently a Bellwether Dissertation Fellow at the University of Tulsa and will receive his PhD in the spring of 2013.  A chapter from his dissertation, Genre, Sexuality, and Censorship in the Modernist Bildungsroman, engages previously classified legal documents held by the British Home Office regarding the banning of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.  Specifically, this chapter analyzes each of the Brangwen family members’ narratives as individual developmental pieces to demonstrate how Lawrence’s novel offers multiple ways of conceptualizing the wide and evolving spectrum of sex and sexuality that was occurring in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This is his first year as a member of DHLSNA;  last year his first publication, "Lawrence's Kangaroo:  De-Establishing the Double Bind of Masculinity," appeared in the D. H. Lawrence Review. He and his colleague Heather Lusty have submitted a collection of essays that juxtaposes the texts of D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce on issues like sexuality, religion, and censorship.  The project, Joyce & Lawrence:  The Bookends of Modernism, is currently under review at University of Florida Press. In addition to his research on Lawrence, he is also working on a digital humanities project, "The Year of Ulysses," sponsored by the Modernist Versions Project.  The project uploads high-quality scans of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses as it appeared in 1922:  http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/you/

Nanette Norris is Assistant Professor of English at Royal Military College Saint-Jean, Québec, Canada, where she teaches undergraduate courses in twentieth-century literature.  Her M.A. dissertation was on Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and her Ph.D. dissertation looked at the occult in The Plumed Serpent, along with works by H.D. and Virginia Woolf.   Her research interests have broadened in recent years to include war literature and the discourse of trauma.  Her work has appeared in Images of the Child, ed. Harry Eiss (Bowling Green, 1994), Engaging the Enemy:  Canada in the 1940s, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Muriel Chamberlain (Dinefwr Press, 2006), Paris in American Literatures, ed. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Vamsi Koneru, (forthcoming from Farleigh Dickinson), C. S. Lewis:  The Chronicles of Narnia (New Casebooks), ed. Lance E. Weldy and Michelle Abate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the D.H. Lawrence Review, among others.  She is the editor of Unionist Popular Culture and Rolls of Honour in the North of Ireland During the First World War:  A Collection of Diverse Essays in Popular Culture (Edwin Mellen, 2012) and Words for a Small Planet:  Ecocritical Views (forthcoming from Lexington Books).  An edited collection of essays on the Modernists and WWI is in the planning stages.

Matthew Leone teaches in University Studies at Colgate University, where he is its Director of Summer Programs as well as Director of its annual Creative Writers’ Conference. His publications include Shapes of Openness: Bakhtin, Lawrence, Laughter (2010); Crafting Fiction, Poetry and Memoir: Talks from the Colgate Writers' Conference (2008); plus reviews in English Literature in Transition and Studies in the Novel. While gaining a PhD from McGill University, he edited its Literary Review. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he had the privilege of being introduced to Lawrence’s work--and to the question of how, or whether, the novel thinks--by luminaries such as F.R. Leavis and his colleagues Howard Jacobson and Wilbur Sanders. His forthcoming book will be an additional collection of talks from prominent novelists, poets, and memoirists from the Colgate Writers’ Conference.
 

Paul Poplawski, formerly of the University of Leicester, is a member of the Editorial

Board of the CUP Lawrence Edition and was Series Adviser for the recent Penguin

Classics series of Lawrence’s texts.  He is co-author (with Warren Roberts) of the 3rd

edition of A Bibliography of DHL (2001) and has recently produced an update to this

in the JDHLS.  He is one of the Co-executive Directors for the 13th International D. H.

Lawrence Conference to be held in Gargnano, Italy, in 2014, and has been a

member of the DHLSNA since 1999.  His other works on Lawrence include

Promptings of Desire:  Creativity and the Religious Impulse in the Works of DHL

(1993); DHL:  A Reference Companion (1996); and, as editor, Writing the Body in

DHL:  Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality (2001).  Other

publications include Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism (2003) and English

Literature in Context (2008).  His broad teaching interests include postcolonial

literature and creative writing.

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Past Presidents of the DHLSNA