Board of Directors

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Officers

Board Members

Ex-Officio

Candidates for the 2010 Election

For Vice-President

Guillermina Walas

Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies from University of Pittsburgh, 1999. She has published Entre dos Américas. Narrativas de Latinas en los ’90s (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000), a poetry book (Fecundiciclos, 2006) and numerous articles on women authors, autobiography, testimonial narrative, migration and identity in peer reviewed journals and books. Her expertise is in U.S. Latinas, and Guatemalan and Southern Cone literatures and culture. Former Associate Professor of Spanish at Eastern Washington University (tenured 2004) and Visiting Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she became an independent scholar in 2009, after moving with her family to the Seattle area. An NCIS member since January 2010, Dr. Walas is currently representing the Council at three forthcoming international conferences/colloquia with accepted papers in Mexico, Argentina and USA (at Austin, Texas). She has recently given a broadcasted lecture at the Guatemalan International Book Fair on contemporary Guatemalan authors, stating her NCIS affiliation as well. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary book project about testimonial spaces and media art in Argentina. While some of her NCIS interests are in the areas of development and publicity/outreach, she is especially interested in serving as NCIS Vice-President. Dr. Walas looks forward to working with other members to enhance the visibility, membership and the vital services that NCIS provides to independent scholars

For the Board

Anika K. Abbate

Originally from Germany, she graduated from the German Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Her longtime interest in women authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries strongly influenced her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Women Editors and Negotiations of Power in Germany, 1790-1850”. She explores the editorial work of four eighteenth and nineteenth century women authors and discusses the editorial sphere as a field of power relations applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. She is currently working as an independent scholar on the nineteenth-century Austrian world traveler Ida Pfeiffer. Her previous and current research is strongly tied to her interest in the history of material texts. In addition to her research, she provides translations from German to English and vice versa. Most recently she translated a historical account of the Jewish population in the German town of Ellingen. She has been teaching German language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, at the University of Utah and at Penn State University.  Furthermore, she has been closely involved with the Women’s Studies Program and with the Lauder Business Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Susan Roth Breitzer

Susan Roth Breitzer completed her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2007 and has taught United States and World History at Fayetteville State University. She is currently revising her dissertation, “Jewish Labor's Second City: The Formation of a Jewish Working Class in Chicago, 1886-1928,” for publication. She has published essays in History Compass and the Indiana Magazine of History, and presented papers at the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. Her scholarly interests include American Jewish labor history, African-American labor history, immigration history, and Southern labor history. She would like to serve on the board of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars in order to promote the following issues: 1. improving access for independent scholars at university libraries, 2. recognizing organizations and publishers who do not discriminate against independent scholars, and 3. encouraging independent scholarship, where possible, in the sciences.

Tricia Cusack

She is based in the UK and a newly independent scholar - BA Hons (Open), PhD (Edinburgh) - with some part-time teaching at the University of Birmingham (UK), after many years of full-time university teaching in subjects ranging from art history to media studies. Her research is cross-disciplinary and explores the intersections of national identity, place, and visual representation. She has contributed to conferences of the American Historical Association as well as the Association of Art Historians. Syracuse University Press has published her book Riverscapes and National Identities this year. She has also published widely in academic journals with papers forthcoming in the Journal of Tourism History and Nineteenth-Century Studies. Her editorial experience includes a co-edited essay collection Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic landscapes, myths and mother-figures (2003) and a special issue of the journal National Identities (2007). She is currently editing a new collection on the formation of identities at the water’s edge. She is (honorary) reviews editor for the online arts journal Visions. She also belongs to the Independents group of the AAH and if elected she would seek to expand NCIS membership and affiliate membership in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. She would aim to extend Independents’ access to privileged research facilities such as JSTOR. NCIS’s newsletter The Independent Scholar is a crucial part of keeping in touch with members and she would like to contribute to its development, both along current lines and new ones, for instance, introducing a special focus on interdisciplinary research by members.

Susan de Gaia

She earned a Ph.D.in Religion-Social Ethics and a Graduate Certificate in Gender Studies from University of Southern California, and taught for ten years in Religious Studies, English, and Ethics. Since 2007, she has conducted research and writing as independent scholar in religion and gender in American history, and worked as contributing author on various projects, including film and culture for ABC-CLIO and world religions for Schlager Group Publishers. She want to give something back to those who have helped her keep going without institutional support, and serving on the Board of NCIS is a good way to do that.

Klara Seddon

Klara Seddon is a Research Director at the Institute of Cultural Research, New York. She received her Master's degree in History of the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, specializing in East Asian material culture. Klara is a contributor to the research group, Critical Studies in Expressive Culture and the author of www.fiveoclockteaspoon.com, a blog of cultural perspectives on the art of cookery. Her current independent research on Japanese women's bento (lunchbox) blogs examining the intersection of food and visual consumption on the Internet, has been presented at conferences and is forthcoming in print publication.