C19 got off to a great start at its highly successful and invigorating inaugural conference in 2010. Along with the other elected officers of the organization I look forward to extending the good work done by the founders at Penn State (Christopher Castiglia, Hester Blum, and Sean Goudie), as well as the other founding members of the C19 Advisory Board, who collectively brought this association into existence and established its principles and goals. There will be a second conference in 2012 and others at two-year intervals thereafter, and a new journal sponsored by C19 will begin publishing in the near future as well. Ours is a field that has in recent years featured a great deal of the most intellectually searching, theoretically adventurous, and archivally rich scholarship in literary studies; the field is characterized by a fruitful conjunction of newer approaches (queer studies, material textuality, feminism, transnationalism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and race and ethnic studies, to name just an obvious few), and rigorously adaptive versions of more traditional methods (literary history, textual studies and editorial work, archival recovery, philology, bibliography, and biography, for example). This amicable and productive conjunction is the most valuable intellectual asset we have as we go forward and build our professional community. My aim during my term of office is to support the organization’s efforts to preserve and sustain this intellectual ethos; to ensure the association is governed democratically, and takes shape in response to its membership’s wishes; and to make it actively hospitable to all interested participants—graduate students, younger faculty, and independent scholars as well as more senior and professionally established members.

Christopher Looby