From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Jennifer L. Airey In our last issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature had the honor of publishing on the special topic of “Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing,” guest edited by Elisabeth Bekers, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and Helen Cousins. The issue focuses on literary innovations and experimental forms of writing by British women of African and African Caribbean descent since the 1990s. Through five articles and interviews with four contemporary authors, the guest editors craft an issue that “raises critical questions about the extent to which precedence has been given to the politics over the aesthetics of their writing.”1 The issue recognizes Black women’s writing as a driving force of contemporary literary innovation in Britain. It was a pleasure to work with the guest editors on the issue and to publish this important work. With this special issue, we had three new members join our editorial board: Robin Hackett, Cynthia Richards, and Mary Youssef. Since I was not able to announce them in our last issue, their introductions appear below along with the editorial board members joining with this issue: Gabeba Baderoon, Kimberly Anne Coles, and Laura E. Tanner. While I am looking forward to working with all these exemplary scholars, I am always sad to bid farewell to those rotating off the board. With great appreciation, I say goodbye to Anupama Arora, Mary Jean Corbett, Marilyn Francus, Hala Halim, Jean Mills, and Carrie J. Preston. Robin Hackett is Associate Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, where she specializes in feminist theory, queer theory, British literature after 1800, and modernisms. She is the author of Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction (2004) and coeditor of Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (2019) and At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the Thirties (2009). She has contributed to several collections including Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literary and Cultural Texts in the College Classroom (2013), At Home and Abroad in the Empire, and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) and published articles in venues including Woolf Studies Annual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Cynthia Richards is Professor of English and Richard P. Veler Endowed Chair in English at Wittenberg University, where she directs the Center for Teaching and Innovation, the Women’s Studies Program, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. She is the editor of The Wrongs of Woman; [End Page 5] or Maria and Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (2003) and coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Behn’s “Oroonoko” (2013), Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (2021), and Quotidian Fevers in the Enlightenment: Patient Narratives of the Eighteenth Century (in progress). She is also currently completing a monograph, The Body, Trauma, and War, 1667–1798 (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press), which focuses on re-thinking the representation of the body and domestic space in eighteenth-century canonical works using the perspective of disability studies and trauma theory. Richard has also published numerous articles in venues including Literature Compass, English Language Notes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, analyzing the works of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is a Contributing Behn Editor at The Scriblerian and a Fulbright Scholar Alumni Ambassador. Mary Youssef is Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, with a courtesy appointment in the Translation and Research Instruction Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her book, Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel (2018), critically examines discourses surrounding race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and language within the Egyptian literary and socio-cultural arenas through case studies of the novels of Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Ṭahir, ᶜAlaᵓ al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Muᶜtazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi, and Miral al-Tahawi. She has published in journals including Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Journal of African Literature Association (JALA), and International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and has contributed to Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies...