ELO is pleased to announce the election of new officers. Dene Grigar has been elected as the next ELO President; Sandy Baldwin, Vice President; and Davin Heckman Secretary.
Drs. Heckman and Baldwin will take their new posts immediately, and Dr. Grigar will take the Presidency at the 2013 ELO Conference in Paris. We are fortunate to have such accomplished board members take these positions. They have already distinguished themselves in their service to the organization.
As incoming President, Dr. Grigar moves from her position as Vice President. During her time in ELO, she has coordinated a major conference (2010 Visionary Landscapes); several major exhibitions, including recent events at MLA 2012 and 2013 and the Library of Congress, and has worked toward networking ELO with other organizations. She has played a pivotal role in the organization and has been actively involved in ELO’s recent events. Her work has greatly raised the profile of the organization and electronic literature more broadly.
We relay our gratitude to President Nick Montfort, who has served his post with excellence for the past three years. During his tenure, Dr. Montfort has overseen the release of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, the ELO Conference at Morgantown (2012), the development of the Electronic Literature Directory, and many other key projects, along with managing the day-to-day operations of ELO. Dr. Montfort will continue as Faculty Advisor, as our headquarters remains at MIT, where he is on faculty.
Mark Marino has stepped down as Secretary, but he will continue as the Director of Communication. Vice President Talan Memmott will also continue to serve.
Some information about our new officers can be found below.
Sandy Baldwin (PhD, NYU) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. In this capacity, he directs numerous projects on new media and digital humanities, as well as teaching courses on multimedia writing. He has been a Fulbright Scholar of new media studies in Austria and Visiting Professor of hypermedia at the University of Paris 8 (St. Denis). Baldwin is a scholar of code, bodies, and creativity in new media, with numerous essays on this topic. He is Managing Editor of electronic book review and the creator and publisher of Computing Literature, the only academic book series devoted to scholarship on electronic literature. His codework poetry is collected in several books and he creates glitched/interventionist computer game performances. For over a decade, he has collaborated with Alan Sondheim on an exploration of performance and embodiment in virtual worlds. Baldwin formerly served as ELO Treasurer. He has also been involved in planning the annual ELO conference and in managing the database interoperability between the ELOs CELL partners.
Davin Heckman (Associate Professor, English, Siena Heights University) is the Supervising Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory. His book, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke University Press, 2008), addresses the intersection of technology and everyday life. In 2011-12, Heckman was a Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. His articles on “digital poetics” can be found in Culture Machine, Dichtung Digital, electronic book review, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. He is the “electropoetics†thread editor for the electronic book review and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards for the journals Rhizomes, Hyperrhiz, and Reconstruction.